Artificial Intelligence is a buzzword you hear thrown around a lot these days, mostly in some jargon-heavy conversations about the future of labor. However, you mustn’t be intimidated by it, because there are some real-world applications that you could implement in your own eCommerce strategy without having to hire the next Elon Musk to carry them out.
Let’s have a look at some of the ways artificial intelligence and machine learning are being integrated in eCommerce platforms.
Most online sales platforms have been giving shoppers product recommendations that work of the keywords you they use to search for items for years. More recently, through artificial intelligence and machine learning, product recommendations are using a wider range of indicators that provide more accurate recommendations because they are specific to that customer’s behavior.
Aside from better product recommendations, chatbots and virtual assistants have made remarkable strides in the recent years to now provide more robust solutions. Facebook, for instance, now allows certain payment methods to be carried out directly through their messenger app to avoid clicking away to secondary site that handles payments. This removes one more step in the buyer’s journey that could otherwise mean a lost lead.
Another tech development that had made some serious strides forward is augmented reality. For several years AR seemed to be limited to novelty applications that were more meant to wow tech conference goers than entice retailers to incorporate it into their sales strategies.
That is no longer the case. Several retailers have made investments into using AR along their online sales channels. One salient example is IKEA and its Place app. The application allows users to see how products would look in your home before buying anything. This gives retailers both the capacity to enter customers while proving valuable sales data that you could use to your advantage.
If you want to learn more about other trends in eCommerce leave a comment below and we’ll work to cover it in the next post.
