When a customer arrives at an online store, they do so with a lot of expectations. Not just in terms of the variety and quality of products that they hope to find inside the store, but also in terms of the overall browsing and shopping experience that the store is able to offer them.
Needless to say, e-commerce applications need to constantly keep on reinventing themselves, integrating new exciting features and experiences that enhance the customer’s journey on the store. Artificial intelligence solutions are key players in this regard, providing a variety of unprecedented ways to uplift the online shopping experience for buyers.
The idea behind using AI software development in e-commerce is to ensure a fantastic customer experience through personalization, boost sales, and foster innovation in application management. Here are some key ways in which AI is able to achieve all of this and more in the world of e-commerce:
Virtual Shopping Assistants
When customers are shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, they have people in the shop to help them out in making the purchase. When they want to know a little more about a product, they can turn to these people and have their queries resolved instantly. With AI programming software, it is possible to bring this unique value offered by brick-and-mortar shopping to digital shopping too, through the development of virtual shopping assistants.
There have been several examples of virtual shopping assistants developed so far with the intent of helping customers find the right products for their needs. The use of virtual shopping assistants in e-commerce stores can encourage customers to engage more with the store, and possibly buy more too.
Data Collection and Analysis
Depending on the size of an e-commerce store, the amount of data that it accumulates within any given day can be humongous. There is the customer data, inventory information, orders and sales-related data, just to name a few important data categories. Within this vast data are present useful insights that can help in making the e-commerce store better and more profitable, something that is easily achievable with the implementation of artificial intelligence solutions.
The extensive amounts of data can be gathered in a more organized way with AI programming software. The complex data thus gathered can then be analyzed for deriving meaningful insights. These insights could be related to the buying behavior and patterns of customers, they could shed some light on the common issues faced by customers, or they could be associated with any other aspect of the e-commerce store. The bottom line is that these insights can help bring in the much-needed changes for the store to perform better.
Visual Product Search
What if there was a way for customers to shop exactly according to the product that they already have in front of them? Visual product search is instrumental in making this feasible. All customers need to do is upload a picture of the product that they are interested in. The image recognition capability coupled with visual search capability will thus yield results featuring products similar to the one in the picture uploaded by the customer.
This type of product search is path-breaking because it enables customers to discover products which match their actual choice very closely. Customers wouldn’t have to spend hours and hours searching for products that they truly desire, they can find what they are looking for much more quickly.
Valuable Recommendations
Customers usually like receiving recommendations at the time of shopping to ease out the tough decision of what to buy. AI software development can be used in this regard for e-commerce shopping experience. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, it is possible to understand customer behavior and accordingly make personalized product recommendations that the customer is likely to find valuable.
What drives these personalized recommendations are a number of factors like the products that the customer has bought in the past, the products that the customer has previously searched for, the products that the customer buys pretty often, etc. Because these factors are unique to each customer, recommendations can be customized for each customer. With artificial intelligence solutions becoming more and more avant-garde, the recommendation systems can even suggest products by foreseeing the shopping needs of the customers.
Customer Service Post Sales
The engagement between an e-commerce store and a customer doesn’t stop once the purchase is over. How the store interacts with the customers after they have bought a product is crucial as well. Ensuring quality and prompt customer service after sales is a difficult area which can be streamlined immensely with AI software development.
Artificial intelligence can be used to reliably automate many critical services in this area, like gathering customer feedback and processing returns or replacements. Automation will enable these services to be completed with enhanced efficiency, making sure that the customers are happy and satisfied.
Credible Product Reviews
The reviews left by customers on products play an important role in shaping up the opinions of other customers. Considering this fact, it’s important for e-commerce stores to maintain the credibility of the reviews posted on their website. Fake reviews are a danger that needs to be addressed promptly before they do irreversible damage to the store’s reputation. Filtering out the fake reviews manually can get really time-consuming and inefficient. AI programming software, on the other hand, can do a great job at identifying suspicious reviews and bringing useful and verified reviews to the forefront.
Conclusion
Above are just some of the many applications of AI software development in e-commerce. In addition to these, artificial intelligence can also be used for sales forecasting and managing product content. The biggest goal for any e-commerce business is to sell more and keep the customers happy, and artificial intelligence solutions can offer major support in the fulfillment of this goal. Now is the time when e-commerce store owners need to start thinking seriously about adopting AI into their online shopping experience.
As the Founder and COO at Cyber Infrastructure Inc, it is my aspiration to drive our global clients ahead in the competitive technology world by enabling them to receive huge financial and operational benefits in software development through my years of experience and extensive expertise as technology adviser and strategist.
