[Guest Post] What Artificial Intelligence Can Do For Your eCommerce Store

Michelle Deery, a writer for Heroic Search, Tulsa, gives an insight on how retailers can use Artificial Intelligence to benefit their ecommerce store. 

Got an eCommerce store and don’t want to fall behind the competition? It’s time to invest in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Setting up an eCommerce store is an exciting prospect for many of us, but it can also be a daunting one. You’ve got web design to cover, as well as generating traffic and providing an excellent user experience. But once you’ve got over those initial hurdles, there’s something even scarier to deal with – AI. In other words, robots!

Okay, not robots like the ones you saw in The Terminator or your nightmares. But robots like the ones that are helping Amazon to get even bigger and better. Here’s the deal: The eCommerce world is about to get a little bit – shall we say – strange, as medium to large sized businesses make the transition to AI. Big businesses are already making the transition, with Facebook going as far as releasing their own videos to explain to their users how AI works. But does your eCommerce store really need to embrace AI? Can you not survive without it, keeping everything the same, including how your website is designed and operates? Well, look at it like this. According to reports, AI could boost productivity by 40% in 2035, while stimulating economic growth in America by some 4.5%. How? By taking care of the activities and tasks that are slowing down your eCommerce store right now. Which tasks are we talking about? Let’s take a look at what AI can do for your eCommerce store.

Artificial Intelligence Can Put An End To Fake Reviews And Improve Customer Trust In Your Store

Fake reviews are just awful. You know this and all eCommerce store owners know this. They damage the reputation of the brand who is publishing them. Fake reviews erode trust between the consumer and your store. If a customer can’t trust the authenticity of a review, they’re not going to buy. Trust is so important to the success of your business. For people to part with their cash, they have to trust your brand.

Artificial Intelligence is already being used by online retail giant Amazon, as they seek to clamp down on fake reviews. Although AI can’t delete a fake review and banish it to the digital abyss forever, it can give prominence to reviews that are clearly human – ergo, those reviews that have been marked as helpful by other users, and which are not spam. So when these verified reviews get prominence, the fake reviews get bumped down. And when this happens, the AI will use only the reviews near the top to create a star rating for a product.This will make the decision to display customer reviews on your website much easier. Remember, according to iPerceptions, 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews. Make sure they are located in the right area, though, so that your customers don’t have to go searching for them. Don’t take a back seat when it comes to the web design of your store. It matters and compliments AI very well.

Artificial Intelligence Personalizes The Customer Experience

We know what you’re thinking:

“How can a robot make the customer experience more personal? I’m gonna click off this page right now!”

But hold on a second. By a personal shopping experience, we’re referring to a shopping experience that is tailored to an individuals particular needs and wants. As opposed to the broader needs and wants of everyone. While you can make your website look as amazing as possible these days with sophisticated web design and eCommerce themes, you don’t just have to rely on web design itself that personalizes the customer experience. In fact they go hand-in-hand. Imagine for a second that you walk into a store and an assistant knows exactly what you’re looking for. How amazing would that be?

In an eCommerce store, Artificial Intelligence – which is essentially deep learning – is able to analyze huge swathes of data so that it knows your customer much more than you do. It knows their spending habits, their buying behaviour, and their exact demographics so that it can give them a personalized shopping experience that ensures they get what they want. This makes the customer very happy, and it makes you happy, too. See, there is a whole wealth of key info about consumers floating around in cyberspace that would really help your eCommerce store to know. AI tracks the info down, processes it and uses it to personalize the shopping experience at every stage of the sales process. As long as the items in an eCommerce store are displayed beautifully with a modern website and show every detail, with the help of a responsive theme, your customer will be very happy with their personal shopper experience.

Artificial Intelligence Helps To Retarget Customers

There are always one or two customers that got away. Sometimes, there is a whole store full. If only you could have kept them on your website for a bit longer and clinched the sale.Heartbreaking stuff. Wouldn’t it be great, then, if you could retarget potential customers who were interested but needed something extra to convince them to make a purchase?

Artificial Intelligence can retarget potential customers who were a little bit hesitant. It can detect how long a customer spent looking at a particular product in your store, before presenting them with related special offers. In this way, AI can prove hugely beneficial to your eCommerce store. It can play on a customers’ impulsiveness and cause them to make the decision you want them to make. These are a few things that Artificial Intelligence can do for your eCommerce store. Don’t fear the robots. Embrace them!