What solutions does artificial intelligence offer in eCommerce?

There are three major areas that concentrate some of the fundamental challenges for e-commerce companies, which directly affect the needs of consumers, the purchasing process and the more or less efficient delivery model of online orders.

1. Custom user experience

Artificial intelligence in eCommerce helps salespeople to offer personalized buying and selling experiences thanks to the analysis of customer consumption patterns. The key is in the quality of the available data and in the capacity of each company to examine the data effectively.

It is about knowing more and better consumers, segmenting the target audience, establishing profiles that allow designing campaigns and exclusive messages for each client based on their habits and preferences: search history, virtual interactions, purchases, similarities with others customers…

Deep learning is a subcategory of machine learning, a technology that seeks to imitate the human brain, process large-scale data sets and create patterns for decision making. It recognizes norms of behavior, attitudes, tastes, intentions, preferences and allows to offer personalized and more precise recommendations.

The eCommerce delegate algorithms, which learn from practice and intuit from the experience which will be the outcome of the purchase process. Companies react before and automatically. They optimize the customer’s online travel, they make it more attractive, more comfortable, adjusted to their real needs.

Personalized recommendations: the case of Retail Rocket

One of the examples of the application of this type of technologies to eCommerce is that of Retail Rocket, which has a tool that accesses the technology of big data and predictive analysis of the highest level, and implements it in online stores in time. real. In addition, it offers eCommerce solutions to personalize the web and the email marketing channel.

Retail Rocket provides more than 20 self-learning mechanisms to personalize the user’s shopping experience. Using advanced technology, it can detect the needs and interests of users in the online store by analyzing their behavior in real time. Thanks to this type of solutions Decathlon managed to increase the conversion by 5.2%, the value of average orders by 5.2% and revenues by 10.7% after adding recommendations of personalized products on its Dutch website .

2. Customer service

Again come into play technologies that mimic the functioning of the human brain, computerized systems capable of solving problems without the need for a person to intervene. In this case, artificial intelligence in eCommerce offers natural language processing systems that are already applied in areas of customer service and sales assistance, for example, through social networks.

Chatbots are able to simulate, increasingly, fluid, precise and natural conversations through the Internet with real users. They learn automatically from their interactions with clients and perfect their skills.

They represent an economical and efficient alternative, that allows to implement virtual assistants for the management of orders, resolution of doubts, orientation during the purchase process, collection of products, elaboration of market reports.

The case of Ingenico

One of the examples of this application of chatbots to eCommerce is that of Ingenico ePayments, which announced in September 2017 the launch (in association with the Californian startup Joinedapp) of chatbots enabled for online payments. The initiative will allow merchants and customers to enter the so-called social or conversational trade, which is emerging as the future of eCommerce (Conversational Commerce). These chatbots would be linked to the main existing messaging applications, such as Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, Kik, Skype and WeChat.

By integrating the bots directly into the payment process, merchants offer users uninterrupted shopping experiences. Thus, this new solution eliminates the need to leave the messaging application to complete a purchase, and thus increases the conversion and revenue. For example, if we have an account in Facebook Messenger, Ingenico’s conversational commerce solution will allow us to complete a purchase easily, quickly, and without leaving the application.

3. Logistics

The quality and speed of the delivery of an online order are key to electronic commerce. Artificial intelligence provides increasingly powerful algorithms and applications to detect consumption patterns, carry out a pre-active analysis and design strategies for the sale and replacement of merchandise adapted not only to consumer demand but also to the interests of eCommerce.

In this field, companies invest in robotic process automation and machine learning technology. On the one hand they acquire platforms with learning capacity to classify data and anticipate the decisions of the clients, and on the other, they automate human tasks to make the most of the talent of the employees in more strategic and creative areas.

They give to the machines the control of merchandises and the management of the processes of delivery of the online purchases. In practice, they save time, costs and speed up the production process. Two experiences of the Amazon and Alibaba giants are good examples:

Amazon: advance shipping

A system patented by the company of Jeff Bezos (“Method and System for Anticipatory Package Shipping”) to anticipate online purchases made by its customers. It is based on the analysis of big data and the creation of a predictive model of consumer behavior based on its purchasing history and consumption habits. You will start using this method with mass-use products.

You can anticipate your demand in a certain geographical area and send shipments of each product to the nearest stores even before the customer makes the purchase. The delivery time will be reduced to a few hours.

Alibaba: intelligent logistics

The Chinese company has managed to map the most efficient delivery routes from the geographic data of its customers, which reduces the distance traveled by 30% and the use of vehicles by 10%. Applies this method in Hema supermarkets, which also boast a robotic restaurant.

In addition, Cainiao Network, the logistics company of Alibaba, announced last year that over the next decade it will reinforce its artificial intelligence technology with a million smart vans that will help it meet the growing demand for package delivery.