How Creative Shoppers Are Using AI

According to a recent report by Salesforce, 17 percent of shoppers are already using AI to assist in their browsing. Those who haven’t yet dipped into AI-assisted shopping are curious to see how AI can help them have a smoother experience. 

Those pioneers using generative AI during their online shopping are hoping for personalized recommendations for their situation, looking for interactive shopping assistants, and wanting to leverage virtual try-ons and in-home visualizations for furniture and decor. Some are also looking for meal plan ideas and answers to questions about electronics. 

Do You Need to Optimize Your Website for AI Searches?

Although it’s likely that AI will power internet searches in the future, we’re not there yet. For now, no single platform is dominating the field, and free AI databases are often too outdated for users to see the very latest deals and trends. AI is already being used to optimize the ads and predictive search engines that you know and love, as with Google’s RankBrain, but it isn’t yet significantly changing the average marketer’s approach to SEO. As new AI tools are used throughout the internet, there may be some important housekeeping details to take care of on your website. For now, AI’s job is to get the best information it can using scans of text, images, and search histories, meaning that the same white-hat practices you’re doing now to optimize SEO will continue to serve as AI becomes more and more dominant in search engines. 

In the meantime, here are some things to keep an eye on: 

• Image-based search will serve up similar items as shoppers seek the right product, making effective product imagery more important than ever.

• Personalization is expected and appreciated by customers, and AI makes this easier than it has ever been.

• Predictive AI can help you track trends and online conversations so you can adapt your inventory to suit customers’ demands.

In addition to understanding how customers are using AI, it’s essential for businesses to understand how AI can maximize their efforts in marketing, customer service, inventory management, and more. Let’s take a look at some of the services that are available today. 

AI Tools That Optimize Your E-Commerce Store’s Operations and Sales

Many of the tools below are available from multiple software suites, often with multiple services from one source. In fact, some tools may be baked into programs that you already use, such as Shopify or SalesForce. Every product today is looking for more ways to leverage AI in order to make your life easier and your business more profitable. Take a look at these possibilities you may want to integrate into your e-commerce store. 

Marketing Optimization With AI

Marketing represents one of the key areas of AI growth and development. AI is able to synthesize huge swathes of data to optimize ads, content, and more. AI can also multiply your efforts in every aspect of marketing, from content development to ad buying. Last but not least, AI gives you the power to send your customers and prospective customers messages that are personally curated for their needs, values, interests, and phases in the sales funnel. Research shows that 80 percent of customers are more likely to buy in response to personalized recommendations and ads. 

AI Functions:

• PPC: Discover new predictive estimates and ad-writing tools

• Personalized Display Ads: Use similar product recommendations to increase conversions 

• Custom emails: Cater messages to browsing and purchase history

Tools to Explore:

• Blueshift

• Seventh Sense

• Regie.ai

Content Creation

Thanks to the ChatGPT boom, content creation may currently be the most familiar AI function to most of us. Not only can generative AI help you with creating blog posts and product descriptions, but it can also help you make infinite variations and treatments on product photos and videos. All of this content can be used on your store, or as marketing collateral to bring in new shoppers. 

AI Functions:

• Create dynamic videos out of images

• Write optimized, engaging product descriptions

• Generate image variations for products

Tools to Explore:

• Jasper.ai

• Midjourney

• Neural Love

• Pixelcut

Automated Dynamic Pricing

Pricing can be one of the most finicky aspects of e-commerce, and also one that can lead to the greatest profit margins when conducted well. New AI-powered e-commerce tools take the guesswork out of product pricing by surveying shopping trends both inside and outside of your store. It can track your competitors and automatically adjust your store’s prices accordingly. These pricing models can also be integrated with inventory management to recommend sales opportunities and order volume and even adapted to individuals’ shopping behaviors. 

AI Functions:

• Personalize pricing according to shopper behavior, general trends, and competition

• Automatically adjust pricing according to your defined goals

Tools to Explore:

• PriceShape

• Prisync

Personal Shopping Assistant

Along with customized recommendations comes the opportunity for a personalized shopping assistant housed on your website or app. This shopping assistant can sift through products to cater to a customer’s stated and unstated preferences, modify results according to their searches, and offer informed feedback about products in order to identify the result that fits into the customers’ lifestyle and needs. Shopping assistants may be thought of as the next generation of customer service chatbots. 

AI Functions:

• Realistic, multilingual chat functionality

• Personalized customer recommendations

• Similar image search

• Ability to gather or limit results based on ambivalent stated intent from customers

• Can also be linked with virtual previews to see products at home

Tools to Explore:

• LivePerson

• Granify

• ViSENZE

What Is Needed for Effective AI on Your E-Commerce Site

AI can’t do an effective job on just any e-commerce site. The most complex and exciting functions that will keep you ahead of your competition require powerful cloud computing, intelligent data storage, and well-built data access models. You also need an intuitive interface that reflects the powerful customer experience that AI provides in your store. 

We have extensive experience with diverse AI tools and have been utilizing them with our clients for years. We understand what’s needed to empower AI on your e-commerce store and deliver an optimum customer experience. Our seamless cloud integration, thoughtfully designed security architecture, and dialed-in consultation can help you understand how to leverage AI to supercharge sales and establish your store as a leader within your niche. 

Contact us to learn more about AI options in e-commerce and how you can integrate these exciting new options in your store today.