CEO and cofounder of e-commerce development agency Magebit.
Lately, just about everybody is talking about artificial intelligence (AI), experimenting with it and tasking it with all kinds of jobs. Likewise, AI is entering e-commerce—not step by step but rather in leaps and bounds, transforming not just the industry but the way in which e-stores sell products to their customers.
By offering a personalized shopping experience accompanied by a virtual shopping assistant, AI enhances the online shopping experience for both customers and retailers. This is not just true for big businesses; small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can also make the most of the opportunities offered by AI.
E-commerce businesses are in no hurry to use AI.
According to a study published by Gartner, Inc., the number of companies actively using AI solutions between 2015 and 2019 rose by 270%. Meanwhile, our observations indicate that SMEs are in no hurry to leap into using AI tools on a widespread basis.
While it’s true that SMEs use search engines and similar solutions that have been around for years, for the time being, they don’t appear to be in any hurry to adopt text generators despite the indications that text generators could turn out to be a fantastic tool for small businesses. Many entrepreneurs are yet to see the added value of AI for their business because there are lots of other ways in which they can drive their sales figures.
What’s more, a 2016 HubSpot survey found that 63% of customers didn’t even realize they were using AI technologies. It looks like many SMEs are either using these solutions on their e-commerce websites indirectly or don’t really understand what they’re working with.
Personalized offers are more effective.
Similar to big e-commerce platforms, small businesses can also take advantage of AI to automate various jobs like customer service, data analysis and document management. In doing so, they can save time and reduce the risk of human error.
The fact is that AI can help businesses better understand their customers by analyzing large quantities of data from different sources. This, in turn, is extremely useful when it comes to developing targeted strategies and creating personalized offers.
Stitch Fix, a popular online personal styling service, uses AI algorithms to analyze customer data and preferences to create personalized style recommendations. By combining AI with human stylists, the company delivers clothing and accessories that suit customers’ individual tastes and needs.
Winc, a wine subscription service, uses AI to tailor its offerings to customers’ unique tastes. Subscribers are asked to complete a quiz that helps the AI system understand their preferences. This information is then used to recommend wines that match their individual palate, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
By learning from these successful implementations, SMEs can harness the power of AI to improve their own e-commerce platforms and better serve their customers by offering them more relevant and engaging shopping experiences.
AI can provide better business results.
The capacity of AI should not be underestimated when it comes to predicting small business expenditures and profits, which is most useful in relation to budgeting and resource optimization. AI enables small businesses to be innovative and competitive, making the most of the latest technological advances and opening up opportunities to secure advantages that were previously solely available to bigger enterprises.
E-commerce businesses are ideally placed to provide personalized offerings in their online stores and to optimize prices in relation to their competitors. To some extent, bigger companies can automate this process, but my advice for SMEs is to check their prices with ChatGPT (which everyone’s talking about right now) so that their initial prices for items are as competitive as possible. By talking to ChatGPT about their prices and those of the competition, small online business owners can get advice on product pricing and which pricing policy they should adopt in response to their market situation.
Create appealing marketing content.
AI is now so widely available that small businesses even talk to ChatGPT in their local language and get valuable advice outside of their specialist fields. When it comes to doing creative jobs, AI can be extremely useful. It can help you find information on where and how to best learn about a specific topic. It can also help you create product descriptions, prepare professional responses to customer reviews, compose marketing texts and even personalized letters to customers inspired by shopper data.
Although a person can undoubtedly write great text, AI helps you work out what you should add (and how you should add it) so that the text is as appealing as possible to the reader and elicits a more powerful psychological reaction. Even small e-shop owners with little or no experience can obtain high-quality content for their stores.
What should small businesses do before integrating AI into their daily operations?
• Explore the specific opportunities that AI offers your industry. This will help you weigh up the potential benefits and how you can leverage them to your advantage. Many AI solutions to specific needs are already available, simplifying and speeding up their implementation.
• Start with small projects that allow you to try out technologies and evaluate their effectiveness. For instance, supervised AI only serves as an assistant and does not independently carry out a specific function. ChatGPT can be used to describe a work-related problem, allowing you to see what AI advises. Describe a decision that you’re about to make and ask what you could improve or add, or ask them to generate an answer to a question from a question, which will give your great perspective. ChatGPT and similar solutions can help small businesses in their everyday operations without major investments.
AI integration in e-commerce holds immense potential for small businesses to streamline operations, personalize customer experiences and gain a competitive edge. By starting with small projects and gradually incorporating AI, SMEs can unlock new opportunities and drive their businesses toward greater success.
Source: Forbes