AI for ecommerce: The future is here

As the e-commerce landscape gets more and more competitive, businesses are trying to bring in AI to help them scale. According to Bloomreach, 84% of ecommerce businesses consider AI as their top priority [1]. The generative AI models are set to impact how businesses operate efficiently.

However, the abundance of AI tools brings a major challenge. Identifying the right AI tools for specific business needs can feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

If you're an ecommerce owner facing this dilemma, this article is for you. We'll explore some of the most vital areas of your business where AI can help you achieve the best results.

Product marketing

Running a successful eCommerce business isn’t just about having a great product, it’s about selling it. With over 28 million businesses competing in the global ecommerce market [2], standing out and selling products online can be daunting.

That’s where effective ecommerce product marketing comes in. It’s about attracting visitors to your online store and converting them into customers. Several key factors influence this process, and AI tools can help you manage them efficiently. Let’s explore these essential elements and the AI tools that make a difference.

Precise product description

Product description is not only a source of information for customers. It is also a testament to trust and reliability. A clear and accurate product description shows the kind of dedication and concern the seller has toward the customer. Here are some AI tools that help you in creating effective product descriptions and drive sales:

• Copy AI: Copy AI is a product description generator with a variety of content templates. Its built-in data management system called Infobase allows you to store key information about your company, products, or campaigns, and then easily recall it using hashtags within your prompts. The plagiarism checker and the ‘improve’ content option make sure the content generated is unique.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Describely: With the ability to ****automatically extract key attributes from your product data such as materials, dimensions, and features, Describely accurately creates product descriptions. It can also generate product descriptions in bulk, saving you time and effort. You can also set Content Rulesets to manage multiple product catalogs across one or more brands in different stores, maintaining unique and on-brand product descriptions.
  
  

  

Attractive backdrops

A good backdrop is crucial for a product image. It enhances the focus on the product and makes the image look aesthetically pleasing. It also contributes a lot to getting better sales and building a more professional brand image. The generative AI tools can help create the perfect product backdrop images, without even lifting a lens.

• Adobe Firefly: The Adobe Firefly AI image generator creates cool AI backgrounds from simple text prompts. It effortlessly integrates with Adobe Creative Suite products and offers the freedom to edit the generated backdrops. You can also use an existing backdrop image and modify it as per your needs to match the product.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Leonardo: You can create stunning backdrops in varied styles like photorealism, anime art, 3D, and abstract, with the AI image generator. The Canvas Editor feature helps you to easily enhance and modify the generated images. The AI tool enables your team to work together and collaborate seamlessly.
  
  

  

Stunning product banners

Product banners are the most prominent design element that visitors see in an ecommerce store. A unique and stunning banner grabs visitors’ attention, creates a positive first impression, and encourages them to explore further, while a poorly designed one drives them away. You can elevate your product banners effortlessly with these AI tools.

• Sivi: While all the design tools are template-based with AI features, Sivi uses generative AI at its core to create template-free, unique designs within a minute or two. With the Large Design Model (LDM), Sivi generates design copy, images and editable, on-brand product banners in 72+ languages.
  
  

  

• Canva: As a template-based design tool, Canva offers generic product banner templates with AI image generation. However, finding a template that aligns with your brand and stretching your content to fit into the template requires a lot of time and design expertise.
  
  

  

Effective email automation

Email marketing isn’t just about sending promotional emails. It's about building relationships and boosting sales. By efficiently automating the email process, you can achieve higher engagement and conversion rates without much manual effort. Simplify your email automation process with these user-friendly AI solutions:

• Tiny Albert: Scheduling marketing emails and following up need not be a tiresome process anymore. This AI-powered email automation tool streamlines email campaign creation in just a few minutes. It also tracks the performances based on delivery, revenue generation, and audience growth to help you devise effective marketing strategies.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Instantly: With a 9.9 ‘ease of use’ rating(competitor average being 8.7), Instantly excels in finding warm leads and scaling email campaigns. It has custom reply labels that automatically categorize responses and help you engage smarter. It also assigns a dedicated account manager to guide you in planning and optimizing your campaigns to boost performance.
  
  

  

Customer experience

Now that you’re driving visitors to your ecommerce store with marketing campaigns, a seamless experience can turn casual browsers into buyers and one-time shoppers into loyal customers. Satisfied customers don’t just return for more, they also spread the word, bringing in new buyers and boosting your brand’s growth.

To keep the new age ecommerce customers happy, here are two important customer experience factors you need to take care of.

Personalized product recommendations

When customers receive product recommendations based on their personal preferences, they feel understood and valued. It offers them a more enjoyable shopping experience, resulting in higher levels of engagement and satisfaction. These are some AI tools that analyze customer data and send such recommendations:

• Qubit: The multiple AI and ML models of Qubit enable highly relevant product recommendations, tailored to each shopper. The AI capabilities in search and product discovery provide highly precise result sets. It also provides a dynamic navigation experience for the users to facilitate the sale.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Nosto: Built with Predictive AI, Semantic AI, Visual AI, and Generative AI capabilities, Nosto enhances customer engagement and drives more revenue. It also uses real-time behavioral and transactional data to recommend the highly relevant products that users are most likely to purchase next. The robust product discovery feature recommends best sellers and geotargeted trends to even first-time visitors.
  
  

  

Smart virtual assistants

You can’t attend to every customer visiting your store. That’s where these smart virtual assistants or chatbots come into play. They provide 24/7 customer support, answering customers’ questions and guiding them through the buying process. AI has taken this to an entirely different level in terms of responsiveness, and here are some tools that are worth considering.

• Zevi (Chatscout): Zevi is powered by an advanced AI engine and proprietary neural search algorithm that gives precise answers. Its AI-driven thematic search provides the fastest response time with great accuracy. The image-based search feature enables users to find what they're looking for, with just a picture.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Chatfuel: What if you get the power to build chatbots for multiple platforms including WhatsApp and Shopify, for free? That’s what you get with Chatfuel. These bots can guide users with appointment booking and product recommendations. They can also automatically send personalized messages to customers who abandon their carts, prompting them to complete the purchases.
  
  

  

Product management

A good part of customer experience relies on efficient product management. From strategy to delivery, product management defines the seamless flow of a product’s journey. A well-defined product management strategy is all about efficiently forecasting demand, optimizing stock levels, and minimizing stockouts and overstocking. Here are the two important components of product management that influence your business.

Innovative inventory management

It’s about making sure the right products are available when customers need them. This avoids out-of-stock items and excess inventory, improving order fulfillment simultaneously. The AI tools below offer effective inventory management solutions for your ecommerce store.

• Netstock: The Netstock Opportunity Engine™ is a powerful AI feature that analyzes inventory data across all locations instantly, providing real-time actionable recommendations. It also offers a customized dashboard with better visibility in inventory optimization.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Peak: What if you can have your own AI tool for inventory management, without actually building it? Peak offers dynamic inventory optimization management software with AI models for higher efficiency. It can give relevant and actionable solutions by analyzing large amounts of inventory, pricing, and user data.
  
  

  

Seamless supply chain management

From manufacturers to your e-commerce store to customer’s location, a well-managed supply chain ensures smooth and efficient movement of products. It reduces costs, makes the customers happy, and builds a huge brand reputation. Here are some AI tools that can simplify and automate the complex process for you.

• Blue Yonder: Handling the huge data generated by today’s supply chain mechanisms demands smart solutions. Blue Yonder is an AI-powered supply chain network that offers accurate predictions and precise optimizations to improve efficiency. It provides robust warehouse management solutions that enhance customer experience.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Logility: The Logility® Decision Intelligence Platform has a built-in AI engine, that ensures peak operational performance by continuously sensing, analyzing, and updating supply chain planning parameters in real-time. It allows businesses to have a synchronized sales and operations planning cycle that cuts costs, errors, and implementation time.
  
  

  

Customer data analytics

Whenever customers visit your ecommerce store looking for a product, they leave useful data about their preferences. Data is the new gold. But without analytics, it is like unrefined gold, bringing down its usability. Precise data analytics will help you understand customer preferences, product performance, market trends, sales metrics, etc.

Decoding customer and product analytics

With precise customer and product analytics, you can make data-driven decisions that positively impact your business. It will give you a deep knowledge of product performance, market position, customer segmentation, behavior, engagement, and retention to make informed decisions. This enhances the customer experience and eventually brings in more business. Here are the AI-powered tools that help you in the process:

• Visenze: Visenze uses an extensively trained AI engine that provides precise customer analytics. The AI-driven query trend reports help businesses understand market shifts and consumer preferences well in advance, enabling proactive decisions.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Sentisum: Sentisum is a sentiment analysis specialist tool with an AI-powered support ticket analysis system. It automatically analyzes negative comments that need immediate responses. It also prioritizes customer tickets based on urgency, risk, and sentiment, which helps you respond without any delay.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Sprig: The AI-powered Sprig instantly analyzes product experience data from various sources including heatmaps, replays, surveys, and feedback studies, to generate actionable reports. It suggests opportunities, trends, strengths, and correlations that drive smarter, faster product decisions.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Tellius: This AI-native analytics platform offers seamless analytics workflows to enhance the data strategy. Its natural language querying, data preparation, and data visualization abilities help in optimizing the customer experience. You get the fastest and easiest way to mine all the data from every platform where people interact with your brand, enabling you to give them a better shopping experience.
  
  

  

Pricing intelligence

One key area in ecommerce is product pricing. Ecommerce customers are highly price-conscious, as they make detailed comparisons of multiple selling platforms before buying a product. This is where you need pricing intelligence to understand their price sensitivities and competitor pricing strategy. Following a dynamic pricing strategy that modifies prices in real time helps you attract and retain customers in the competitive market.

Dynamic pricing strategy

It is the system where your product’s price changes dynamically in real time, in alignment with your competitors. It considers various factors like demand, competition, inventory, time, and customer segmentation. Here are some AI-powered tools that execute this efficiently, so that you need not worry about doing it manually.

• Feedvisor: With AI-powered real-time dynamic price optimization, this tool facilitates effective repricing based on market changes of competitors. Its Amazon and Walmart repricing feature ensures consistent pricing, thereby preventing listing suppression. The tool uses price elasticity modeling to test various price points for detecting changes in demand patterns.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Hypersonix: Proactive monitoring and automated pricing lead to maximum sales and product margin growth. The connected network of generative AI models in Hypersonix does these and also manages the optimal price point for millions of SKUs to solve any price complexity. It optimizes the inventory levels and improves demand planning to ensure improved profits.
  
  

  

Site security

In addition to all the advanced features that an ecommerce site can offer, security is paramount. A single security breach can erode customer trust and affect your business negatively. It’s your prime responsibility to ensure the safety of customers’ personal and financial information. Your site security has to be fool-proof and super-efficient to prevent attacks.

Protection from threats

This includes safeguarding your ecommerce store with crucial elements like firewalls, payment gateways, malware protection, and password management. Site security is a multi-layered approach that addresses various potential vulnerabilities and threats that might come from any external source. The advancements in generative AI have taken platform security to greater heights and here are some tools to help you.

• Crowdstrike: Crowdstrike offers advanced cybersecurity solutions, by providing seamless scalability and real-time updates, which rule out the need for manual interventions. Its multi-model AI architecture has been trained on trillions of daily events and world-class threat intelligence, making it highly accurate.
  
  

  

  
  
  

• Vectra: Protecting modern networks from modern attacks needs tools with advanced AI algorithms and machine learning techniques. Vectra is capable of detecting multiple threats including attempts to move laterally within the network and map out network infrastructure. It automates threat detection, and prioritizes security incidents in real-time, helping you outsmart the attackers.
  
  

  

AI is no longer a complex concept. With the right tools and processes, it is more adaptable and useful than ever before. The solutions we've explored here provide a powerful toolkit for your ecommerce businesses to stay on top of the competition. Implement the power of AI and take your ecommerce business toward success.