All eCommerce businesses continuously strive to deliver great customer experience and generate higher revenues. To achieve this, you need advanced solutions such as a personalized recommendation engine, analytics and reporting functionality, smart logistics capability, and more.

However, building each of these solutions in-house may take years of effort and resources. But the good news is you don't need to build these solutions from scratch. There are ample AI solutions in the market that you can readily implement to optimize your entire customer journey. 

And most experts vouch for the benefits of AI in eCommerce. For example, Salesforce data notes that 84% of eCommerce professionals say using AI gives companies a competitive advantage.

In this post, we will cover top AI applications in eCommerce and suggest tools that you can easily adopt.

Impact of AI on customer journey

Let's see how you can use AI to optimize all customer touchpoints: 

1. Brand awareness: Marketing your eCommerce store

The first step of the customer journey is raising awareness and making more and more consumers aware of your brand/products. To raise such awareness, you need engaging marketing campaigns across top channels: social media, email, and SMS. 

But it’s not easy to manage multiple channels together. 

An AI-powered omnichannel marketing solution like Plivo CX can easily boost your marketing efforts. For example, with the Copywriter AI feature, you can enter a few details about the campaign, and the platform will auto-generate the message for you. No need to spend hours crafting that perfect message. 

Another issue in managing marketing campaigns is finding the right time to message. What if you spend days drafting the perfect message only to find that the customer didn't even open it? All your efforts simply go to waste.

 AI can help you win this guessing game. Plivo AI suggests the right time to send a marketing message so that you have the best open rate. 

Apart from crafting the messages for campaigns, another task that takes the most time is designing graphics. You need an excellent design team. Also, you need to have the time in hand to coordinate with them to explain your vision so they can create the graphics. 

Sometimes, there is a lack of time and, sometimes, a lack of resources. AI can be your designer in that case. 

Midjourney is an excellent AI tool that you can use to create images for your marketing campaigns. It creates hyper-realistic images based on the prompts you provide. With the right set of prompts, its image outputs are so realistic that, controversially, it is one of the first AI tools to win an art competition! 

You can create graphics quickly and launch your campaigns faster by using such generative AI tools. 

2. Product search: Improving product catalog search

Once customers open an eCommerce store online, they are searching for that “one” product. Sometimes, it takes just a few scrolls, or sometimes, the scroll lasts hours. 

Optimizing this experience will ensure your customers find what they need as soon as possible and do not stop scrolling mid-way. 

Vue.ai, an AI orchestration platform, understands the shopper intent and autocomplete searches. Sometimes, users search incorrectly with typos or incomplete information. 

Of course, there is no one perfect way to search for a product. So, as a business, you need to decode their intent. Vue can interpret typos/shopper intent and show relevant results.  

Another way to speed up product search is by supporting visual search. You can take advantage of an AI platform like Visenze. Users can upload images of the product, and the Visenze search engine will instantly show relevant results based on the uploaded image. 

Make product search simple for your customers using AI.

3. Product selection: Recommending the right products 

Your best product may not be the best for customers. So, it's not just about optimizing the search. It's about optimizing the search for the user so you can suggest products that are right for them. This way, you can make personalized recommendations based on user behavior and purchase history. 

Apart from product search, Vue.ai also helps eCommerce companies build a personalized search engine that constantly learns from customer behavior. It builds a profile for every user based on their actions on the site and suggests products accordingly. 

Salesforce points out that 73% of customers expect better-personalized experiences from businesses than what they are currently getting. AI can help you fulfill their expectations. 

4. Product purchase: Set dynamic pricing

Imagine selling a product and then realizing you could have sold it at a better price. Or find out you are losing all your customers to a competitor who is selling the same product for a cheaper price.

Dynamic pricing is a powerful strategy that allows you to adjust prices based on supply, demand, and market trends. 

During peak seasons, you can raise prices to maximize profits. During slow periods, you can lower them to boost sales. You can also monitor the market to establish competitive pricing and stay relevant. 

Sounds interesting? But wondering how you can implement this strategy? 

Doing this manually by going through the product catalog is neither easy nor efficient. You can use Dynamicpricing.ai to optimize pricing. It monitors product demand/supply,  competitor products, and historical trends to define pricing. 

With dynamic pricing, you will ensure your business has continuous cash flow. It also keeps your customers happy as they pay a fair price for the product based on industry trends. 

5. Product delivery: Use smart logistics  

Now, with growing quick commerce options, consumers want products as fast as possible. A delay in product delivery can cost you a customer. 

Using AI can help you in the timely processing of orders. An AI-driven smart logistics platform helps streamline operations, automate manual tasks, and regulate the overall workflow. 

Blue Yonder is one such platform that helps you deliver an impeccable last-mile experience. Using Blue Yonder, you can:

• Automate manual partner processes
• Do real-time tracking of orders
• Optimize delivery routes
• Provide fast and cost-effective delivery 

6. Customer service:  Use chatbots and automation 

It's not just getting that first order. How you deal with customers when they want to initiate a return or have any queries will tell whether they will order from you again. 

Providing great customer service is a must in this competitive market. But it's not operationally heavy and expensive to provide excellent customer service. 

You can make it effective and quick by using AI-powered chatbots and automation. They can be trained on specific data sets to accurately answer repetitive queries of customers 24*7. Also, to avoid escalation, the call can be transferred to customer service agents.

Plivo CX’s AI-powered platform also serves as an effective customer service tool that lets you bring all your customer conversations (chatbots, live chat, voice, SMS, WhatsApp) into one platform. 

This helps your customers resolve their queries right from the platform they use the most, while agents also gain a complete context of customer issues without switching channels. 

Impact of AI beyond customer journey

AI can also optimize the following two processes running in the background:

1. Inventory management

Manual inventory management is prone to errors. AI helps you analyze product demand, sales history, customer trends, and market trends and maintain the right inventory to fulfill customer orders. It also provides real-time insights into inventory levels. 

Logility is an AI-first supply chain planning solution, using which you can:

• Predict promotional demand
• Get real-time visibility into supply chain activities
• Find the best source of supply
• Optimize inventory strategies.

2. Fraud detection

Global eCommerce companies lost $48 billion to online payment fraud activities in 2023. The most common payment fraud is friendly fraud, where a customer completes a purchase with their debit or credit card and then raises a dispute with their bank to get a refund. 

In 2021, nearly 40% of online merchants worldwide reportedly encountered this type of attack.

It's time-consuming and tedious for employees to manually review all transactions and raise red flags. You also need to build a big team to do this. The good news is AI can do this faster for you. 

Signifyd, an eCommerce fraud protection platform, provides guaranteed protection against fraud chargebacks. It analyzes data to identify patterns and trends associated with fraudulent transactions, interpret consumer behavior, and approve more “good” orders. The tool also detects suspicious activity to reduce fraudulent chargebacks. 

Use Plivo CX for effective marketing and customer Service

Plivo CX is an all-in-one, omnichannel marketing and customer service solution that helps you segment, reach, and engage more customers while taking care of the full customer experience lifecycle. 

With AI features, you can create and optimize SMS, email, and WhatsApp campaigns, send the right messages at the right time based on your customers’ actions and monitor the impact of the campaigns.

Plivo CX also ensures your support teams deliver exceptional service and automate handling repetitive queries by AI chatbots. 

Want to boost your customer experience using AI? Sign up for a free trial.