It’s pretty obvious that many e-commerce websites are incorporating some kind of artificial intelligence and/or machine learning to help with ROI and improve customers experiences. The entire buying and selling process has drastically changed for the better. Companies are increasing their profits while customers are receiving better customer service and a much easier time finding the products they really want. How does this all come about though? How do you as a new or older e-commerce company integrate this into your business? Well, there is a lot to think about before you jump in. The following are different ways you can implement it, also known as use cases. 1. Customer Service One of the largest uses of AI in any e-commerce website is through customer service. You no longer need to have a huge team of people answering calls. Everything can be done through automated chatbots. Throughout all pages of your website, you can have the chat boxes appear so customers can ask questions at any time and from any page. There is a long list of items that these bots can help customers with. Some of them include finding certain products, ordering them, or even login help. Some limitations are specific problems customers are facing. When a chatbot is unable to assist with these sort of problems they will direct them to a real person. You don’t want to rely 100% on these chatbots as there is still a need for real people but not as many. On the flip side, these chatbots don’t just help the customers but it can also help your personnel as well. They can find answers faster and get specific details about a customer’s account so that they can help the customer better. Many e-commerce companies have implemented this which has been pretty successful so far. These bots are quite good at personalization which helps increase engagement. 2. Sales AI algorithms have the ability to take massive amounts of data and use it to predict certain patterns in customer behavior. This allows e-commerce websites and any business for that matter to make changes in their marketing to essentially get more sales. This leads to making the right product recommendations to each individual person. By tracking and collecting certain types of data e-commerce companies can understand and predict purchasing behavior. There are many ways companies can gather this information such as; through social media, purchasing history, web search history, online reviews of products, and more. The data that is gathered from this will help you create an effortless user experience on any device. If you have ever bought or searched anything on Amazon, they do a great job at suggesting items to people that make sense to them personally. This level of personalization can make it easier for customers to purchase the product, gets them more engaged which in turn will increase conversions. 3. Warehousing All of the AI predictive capabilities and sales algorithms help with warehousing as well. Having the right products stocked up at the right time. If you know that soon you will have a spike in requests for a certain item, you have time to get it stocked up. As AI and ML technology gets better this type of feature will only get better as well. Besides just being able to stock up on certain items, how the warehouse operates is also essential. How an item gets sorted and categorized How it is grabbed for shipment How the item is then packaged and shipped out The efficiency of all of those items is key to ensuring better accuracy, speed, and delivery of products in the warehouse. Many e-commerce companies still rely fully on humans to do all of this manually. Again, let’s circle back to Amazon. They are the kings of warehousing and product delivery perfection. Well, almost perfect. Of course not every e-commerce website can implement their level of tech for every department of the company but it gives you an example of what can be done on a larger scale so smaller companies can still do amazing things on a smaller scale. 4. Pricing If there is a higher demand for a product you increase the price right? Especially if that item is close to selling out. Dynamic pricing that’s enabled by AI is a newer type of technology that e-commerce companies are starting to try out. You may be thinking, wait, increasing prices during high demand isn’t new at all. You would be right, but the information that is gathered to determine when to increase it and what that new price should be is. This lends not only to increases but decreases as well. Knowing when you should discount an item and by how much to ensure more people purchase it is something new. The accuracy of this is improved through AI algorithms. Since this is something newer, you should think seriously about being one of the first ones to integrate this into your e-commerce website. It’s a risk but it’s one that could pay off big time. The Big Picture You may be wondering where to start and how to do all this. First, think about your customers and what you currently know about them. What is your target audience, could you increase the audience through marketing. What does your current audience like the most? What pages of your e-commerce website do they linger on the most? Take the data you do have and analyze it to answer all these questions. Once you have this information you can make a much better decision about the type of AI you should be implementing. AI is only as good as the inputs you provide it. If you don’t provide it with proper information, it won’t be able to provide you with proper results. You, like many other companies, may not have the proper team of people to implement it yourself. AI professionals are needed to be able to help you create the right algorithms and use them in the right areas. You need to reach out to companies like SDI who have experienced AI personnel who can work with you to determine exactly what you need. Before you jump right into implementing AI to increase sales, make sure your warehousing and shipment can handle it. You may want to think about starting with sorting and shipping and how you can make it more efficient. AI can not only do that but if something changes AI is there to account for those changes. Once you have that settled you can move on to converting more customers. The ability to recommend products for each individual is important but so is allowing them to use images and talk with chatbots increasing the level of personalized customer interaction. Other e-commerce websites have seen sales improvements of approximately 10% just with personalized marketing strategies. What It Does For You In the end, your e-commerce website will make huge innovative strides in saving and earning you more money by identifying new markets to find new customers, automating many parts of the logistical process, creating new products that are in high demand, and making current products better. Keep in mind that this technology is not going to be implemented overnight. It takes time and patience to get this done. Once it is done you can’t expect everyone to just jump on right away. This is a serious process that needs time to grow. Make sure you know what use cases you should deploy and do this on a small scale to see what works and what doesn’t. Only then will you realize how AI can seriously change your business for the better. To learn more about how AI can be implemented into your e-commerce website contact Sakshi Sharma at 408.621.8481 or email her at sakshi@sdi.la.