Read on to learn all the ways AI can enhance eCommerce businesses.
You hear so much about Artificial Intelligence these days.
AI can do this, AI can do that.
But the how largely remains unexplored.
Well, for starters, AI is helping today’s retailers in various ways that ultimately boost the business and expeditates sales while also keeping the customer experience top-notch.
Research also suggests that AI will help hyper-personalization with detailed insights into buying behavior and customer patterns.
So if you’re unaware of how AI can enhance eCommerce businesses’ sales, this article is for you. It talks about the ways AI improves the sales game for online retailers and how you can leverage the same.
Let’s check it out.
Top Ways AI Can Enhance eCommerce Sales
- Reduced Cart Abandonment
The average cart abandonment rate across industries is almost 70%.
Let that sink in.
It means that after all those marketing efforts, securing a customer, and guiding them to make a purchase, they decide to change their mind. And all those efforts come crashing down and gravely impact sales.
AI can help eCommerce businesses retarget the prospects that abandoned their cart. The machine learning tools assess a customer’s digital body language to determine if and when they might abandon their cart. They do so by employing sophisticated algorithms that quantify humongous data points in real-time.
AI-enabled automated systems help you send targeted emails to users to send reminders, offers, or a discount with a promo code to urge customers to complete the purchase. It also helps you retarget advertisements that rely on cookies. It enables you to keep track of the pages visited by the abandoned user and records their exploring activities while on the site.
As a result, eCommerce merchants can develop tailored advertisements for specific individuals, especially on checkout pages, that encourage users to complete the transaction and encourage sales.
- Product Recommendations
The online buying experience is different from an offline buying one. In a brick-and-mortar store, a salesperson recommends products to customers based on their choices and preferences. Since there’s no one to push the customers to buy products online, AI fills in the gap.
Imagine you clicked on an item on an eCommerce website, and you see similar items below. Would you or would you not check them out to see your items?
That’s what we thought.
It’s because the items are closely related to what you’re viewing.
With AI and machine learning, online retailers can collect and process data about customers’ online shopping habits, which helps bots offer personalized shopping experiences. If you’re able to show products that the customers have shown interest in prior, you have a higher chance of closing that sale. AI also uses Natural Language Processing to narrow, contextualize, and improve customer search results.
With the help of AI, eCommerce product fulfillment companies also share recommendations from their past sales data to bundle similar products and increase Average order value (AOV).
AI isn’t just limited to recommending products based on customer history, and it can also recommend based on the text, image, and visual elements of the customers. This advanced technology is affordable and accessible and gives businesses a competitive advantage. For example, Pinterest’s recent update of its Chrome extension enables users to select an item in any photographs available on the Internet and then ask Pinterest to showcase similar items using image recognition software.
And with so many qualities and advanced algorithms, you’d think AI must cost a fortune. But the best part is that AI chatbots provide you get all of this and more at a fraction of chatbot pricing.
- Upsell and Cross-sell
Similar to product recommendations, AI also helps customers choose complementary products that customers would be interested in buying. Again, it becomes easy to cross-sell or upsell when you’ve built that relationship in a brick-and-mortar store. However, the same data fetched by AI can help you understand what to cross-sell and upsell to who and when.
For example, if a customer has purchased shoes from a particular brand, you can target them for bags at a discounted price from the same brand through a pop-up or a chatbot. Moreover, an online store that can touch the right level of personalization with upselling and cross-selling can drastically enhance its order value and total income. Not to forget that with AI and automation, the customer also doesn’t have to feel pressured into making another purchase like they often do when an agent or salesperson pitches other products.
- Smart Logistics
Besides customer experience, AI aids with backend and supply chain processes. Most businesses want to plan inventory in real-time, considering past data. Since the entire supply chain relies on demand and supply, machine learning’s predictive analytics forecasts transit times, demand levels, and shipment delays that help retailers give a prompt delivery date.
Machine Learning algorithms use real-time information through sensors and analyze available data to forecast the demand and make the products available to increase sales. These systems also become smarter with time so their predictions become more accurate and enhance supply chain functions. And this is just the beginning. AI is continuously evolving in making use of big data, enabling continuous improvement and optimization that boosts the customer experience and fosters sales.
- Scaled Support and Service
A lot of times, customers just want to have a conversation with the retailer about the products and services before making the purchase. Certain doubts that the customers have the ability to halt the sale. For example, what is the return policy? What are the other brands offering this product? Are there any discounts available? Or what are the shipping charges and policies?
Now imagine the team you have to hire to answer every question to every customer. It is ineffective and costly. Instead, you can build AI-powered FAQ bots that answer all these questions for you. Its 24*7 availability and scalability, and instant replies expedite the sales process.
Wrapping up
If you notice, in a lot of places, AI fills in the role of a salesperson that is driven by the motive to guide the buyer in their journey and close sales. It’s why thousands of eCommerce companies are leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence because AI can simply change and improve the way consumers find and buy products online for good.
