Winning in e-commerce means beating out your competitors and giving your customers an experience they can't find anywhere else.
“Time is money” — a proverb as old as time. And this is very relevant in today's fast-changing world of e-commerce, where customer behavior and expectations are rapidly changing and businesses are constantly scrambling to keep up.
Winning in e-commerce means beating out your competitors and giving your customers an experience they can't find anywhere else. But when you're busy juggling time-based price optimization, filling out and configuring descriptor boxes and tags, think of creative ideas to attract more customers and create lifetime value. , there is precious little time to strategize and execute. Next email series.
Therefore, e-commerce practitioners also need to smartly find ways to free up time to focus on the big picture and growing their business.
That's where AI comes in.
There was a lot of fuss surrounding the debut of “Generative AI” with Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard products, but as the dust settles and use cases emerge, practical AI applications for e-commerce are quickly becoming a reality. It is becoming clear that it exists.
Generative AI has great potential to revolutionize all aspects of e-commerce in the coming years. Gartner's 2022 AI Technology Maturity Curve predicts that these tools will enter production maturity within his 2-5 years. This is before development in this area accelerates in his 2023 year. The growth of AI in the retail market is projected to reach $57.8 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate of 41%.
But by deploying existing AI capabilities now, you can remove many of the mundane tasks that take up mental space, divert attention from problem-solving, and avoid disillusioning employees stuck on a hamster wheel. There is a way to do that. Just as industrial robots can move large pallets in a warehouse, AI can perform heavy lifting in online businesses.
The power of personalization
Personalizing the shopping experience is a top priority for all retailers. Customers value being recognized and presented with relevant marketing content, customized offers, and recommendations when they shop. According to a McKinsey study, 72% of consumer respondents “expect the companies they buy from to recognize them as individuals and know their interests.”
By demonstrating that you understand your customers on a personal level and providing a more customized experience, you're more likely to generate repeat business and loyalty. Past transaction data, on-site behavior, and data that customers freely provide with their permission are all invaluable in developing customized experiences. However, this is a large amount of information that must be collected, processed, and deployed effectively. AI quickly extracts meaningful data so you can develop and serve the right content at the right time.
For example, post-sales contact is a key opportunity to create loyalty. You can use AI to create and deliver messages that say “Thank you for your order” to your customers. A personalized checkout message for the item the customer just ordered. This allows for a significant reduction in manual work.
AI can also be used to identify and develop customer clusters for marketing programs. AI services can find and prompt clusters of customers together by searching for common characteristics and behaviors in order information. For example, a retailer might want to reach users who frequently purchase a newsletter featuring bargains. The selection criteria could be “Customers who have placed at least 10 orders in the last 10 months.” AI can put this together very quickly, saving you a lot of time.
Help with content creation
And then there's the site content itself. Generating short descriptors with personal relevance or finding the right images for a campaign can tie up employees for hours.
Customers always want to know what's “new”. Whether it's a new color, the perfect shirt, or the performance specs of the latest model of TV. Listing and updating product properties based on product descriptions can be a tedious task, but there are AI capabilities that can automate this mundane task. Such functionality can automatically create a list of product properties based on the product description and recognize which properties are already saved, so employees can instantly see which properties are new. and promote accordingly.
Images are very important for increasing conversions and driving interest in your product line. Images may require engaging content, such as his blog about his recent TikTok fashion trend, “Tomato Girl Summer.”
Pity the poor designer who has to find images from large media libraries with vast databases to illustrate a page. AI analyzes the uploaded images, identifies the content, and assigns keywords. These keywords are stored as metadata and can be found through administrator search. It is also saved as an alt tag for better search visibility.
These AI capabilities and many others can help improve the performance of the largest retailers while leveling the playing field for small and medium-sized operators. You don't need to invest heavily in a bloated proprietary technology stack to access these capabilities. There is a low-cost way to integrate AI applications and functionality into your e-commerce operations through software-as-a-service packages.
These tools give employees back time to work on bigger projects around personalization and delivering a best-in-class shopping experience.
With more than 20 years of experience and a proven track record at top technology companies such as Microsoft and Sony, Stanley will lead Shopware's broader product development efforts with a focus on increasing productivity and scalability across global markets. I am.
