Artificial Intelligence as a breakthrough technology is continuing to transform our lives in myriad ways. From intelligent chatbots capable to answer questions and guide users to virtual assistants responding to our commands for fulfilling tasks to smart and intelligent cars adjusting to typical user preferences, there is a multitude of ways artificial intelligence has penetrated our lives. Naturally, ecommerce cannot be left without reaping the benefits of AI for customer-centric product search, customer support, personalized recommendations, and customer support.
Magento as the most popular and widely used ecommerce CMS platform has integrated AI with a whole array of plugins and extensions. If you have a Magento ecommerce store you can easily give your customers sophisticated AI-based shopping experience. Magento always stays on the edge of innovation by incorporating the latest technologies into its shopping experience. Now AI can truly become the game changer for shopping experience on Magento ecommerce store.
Through the length of this post, we are going to explain how artificial intelligence (AI) can deliver groundbreaking changes in the Magento ecommerce stores.
The Promise Of AI For Magento eCommerce
The promise and potential of artificial intelligence have already been realised by a whole array of leading ecommerce stores and a vast majority of them are built on Magento. As the leading CMS solution, Magento is most equipped with tools to accommodate the AI-powered shopping experience. AI helps Magento stores earning higher revenues and it also gives customers the feeling of being personally attended. Thanks to AI shopping experience becomes more effortless, fluid and more personalised than ever before.
Playing The Role Of Shopping Attendant
A good online store never fails to make us feel attended all the time whatever we want when using the store. On the other hand, the bad shopping experience is basically about finding yourself totally clueless and confused with nobody to turn to for help. Though you have various filters to get access to what you want. But at times when you have certain unique questions that need to be addressed with a different filter, you need active help. In an online store, an AI-powered chatbot can just play the role of store attendant in such circumstances.
Apart from this real-time help, AI can also cater to customers in a more personalized way thanks to the wealth of customer information and insights it can access. Even before the customer lands on the store and starts browsing products, through machine learning and analytics the AI function of the Magento store knows about the customer and can serve him accordingly.
Delivering An Effortless Shopping Experience
Often ecommerce is referred by many as the one-click shopping experience. But for the vast majority of stores, it actually requires too many clicks and interactions from the customers. To be precise, for most stores the online shopping experience isn’t as effortless as it should be. This is where AI can play a really defining role to boost the ease and effortlessness in shopping.
For example, we can refer to the AI-based search function in certain ecommerce store that helps to deliver results as per specific user context. AI now also incorporates the power of semantics through natural language processing to decipher the search intents and semantically addressing those searches with befitting contents and business offerings. As a whole AI is making all functions including search and browsing more effortless than ever before.
The Exceptional Scope Of Personalization
In a traditional brick and mortar store in any locality, you can experience a typical personal touch. From the store owner to the attendants all stands on their toe to answer your queries and finding you the products you are looking for or the products, you may wish to prefer. This personalized touch actually boasts customer loyalty and make them return often. This typical personal touch is missing with most online stores in general.
This is precisely the area where AI can play a big role. AI capable to understand specific customer preferences and needs based on data-driven insights and machine learning is more equipped to address customers more personally. From shopping suggestions to personalized browsing experience with preferred filters to shopper specific loyalty and promotion programs, AI offers a great scope of personalization with Magento shopping experience. Basically, the key role of AI is to cut the entire time required to scroll through the product pages and take customers to the products they need.
Conversational Shopping Experience
AI in the ecommerce store is mainly implemented by allowing conversation with the customers through chatbots. AI-powered chatbots capable with natural language processing technology can easily understand customer queries and relate to what the customer needs quickly and in an efficient manner. No wonder, AI-powered chatbots are used by many ecommerce stores to facilitate real-time browsing help.
Conversation with chatbots can also give customers a personalized touch when navigating through the store and browsing products. Any query or complaint answered by the chatbot through a cordial conversation can really make the shopping experience better by bringing in a personalized touch.
Most Informed Customer Support
One of the crucial ways AI can really give your store a performance boost is through well-informed customer support. While an AI-powered chatbot for a Magento Store can always be designed by training the bot with a lot of sample customer data and queries, it can always personalize conversation and address query based on specific customer information.
With AI an online store can easily improve customer support to a great extent simply because it remains well informed about the individual customers and can tweak the conversation as per customers.
Boost Business Conversion
The biggest benefit of AI in ecommerce Store is the boost in business conversion. AI-based virtual shopping assistants always help by cutting down the time required for a customer to buy a product. Just by prescribing the right product and by coming with useful information all through the product browsing and search, AI-based virtual assistant helps customers making decisions faster for a purchase.
A very recent study conducted by Adweek it has been found that 36% of shoppers researched for as long as 30 minutes and a whopping 65% of buyers do the same for as long as 16 minutes before actually making a purchase. Virtual assistants can minimize this time spent on research to a minimum and help to boost sales faster. By getting insights and consumer insights through machine learning algorithms, the AI-powered virtual assistants can help customers precisely in a way to make purchases early and often.
Visual Search and Voice Search
When it comes to the product search in ecommerce stores, most of the stores depend on a variety of filters. But thanks to AI even the search function is experiencing a lot of positive changes to the benefit of customer experience.
Now we have visual search powered by AI-based image recognition algorithms. This allows uploading a picture and searching for similar products. Voice search is already popular across the vast majority of interfaces including even the Google search engine and YouTube video streaming. Thanks to the latest technologies like natural language processing, voice search has become more context driven and specific to customer needs.
Preventing Fraudulent Activities
As more and more businesses are hopping on the ecommerce bandwagon, fraudulent activities and cyber threats are rapidly increasing. To prevent online commerce from such frauds and data tampering, ecommerce stores are now integrating smart AI capability. A Magento store now by using a dedicated plug-in can decipher and predict all sorts of frauds and data tampering efforts.
The Ever-Expanding Scope Of Personalization
AI-based personalization in ecommerce stores will continue to play a pivotal role and addressing individual customers personally is the biggest input of AI tools in online stores. But earlier efforts to address customers with personalized attributes had a limit. Presently, AI-based personalization is expanding in scope and introduced many innovative ways to address customer preferences. The new ecommerce experience allows more personalization than what we understood by the term ever before.
For example, just look at how most advanced personalization engine of SAP Hybris works. By mining data of consumers this engine helps businesses to up-sell and cross-sell products and also to encourage for future orders. Based on the in-store behavior of a customer such as looking at a product, the engine can recommend similar or related products or can push sales through custom promotions. Apart from recommendations based on predefined rules and customer insights, this engine also helps to recommend products based on real-time customer inputs.
Personalized product recommendation is the biggest treasure trove to boost sales in an effective manner in online stores. As customer footfall across stores is increasing, assessing customer preferences is becoming more precise and accurate over time. With the increased frequency of product browsing and shopping, getting customer insights and accordingly recommending products is becoming more accurate.
The huge scope of personalization in online stores thanks to AI-powered engines is creating unprecedented value for consumers. According to the digital commerce research of Gartner in 2017, these new software enabled personalization will help to generate more sales and boosting the profitability of ecommerce stores more than ever before.
How AI Is Doing In Most Of The eCommerce Stores Presently?
There is a multitude of ways AI can really transform the shopping experience. Thanks to AI shopping decisions and recommendations can be more intuitive and tremendously convenient. The AI-powered conversation through chatbots helping the customers to navigate, browse and shop products is a nice example of how AI can play an effective role. Natural language processing (NLP) technology utilized to decipher text queries instead of only understanding prefixed questions and answers gave modern chatbots more intuitive power for utilization in ecommerce stores. Some limitations that are still aching AI chatbots will be extinct in future as future chatbots become more equipped.
AI Transforming The eCommerce Supply Chain
Apart from the shopping experience, all other aspects of online shopping will also experience a massive positive boost thanks to artificial intelligence. AI is not just about the better and enhanced shopping experience, it is also about staying equipped to deal with the supply chain challenges that most ecommerce stores face day in and day out. AI solution can be integrated with enterprise resource planning software, human resource management solutions and inventory management to unleash the potential of data-centric insights for ecommerce stores.
In this respect, it is important to see the way AI can enhance the precision and accuracy of inventory management. AI can be utilized to predict and forecast inventory needs more precisely. Thanks to AI you can always remain informed about your stock and needs to load the store as per precise prediction of orders based upon previous order history and patterns. The AI-based recasting and machine to machine communication can boost sophistication and drive precision in inventory management.
Conclusion
From the above-mentioned elucidation, it is already clear that AI is not just hype but a big value addition to the world of ecommerce. Magento 2.0 is equipped to the boot with an array of plugins to incorporate AI power into the online shopping experience. Through AI the shopping experience will continue to evolve and get better over time.
