How AI Is Helping e-Commerce Platforms Succeed

Artificial intelligence (AI) has so many uses that it would be impossible to list them all. In fact, many of the ways AI could be used probably haven’t been thought of yet. Nevertheless, AI is becoming an ever more useful tool in the world of online commerce, specifically online stores and e-commerce outlets. If you run such a business, then how should you be harnessing AI today?

Setting Up Multiple Stores For Different Clientele
It was not that long ago that .com domain names passed the 110 million mark in terms of new registrations. Today, domain checker tools are available online to ensure that new businesses can access the domain names they need for their brands. This is important to know if you’re going to be able to harness AI to set up new sites for your e-commerce platform to work through. For example, if you have a fashion e-commerce business, you might want to have men’s, women’s and children’s clothes all on the same site. However, there’s nothing to stop you from having three different sites all with their own design cues to help promote greater sales from each sub-segment of the market. If so, you won’t have to build entirely new sites any longer for each of your domain names or sub-brands. You can simply get AI to look at your current site and duplicate it for you with certain brand tweaks that you can either automate or implement yourself. Today, many e-commerce online stores are duplicated in this way, offering a more tailored customer experience from a user’s perspective without them even realising the site they’re visiting is a digital twin of another one owned by the same business.

Virtual Sales Assistants
E-commerce stores are at their best when they offer the products and buying experiences that customers could find in real-world stores. All too often, however, customers only have one image of a product and a short, generic product description to make a purchasing decision on. To counter this, forward-thinking e-commerce platform owners are installing virtual sales assistants. These are basically AI-powered chatbots which have been trained to be knowledgeable about the products on offer. They can make recommendations or provide short lists of products for customers to review based on what the customer says they’re after. Even better, AI can be used to gently push customers into making a decision, thereby guiding them towards the desired outcome of placing an order.

Dynamic Pricing
When you run an e-commerce store, there is nothing to stop you from adjusting the prices of your products according to market fluctuations or levels of demand. The trouble with upping the price of an in-demand product is that it takes time and effort, of course. The same goes for when you should be dropping your prices because custom is being lost to competitors. This is where automation in the form of AI-run dynamic pricing can be so effective.

Summary
AI will continue to evolve and e-commerce platforms will need to change with it if they are to remain successful. Given the efficiencies AI can drive in terms of fraud detection, price setting, site duplication and driving sales, it is a tool few online stores can do without.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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