"Time is money" — it's a saying as old as, well, time. And one very pertinent in today's fast-moving world of e-commerce where customer behaviors and expectations change rapidly and businesses are always scrambling to keep up.
Winning in e-commerce means outsmarting the competition and offering your customers an experience they can't find elsewhere. But there's precious little time to think, strategize and implement creative ideas that could attract more customers and develop lifetime value if you are busy running on the spot trying to juggle price optimization on an hourly basis, fill in descriptor boxes and tags or set up that next sequential email campaign.
So, e-commerce practitioners also need to be smart at finding ways to free up time to focus on the bigger picture and business growth.
And that's where AI comes in.
There has been a wave of hype around the debut of 'Generative AI' driven by Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard products — but as the dust settles and use cases emerge, it's becoming apparent that there are immediate practical AI applications for e-commerce.
Generative AI has huge potential to revolutionize every aspect of e-commerce in the next few years. Gartner's 2022 AI Technology Maturity Curve predicted these tools will enter a production maturity period within 2-5 years — and that was before the accelerated developments of 2023 in the field. AI growth in the retail market is forecast to reach $57.8bn by 2030 from now at a compound annual growth rate of 41%.
But there are ways to deploy existing AI capabilities in the here and now to remove many of the routine tasks that occupy mental space, divert attention from problem-solving and avoid employee disenchantment at being stuck on a hamster wheel. Just as industrial robots can shift big pallets in the warehouse, AI can carry out some heavy lifting in your online business.
The power of personalization
A top priority for all retailers is to personalize the shopping experience. Customers place a high value on being recognized and presented with relevant marketing content, tailored offers and recommendations when they shop. McKinsey research shows 72% of consumer respondents "expect the businesses they buy from to recognize them as individuals and know their interests".
Showing you understand your customers on an individual level and providing them with a more tailored experience is more likely to generate repeat business and loyalty. Historical transaction data, on-site behaviors and the data customers freely give with permission are all invaluable in developing tailored experiences. But that's a lot of information to collate, process and deploy usefully. AI can extract meaningful data at speed to develop and help serve the right content at the right time.
For example, post-sales contact is a crucial opportunity to create loyalty. AI can be used to formulate and deliver a customer 'Thank you for your order!' checkout message that is personalized and tailored to the products a customer has just ordered. This removes a chunk of manual labor.
AI can also be used to identify and develop clusters of customers for marketing programs. An AI service can be prompted to search and pull together a cluster of customers by searching through order information for common characteristics or behavior. For example, a retailer might want to reach out to frequent shoppers with a tailored newsletter of bargains. The selection criteria might be 'customers who have placed at least 10 orders in the past 10 months' — AI can pull this together very quickly, saving huge amounts of time.
Help with content creation
And then there's the site content itself. Generating short descriptors that will have personal relevance or finding the right imagery for a campaign can tie an employee down for several hours.
Customers always want to know what's 'new' — be it a new color or fit for a shirt or the performance specs for the latest model TV. Listing and updating product properties based on a product description can be monotonous work but there are AI features that can automate this day-to-day work. Based on the product description, such a feature can automatically create a list of properties for the product and recognize which properties are already saved, so that employees can instantly see which properties are new and promote accordingly.
Images are so important for lifting conversions and prompting interest in a product line. Images might need an engaging piece of content like a blog on the recent TikTok fashion trend 'Tomato Girl Summer'.
Pity the poor designer who must find images in a large media library with a vast database to illustrate their page. AI can analyze images that have been uploaded, identify the content and assign a keyword. These keywords are saved as metadata and can be found via an admin search, and also be saved as alt tags for better search visibility.
These AI features and many more can help level the playing field for smaller and mid-size operators alongside improving performance for the biggest of retailers. Accessing these features doesn't need huge investment in a swelling proprietary tech stack — there are lower cost ways of integrating AI applications and capabilities into your e-commerce operations via software as a service packages.
These tools can give employees their time back to work on bigger projects around personalization and delivering a best-in-class shopping experience.