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If you are running an e-commerce business, you will agree that it is nothing short of running a marathon. It has to be continuously and consistently monitored to ensure that everything runs smoothly.

If we look at the e-commerce market, it is growing at a CAGR of 18.9% from 2024 to 2030. This indicates a possibility of new businesses appearing in the market, which further leads to stiff competition and the survival of the fittest scenario. And that’s where AI can make a difference.

Whether you are a new e-commerce venture or an existing one, the integration of AI is necessary for you to overcome manual bottlenecks, scaling issues, and more. By automating content generation, providing targeted recommendations, and streamlining customer service, business owners can boost their e-commerce operations, thereby taking out the market competition. Read ahead to learn how!

Understanding Automation and AI in E-Commerce

The role of AI and automation is significantly high in e-commerce, especially now when content creation is faster and customer support can be automated.

E-commerce Automation

Automation in your e-commerce business will include the use of intelligent tools and systems to perform repetitive, time-consuming, or data-driven tasks without any human intervention.

Automation boosts operational efficiency, accuracy, speed, and scalability; all these elements are helpful for you to stay competitive in today’s fast-growing market space. Some of the use cases of e-commerce automation include

Automated Order Fulfillment & Warehouse Robotics

Customer Support & Chatbots

Personalization and targeting

AI in E-Commerce

If you use AI in your e-business, it can harness advanced technologies, such as ML, NLP, predictive analytics, and computer vision. The technologies can be helpful in several ways, including

Anticipating customer needs

Automating complex workflows

Deliver deeply personalized shopping experiences at scale

According to industry data, 84% of e-commerce businesses are already using AI in some form, which has led to a 15% boost in conversion rates and reduced shopping cart abandonment by 20%.

How are Automation and AI Impacting E-Commerce

By taking care of repetitive tasks and powering intelligent, proactive decision-making, AI and automation can easily place you at the lead of the e-commerce market. Here are some noteworthy use cases.

Personalized Shopping Experiences

Personalization backed by AI can help your e-commerce brand in several ways, including designing homepage layouts to product recommendations.

These steps are taken based on the analysis of user behavior. With the help of AI, Saks Global boosted revenue per visitor by up to 7% and lifted its conversions by nearly 10%. These dedicated experiences deepen engagement and drive more loyal, higher-value customers.

Chatbots & Virtual Assistants

Unlike the human workforce, AI chatbots and virtual assistants can enhance your e-commerce operations by offering 24/7 instant support, handling FAQs, guiding purchases, and boosting satisfaction. Today, these chatbots can handle more comprehensive and conversational user queries for an enhanced user experience. Amarra, a global special-occasion gown brand, uses ChatGPT for handling 70% of customer inquiries.

Inventory Management

With the help of AI algorithms and automation processes, you can predict demand, balance stock levels, and optimize fulfillment across channels. This helps in overstocking and the availability of necessary inventory items on time. Taking the previous example of Amarra, the company uses AI to study historical data and seasonal trends to predict stock demand. This has helped the brand reduce overstocking by 40%.

Fraud Security

Data threats and approving invalid orders can eat into the revenue and reputation of an e-commerce brand. With AI, business owners can prevent this by analyzing transactions in real time, which allows them to identify suspicious patterns that may indicate fraud. A great example of AI used for fraud detection is MasterCard. The firm witnessed a boost of 300% in fraud detection rates, and it also reduced false declines by 22%.

Visual & Voice Search

Predictive Analytics for Sales and Trends

These two are very convenient features offered by e-commerce giants like Amazon. Users can either snap a picture or just provide a voice input in their native language to search for the product. At the backend, smart AI systems can analyze the input and display the relevant results. According to some industry stats, 36% of consumers have used visual search.

Ideally, automation is backed by AI, and with this combination, you can forecast product demand, optimize their pricing, and identify emerging trends. Thanks to predictive analytics, this can be done based on historical data, seasonality, and external factors like weather. There are several brands that have witnessed a forecast efficiency improvement of 20–30% with AI.

AI-Based Image Generation and Editing

With the use of generative AI, creating images has become a piece of cake. Yes, not all the AIs are accurate in this, but some models provide just the right visuals rapidly and cost-efficiently. Brands like Zalando are using Gen AI to produce imagery faster for their e-commerce business. So far, AI and automation have reduced the time (3–4 days from 6–8 weeks) to produce the visuals and their cost (by 90%).

AI-backed Content Generation

Besides images, Gen AI tools can also help in generating other content types, such as

Product descriptions for the site and Google feed

Marketing email generation

Social media post

Banner generation

Blog posts

The rapid content generation with AI can help brands save time and boost consistency across all marketing channels.

Use Cases of AI and Automation in E-Commerce

With the use of AI and automation, several brands across the world have streamlined their inventory management, demand forecasting, packaging optimization, and other processes.

1. A jewelry brand enables product search via NLP. A well-known jewelry brand uses powerful natural language processing capabilities to help customers find the diamonds that they are looking for. The brand enables customers to search for the product by typing. Instead of using complex filters or sliders, you can just type what you want, and our intelligent system will do the rest.

For example, the customer may type, “2.5 carat round diamond under $5000 with excellent cut and D color.”

AI easily maps your words to find the exact match for the provided query almost instantly.

2. Sephora excels at personalization with AI. The makeup and skincare products brand has invested in an AI recommendation engine that merges the power of collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and deep learning techniques.

These techniques are used to study several aspects of user behavior to provide personalized product recommendations to them. The AI engine studies the following factors.

Search queries

Browsing history

Click-through rates

Abandoned carts

In-store purchase history

Quiz results

3. IKEA uses AI and automation for demand forecasting and reducing logistics costs. With the power of AI and robotics, IKEA implements an automated warehousing and distribution system. This technology-backed system ensures that operations are efficient and accurate; that directly reduces costs and delivery times.

According to a study, the use of automation can reduce logistics costs by 40%. Moreover, the brand also invests in AI-powered “demand sensing” technology that improved the overall forecast accuracy by 5% in a pilot in Portugal.

4. Marks and Spencer uses AI to be a style guru for the shoppers. Marks and Spencer, which is a multinational retail brand, uses AI to suggest outfit choices to its shoppers. As a part of efforts to boost its online sales, the brand uses shoppers’ body shape and style preferences to curate choices. The shoppers also have the choice to provide their data on their size, body shape, and style preferences to get a personalized experience.

Conclusion

Today, the use of AI and automation has become a necessity, not just for e-commerce businesses but for all of them. As we have seen, AI and automation can…..

Shoppers abandon more than half of the shopping carts instances just before final checkout. This has reduced conversion rates to a large extent. If you want to boost sales and increase revenue, you would need to reduce shopping cart abandonment. You can hire a company that offerseCommerce shopping cart solutions to help with it.

Knowing why shopping carts are abandoned, and the problems that customers face, could help you device a method that helps reduce shopping cart abandonment. Here are some of the reasons why shopping carts are abandoned that you could investigate before you hire an agency that provides eCommerce shopping cart solutions,

High product costs: People avoid buying when they find that the price of products no your website are high. They may know of alternate sources online that sell the same product at a lower price, so it is obvious they will not buy it from your store.

Long, complicated checkout process: People visit your website, like some products, and then add them to their cart. However, they leave your store empty handed. Why? Having to navigate a complicated and time-consuming check out process that asks for a lot of information could be the culprit. So, make sure you create a simple one-page checkout.

We live in an age where mobile users outnumber those who use a desktop. We live in the world of mobile devices and apps. Websites are no longer sufficient for any business. An app contributes to the success of any and every business; irrespective of whether the app is a web app or a mobile one. This post is for things less talked about; web apps for tablets like the iPad. A web app for an iPad is an amazing idea, and you can get it built from iOS developers working at an iPad web application development company.

Although you hire professionals, there are a few things that you must know about web application development for iPad’s, so that you can keep an eye on the iOS developers that you hire and check if they are going on right path.

Here are some of the best tips for iPad web application development

1. Know your customers, understand their problems and begin with a goal designed to solve those problems

In this tech savvy world, it is easy to get an online store built. All you have to do is hire a company that provides eCommerce application development services and discuss your requirements with them. However, building a mobile app for your store is not that simple.

When you invest time and money into eCommerce application development, you would expect that the app you get should be worth it. You would want that your app should be amazing enough to engage shoppers for longer periods, and possibly convert them into customers.

While the process of developing an eCommerce application is quite easy, there are certain points that one should keep in mind, to ensure that the final product is an engaging one.

Here are some of the most important tips and tricks to build an engaging eCommerce application

In this modern world, businesses have realized the importance of websites. Every business wants to beat their competition and top the charts. Hence, it is vital for every business to have a website of its own. A website not only lets the business showcase their products and services, but also helps them engage customers. A website is a promotional tool for every business, and can provide the business with a platform to make sales and generates revenue online.

However, building a professional website requires finesse, and every business may not always be able to build a website that reflects their brand, and promotes them effectively on their own. Instead, hiring a website design and development company makes this task very easy to accomplish.

Many companies offer web development services, and it is sometimes daunting to choose the best one. However, a business can use a few tricks to ensure that they choose the most appropriate website design and development company.

Mobile devices are the rage of the day. You look around you and see almost everyone using his or her mobile to access data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. The card-style interface is perfect in terms of usability, and offers an extremely personalized experience; one that allows for the optimal display of an aggregation of many individual pieces of content – on screens that come in all shapes and sizes. Card designs have gained prominence in website designing. These rectangles, containing images and text have proved so successful in web design and development, that they have become a default option in order to strike a balance between aesthetics and functionality.

In this article, we will highlight the pros and cons, and list some best practices to follow while using card-layouts in web design and development.