It is always said that Amazon gained the first-mover advantage in the eCommerce segment. Today, the company stands along with multiple eCommerce platforms playing on the same field. However, things are a lot different today than how it used to be before. The factor for success for eCommerce businesses is no longer its services alone. With rapid digitalization, eCommerce development has taken a place on the table as well.
E-commerce today focuses on Customer Engagement more than anything else. Platforms such as Amazon today don’t focus on Good customer services and satisfaction alone, its focus has shifted to keeping the customers glued to its own ecosystem. This “Ecosystem” consists of everything an E-commerce development company could create in order to assist customers with their requirements and requests for service.
These creations which form an ecosystem of products and services are inevitably coming in the form of software and web services which not only make the lives of customers easier but bring new levels of efficiency and effectiveness in e-commerce services. One of the most hyped technologies viable in e-commerce website design is the implementation of AI.
The use of Artificial intelligence in an eCommerce development has changed the way customers shop online. It has changed the way businesses collect, analyze and interpret customer data.
According to Gartner, by the year 2020, 85% of the customers will manage their interactions with an enterprise without a human. Such is the impact of AI in nearly every function of today’s enterprises that it threatens the role of human employment. However, in the case of E-commerce development, AI definitely can’t replace most of the human roles in some departments such as delivery, transportation, and logistics This is why Artificial Intelligence today works in Sync with the human capital to create experiences which engage and make customers stay glued to the ecosystem of businesses.
Customer Experience and engagement is one of the most primary elements of importance for eCommerce companies today. Unlike physical stores, eCommerce platforms can’t deliver an immersive real-world experience to its customers. However, where eCommerce succeeds is in its ability to be functional and provide a more efficient experience for users.
Through AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants, businesses are taking customer interaction to a greater level by reducing the need for application interfaces, and harnessing the potential of hardware devices such as smartphones and speakers to reach out to its customers.
The key advantages of AI-powered chatbots are its 24/7 availability, minimal use of resources and a faster rate of data interpretation in comparison to human assistants. Another major use of AI comes through its subsets of Deep and Machine learning. These subsets make use of Data analytics to recognize user patterns and make the right recommendations for users at the right time.
Presenting the users with the right information at the right time can go a long way in defining their experience with the business. With each user having their own personal preferences, AI can take personalization to a level which makes it interact with the business more closely than ever.
It’s a well-known fact that generalized interfaces for all types of customers are not considered appropriate in the context of customer engagement. Personalized interfaces, however, create more interaction and subsequently more business.
In the pursuit of the creation of personalized interfaces, every ecommerce website design company today must leverage AI in order to understand more about the user, and design interfaces easily accessible to users with specific interests.
A major issue halting the growth of sellers on eCommerce platforms is their lack of control over the reviews made by customers. Fake reviews often leave a negative impact in the minds of potential customers about the products they might intend to purchase. This is an issue which needs a deeper focus on part of any eCommerce website design company. The corporate giant Amazon has successfully tackled this problem up to a small extent with the use of machine-learning for analyzing the reviews and putting the most authentic and relevant reviews on top.
AI can be utilized as an effective filter to weed out errors and biases on eCommerce platforms. Such a filter can not only analyze fake reviews, but it can also be implemented to identify sellers using illegal or false means of advertising and selling counterfeit products.
Also read: How can AR, IoT, Blockchain and Chatbots redefine Customer Experience
The greatest potential of Artificial Intelligence lies in its ability to reach areas not so easily reachable by human means. The Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba is using Bot scanning techniques to analyze and remove counterfeit products and those with false advertising. By acting as a filter for detecting false practices on eCommerce platforms, AI can bring greater levels of transparency in Online businesses.
Big Data analytics is the primary driver of marketing and sales practices of corporate giants including Google and Amazon. Large amounts of data collected by eCommerce platforms which include raw data of customer usage patterns, devices connected, user accounts and myriad other aspects are not easy to be analyzed by human workers alone. This is where AI and its subsets play a major role.
The use of machine learning in Big Data analytics is the engine of every other benefit of AI ultimately passed on to the customers. In a time when the complexity of technology is increasing with each day, AI presents a viable solution to ease out this complexity, and make technology more understandable and accessible than ever before. However, what haunts its progress is the threat it places on the importance of human capital in organizations.
But as far as eCommerce is concerned, the use of Artificial Intelligence here is limited to the virtual experience it creates. At the end of the day, it only serves as something which provides a greater amount of information for the businesses to understand and implement, and additionally as a tool for an eCommerce website design company for practising and testing new interfaces personally designed for every customer.
In essence, the use of AI through machine learning and chatbots are the most viable use cases for ecommerce development companies. The progress in the development of AI-powered technologies poses new challenges along with the creation of new opportunities and expectations.
The challenges presented by AI in eCommerce come in the form its unreliability in comparison with human conscience and the costs in its development. However, the opportunities it presents far exceeds any negative aspects of it. A reliable ecommerce website design company and development teams could create customer-specific platforms through AI which could bring personalization along with efficiency from both customer and business perspectives.