Artificial Intelligence is getting more and more mature with each passing day. Plenty of modern algorithms and problem-solving techniques are being innovated every day that adds to the power of AI. The year 2020 has also proved to be the most pivotal year in implementing the use of artificial intelligence in day-to-day life because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As per one report by SHRM, 43% of the small business owners found new ways to survive in the business during the Covid days. The restrictions imposed due to the pandemic forced businesses and customers to go online. This has changed the shopping habits of the customers and can be the beginning of the new eCommerce era.
AI is expected to power online businesses to gain new heights in the post-Covid period. A forecast made by Gartner stated that artificial intelligence will help to increase customer satisfaction by 25% by 2023 in most of the organizations that use it.
It can fuel online businesses in several ways. Here is how artificial intelligence can be useful to online businesses along with the best practices of using AI.
How AI Can Help Your eCommerce Business to Grow?
Artificial Intelligence has a lot of things to offer to online business owners, ranging from small vendors to well-renowned brands. The pandemic has forced online business owners to try out new endeavors with the ever-developing artificial intelligence (AI). It can help eCommerce business owners to automate and improve a variety of tasks with minimal effort. Some of the key benefits of implementing AI in eCommerce are:
- Improve customer experience
- Customer retention through a personalized shopping experience
- Personalize shopping experience
- Effective supply chain management
- Enhance security by analyzing possible threats
- Provide a stronger customer support
- Understanding the New Normal of eCommerce World
The online market is constantly changing along with the ever-changing shopping habits of the customers. Therefore, online businesses must be dynamic and versatile enough to meet the ever-changing audience.
In the lockdown period in a majority of the countries across the world, most of the businesses and customers went online. As per UNCTAD data, owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, online businesses witnessed new peaks in the year 2020. Online trades increased from 14% in 2019 to 17% in 2020 and are expected to flourish furthermore.
We have already passed the peak of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and everything is getting back to normal. However, online shopping or eCommerce businesses are expected to continue their momentum even after the pandemic. This has to be accepted as a new normal and eCommerce business owners must try to leverage artificial intelligence for their store.
Here are some of the significant points on how eCommerce platforms can be benefited from Artificial Intelligence in the post-pandemic period.
Improved Cash Flow
As per one report by NBER, the pandemic has hit small business owners more than anyone else. The main reason behind it is that the business owners were not ready for the upcoming pandemic along with its cash flow challenges.
Most of the businesses could not pay their debts, loans, and handle scheduled transactions and salaries of their employees during this tough period. This was because of the extreme effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the cash flow.
However, artificial intelligence can help businesses to improve the cash flow effectively in multiple ways. AI can predict the outcome from the previous entries and can help the business owners to anticipate actual collections based on various algorithms and various data-driven forecasts.
AI can also maintain the inventory effectively by studying the market trends, demand, stock, etc., and thus can help in making better financial decisions.
Smooth Checkout Process
Easy navigation, clear communication, trustworthy content, and clear call to action are some of the important pillars that make up a smooth checkout process, ensuring more conversions.
However, targeting the wrong audience type can go against marketing and can also heavily impact the conversion rate. Artificial intelligence can make use of chatbots and analytics to target the most potential audience for the online business.
Also, AI can interpret data much faster than any manual interpretation and thus allow dynamic and versatile audience targeting based on the inputs.
Moreover, it can suggest products to the customers based on their shopping cart or recent purchases, improving the overall checkout process. Integrate best payment gateways to your ecommerce webstore.
It can further make the checkout process flawless by suggesting the preferred methods for payment such as partial payments or buy now pay later options.
Online stores can implement AI to ensure a smooth check-out process, converting more potential leads into sales.
Enhanced Security
As per the reports, the number of cyberattacks has skyrocketed after the pandemic, i.e. 300%. The main reason behind this spike in the occurrence of attacks is the larger amount of audience getting visible to the existing security vulnerabilities.
Business owners must take this figure seriously to provide utmost security to their loyal customers and thus winning their trust. However, small business owners can not afford to hire professional cyber experts or cyber security companies.
This is exactly where artificial intelligence can do wonders. AI can constantly look for vulnerabilities and loopholes in the online store and can help to prevent a majority of cyberattacks. AI can detect potential malware such as viruses, trojans, rootkits through machine learning.
There are plenty of free and paid cyber security tools available on the internet which are based on artificial intelligence and can add a layer of security to the eCommerce site.
Spread the Word About Your Brand
Brand awareness is one of the crucial steps of branding. It is a long-term process that generates fruitful results. Businesses can create brand awareness by spreading their messages over social media and other platforms where their potential platforms are hanging out.
However, it may require consistency and regularity. However, for a business owner, it can be time-consuming to plan and create regular content for their brand, let it be a social media post, email newsletter, or blog post.
Here is where artificial intelligence can help online business owners with the content creation task and spread awareness about your brand.
There are plenty of automatic content creation tools available in the market, both free and paid, to choose from that allow content creation with minimal effort. Many of the tools also allow scheduling the post, so that the store owners can easily plan and schedule the content distribution in their free time.
Study Marketing Campaign Performance
Poor marketing campaigns often lead to higher CPC and lower conversion rates. Analyzing and optimizing the marketing campaign is one of the most important things that you must consider to get more conversions at lower CPC.
Analyzing a copious amount of customer data manually can be time-consuming and is often prone to manual errors. However, artificial intelligence can manage and analyze such data effectively in a lesser amount of time.
Online marketers can target the correct audience through AI-provided analytics tracking and data-driven insights. It can help the online marketers to get answers to some of their questions such as:
- Who is their target audience?
- What does the audience want?
- When and where to reach the audience?
Thus, implementing AI in marketing campaigns can provide faster data analytics and accurate insights with greater efficiency. It can help online business owners to achieve meaningful results with massive ROI.
Customer Support
Customer support is one of the most important things that online business owners must consider to win loyal customers and retain them. However, it may require a lot of manpower and thus can add up to the company’s expenses.
In 2021, chatbots and AI customer support have become most prevalent than ever before. The majority of online businesses are implementing artificial intelligence and chatbots to provide basic support to their customers.
Online business owners can provide 24x7 basic customer support on their websites through the never-sleeping chatbots, which are also cost-effective. It can also help to reduce manpower and can improve customer experience by providing immediate basic support.
According to Forbes, chatbots and artificial intelligence can recognize if the customers are angry, disappointed or frustrated, and can directly escalate them to human support. Apart from that, it can also gather data that can be further analyzed for product improvements.
Use Cases of AI in eCommerce
Artificial Intelligence can help eCommerce businesses to blossom in the internet world in a number of ways. Here are some of the best ways to implement AI in online stores to leverage online sales.
Chatbots: Online store owners can implement customized chatbots to their site to provide customers with basic support, gather customer data, and much more.
Product Recommendations: Personalization is important to engage the visitors to your online store by showing products based on various factors.
Moreover, it can also go one step further by sending the product recommendations to the customers by sending push notifications or emails and thus improving the conversion rate.
Visual Search Engines: Providing the customers with visual search capability or search with image capability is another great use of artificial intelligence. It can help the customer to find what they are exactly looking for on your online store and thus can improve customer navigation. Similarly, implementing voice search is also another great option to use AI in eCommerce businesses.
Product Grouping: Online store owners can easily group their products based on various factors and can provide customers with a personalized shopping experience.
Other Practices: Apart from the described use cases of AI in the eCommerce business, it can further be used for various other operations such as supply chain management, marketing & sales, product improvement, platform improvement, etc.
Having plenty of options to choose from, it is important for eCommerce businesses to choose the most preferred AI tools for their business as per their requirements and business category. Business owners must take their business category, potential customers, and tool costs into consideration while implementing any new AI tool in their online business.
Conclusion
The pandemic period has proven to be traumatic for most of the economies across the world. However, the eCommerce businesses that adapted to the new normal with AI have exceeded success even during the tough times.
Considering the situation, eCommerce businesses are expected to rise in the upcoming years. Artificial intelligence is going to be a ‘must-have’ success-driving factor for the eCommerce business due to its versatility and cost-effectiveness.
Top comments (0)