Is AI The Future Of E-commerce?

AI or artificial intelligence has already become an important part of our everyday lives without us even realizing it. Online retailers have been implementing AI into e-commerce for quite some time now, as chatbots, virtual shopping assistants, completely personalized shopping experiences and even customer service agents. There are endless possibilities when it comes to implementing artificial intelligence into online shopping and judging from the current advancements, AI is going to completely reshape the business of e-commerce as we know it.

Using AI to improve the search for products

Searching for a particular item can be a tedious task. Users have to enter a set of specific keywords which describe what they’re looking for. If the description is accurate, then the search engine will greet them with a number of different results relevant to their search query. However, using wrong keywords can produce completely irrelevant search results, which means that users have to readjust their query, enter again and so on until they’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

This is where artificial intelligence comes into play. Search queries of today lack the innate ability to distinguish and understand the natural language. AI, on the other hand, can be combined with more natural capabilities to process language which will allow it to better understand the context behind the search query. Google is already using artificial intelligence in both the search engine and the Siri-like personal assistant available on android smartphones. It’s only a matter of time before AI technology becomes readily available for retailers to use in order to decrease the number of failed transactions due to inadequate search options. 

AI as a personal shopping assistant

Numerous companies and social media platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Skype are using chatbots to personalize the customer service. It’s safe to say that one day, retailers will use AI as a completely personalized virtual shopping assistant. They can potentially be used to assist shoppers proactively throughout their purchase or to complete the purchase without any input from the shopper. The best example for the second scenario would be for an AI to purchase a specific product only when there’s a discount available or at specific parts of the week or month.

Using AI to personalize the shopping experience

Cognitive computing, as well as machine learning, are already being used to anticipate the customers needs by analyzing their behavior and previous shopping history. By using the big data collected by these self-learning algorithms, artificial intelligence could, in theory, deconstruct that information in order to facilitate a precisely-targeted user experience for every individual customer. Furthermore, experts from Nirmal Web Design Sydney argue that AI could compute this with ease and formulate the best plan allowing it to cater to the exact preferences a consumer might have. Customer experience is one of the key staples of Google’s ranking guides, which means that e-stores of tomorrow could have an added, SEO benefit from using artificial intelligence.

AI and search engine optimization

Another excellent SEO benefit could be to use AI for content and website optimization. This is a pretty straightforward work which takes some time, effort and resources to be accomplished manually. Not to mention that most A/B testing of content, which is normally done by the retailer, can easily be accomplished by an AI. By using artificial intelligence, retailers should be able to create a number of different candidate solutions and pre-set configurations for content optimization.

Creating the path towards evolving content

Evolutionary algorithms are a subset of evolutionary computation, a type of optimization algorithm used in artificial intelligence. Applying evolutionary algorithms to e-commerce would allow retailers to adjust their content as the user clicks around the website. This means that the content would constantly be evolving in real time in order to find the most effective configuration and convert a visitor into a paying customer. This would essentially eliminate content and layout testing, saving a lot of resources in the process which could later be invested to further improve the customer experience.

Final Words

Whether it’s creating a personalized shopping experience or offering virtual assistance during the purchase, artificial intelligence is slowly but surely changing the way both retailers and consumers experience their online shopping. With access to chatbots, customers can easily look for the best price for a product and or use them for customer service. Retailers, on the other hand, have the ability to analyzing consumer data which can later be used by the AI in order to predict customers buying patterns.