A lot has changed in the ecommerce industry over the past decade. Technology has been one of the most crucial drivers for these changes. With AI and machine learning becoming ever more integrated into our daily lives, ecommerce is not far from being influenced by machine learning. As ecommerce continues to grow by 20% every year, technology will keep playing an important role in how customers interact with online stores. Further, mobiles will be responsible for around 70% of the total ecommerce traffic. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning will enable handling of over 80% of the customer interactions.
Here’s how machine learning will impact ecommerce in the near and distant future:
Customer shopping experiences:
Machine learning allows ecommerce businesses to create more personalised customer experiences. Customers prefer to communicate with their favourite brands and ‘expect’ personalization in the communication. Machine learning can learn your shopping habits and preferences and hence offer more relevant suggestions and other communications.
Search results:
Improving search-results means more business for ecommerce stores. Machine learning can improve ecommerce search results by taking into account personal preferences and purchase history. Machine learning can create search ranking based on the relevance of the page for that particular user – unlike the traditional search methods that uses keywords.
Re-targeting:
Artificial intelligence can use not only customer’s digital data, but also analyse their in-store behaviour. Face recognition software will be used to re-target the ads for that latest product you checked out in-store.
Product recommendations:
Machine learning can be used in ecommerce to recommend products according to patterns in customer’s shopping behaviour. This helps increase conversions.
Marketing guide:
Machine learning can recognize patterns and predict trends so that businesses can find out what people respond to, what can be changed and what can be entirely eliminated from the marketing campaigns. This helps maximise returns on a marketing campaign.
Price Optimization:
Machine learning algorithms can help collect information regarding pricing trends, competitor’s prices and demand for various items – and combine this information with customer behaviour to determine the best price for each of your products.
There are a lot of exciting opportunities for machine learning in ecommerce and it’s becoming a means of improvement in online retail. It makes selling online more effective and rewarding.
