9 Clever Ways Your Ecommerce Store Can Use AI

If you’re like most eCommerce store owners, you’re always looking for ways to improve your business. With all the chatter online about tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Midjourney, and DALL-E, a lot of people are starting to think about how to use artificial intelligence (AI) in business.

Long story short, if you’re not already using AI, you should be! You can do more with it than ever before, and it can automate and streamline many uninteresting, repetitive tasks that seemed un-automatable even two years ago.

So with that in mind, here are 9 clever ways your eCommerce store can use AI to get ahead of the competition.

1. Product Description Generation

One of the most reliable ways to improve your eCommerce store’s performance is to write long product descriptions. Long product descriptions make it easy for customers to know what they’re buying, reducing the return rate and the costs that come along with it. The additional text is also great for SEO.

AI is very good at generating large amounts of text quickly. In particular, product description generation is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, enabling them to quickly and cost-effectively create descriptive product descriptions for their items.

With the right direction, AI can generate long descriptions that can be tailored to the target audience and account for trends, as well as other factors like brand image and pricing. With a few simple settings the right words can be put together to bring products to life in a captivating way – boosting visibility and sales potential.

However, be careful – even though AI is very good at generating text, it has no ability to fact check. Always be sure to read the descriptions your AI writes and modify them to ensure that they are accurate and relevant to your audience.

Recommended Tools: ChatGPT

2. Chatbots

Chatbots are a great way to help businesses streamline customer service processes and give customers the answers they need quickly. Through advanced algorithms and natural language processing, chatbots can provide fast, accurate solutions that you need in order to get back to doing what you love.

And if you don’t believe chatbots are up to the task, let me tell you – an AI wrote that last paragraph!

There are a bunch of benefits to using chatbots in eCommerce, including:

  1. Faster response time on inquiries
  2. Reducing costs on customer service
  3. Better customer relationships
  4. Easily collecting data
  5. Reducing shopping cart abandonment

Chatbots are naturally good at behaving in a friendly and professional way. Plus, the technology is improving every day at a very rapid pace. If you implement chatbots now, odds are, performance will start strong and only continue to improve by the end of the year.

Recommended Tools: Full list for Shopify, WordPress

3. Price Optimization

Optimizing the prices of your products or services is a critical component of successful business operations. By understanding current market conditions, analyzing consumer behavior, and leveraging technology to predict customer needs, you can develop pricing strategies that will yield the most favorable outcomes.

Put more simply, with the right price optimization tools at your disposal, you can maximize your revenue by pricing your products high enough to make sure you’re being paid well, but low enough to avoid scaring off too many customers.

On a small scale, price optimization needs to be done by individuals working in the business by trial and error. However, once you generate enough data, AI can start to process it in bulk and provide automatic recommendations that can account for factors that individual pricing specialists cannot see.

Pricing optimization tools are expensive, but may be worth it if your store has a high order volume.

Recommended Tools: PriceIntelligence AI

4. Inventory Optimization

Inventory optimization is an important part of running a successful business, allowing them to reduce costs while ensuring they have enough stock available to meet customer demand. Businesses that wish to optimize their inventory, must take on a number of tasks, including:

  1. Developing and monitoring inventory metrics
  2. Determining appropriate safety stock levels
  3. Planning for demand
  4. Ensuring there is enough available storage space
  5. Optimizing the location of goods in the warehouse

For companies that specialize in order fulfillment, such as Fulfillrite, there are warehouse management systems that help ensure there is enough storage space and that items are stored in sensible locations. However, for the individual eCommerce owner – whether they work with a third party fulfillment company or not – the biggest obstacles are going to be: planning for demand and knowing when to submit purchase orders.

With the right AI tools, companies can more accurately predict sales and decide when replenishment inventory needs to be purchased. This can help reduce the risk of both stockouts and ordering too much inventory, both of which can be costly mistakes.

Recommended Tools: Smart Purchase Orders 

5. Fraud Detection

With the increase in online shopping and digital transactions, fraud detection has become an even more important part of protecting your business. Securing customer data is essential and the sooner any potential fraudulent activity is detected, the quicker you can take steps to prevent further damage.

Sadly, global payments fraud has tripled since 2011, costing businesses a collective $32.39 billion in 2020. Ecommerce retailers are said to deal with an average of 206,000 web attacks per month. Scarier still, 27% of attacks against smaller retailers have been successful.

The data doesn’t lie – preventing payment fraud is critical for eCommerce business owners. Thankfully, there are now systems available that can help identify suspicious activities throughout your network so that you can be assured your customers’ data is safe. 

Recommended Tools: SEON Fraud Prevention, WooCommerce Anti-Fraud

6. Customer Feedback Analysis

When it comes to creating a successful business, getting feedback from customers is key. Their experiences help us identify areas of improvement, as well as learn what strategies worked well.

Customer feedback analysis is the process of looking through customer data and identifying useful insights. Through careful examination, we can determine how our products are being used, what customers like and don’t like, and much more.

Of course, if you have a lot of customers, it’s very difficult to read every single bit of feedback. It may be helpful to get a summary of feedback instead. With new chat-based AI tools such as ChatGPT, it’s now possible to copy and paste large amounts of text and ask for a summary. This is an excellent time-saving shortcut for customer feedback analysis.

Recommended Tools: ChatGPT

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Increasing your online store’s visibility in search engines is critical to its success. SEO is how you increase your store’s visibility in search engines. This is a great way to bring in organic leads.

Many eCommerce store owners find SEO confusing. That’s why AI-based SEO tools such as Yoast and Plug In SEO exist. These tools can provide custom suggestions that can help you naturally improve your store’s SEO in practical, clear-cut ways without hiring an SEO expert.

Recommended Tools: Plug In SEO, Yoast

8. Copywriting Assistance

Writing copy for a website, advertisement, or press release can be overwhelming and time-consuming. But it doesn’t always make sense to hire a professional copywriter, because copywriting is a highly refined skill and service providers charge a lot for it.

Whether you’re writing product descriptions, email copy, blog posts, press releases, advertisements, or social media posts, generative AI tools can help. In particular, ChatGPT and Jasper AI have shown enormous promise. You can provide instructions such as “write 20-25 words of email copy for a Valentine’s Day promotion for X product, 20 alternatives” and receive a numbered list of options.

Sometimes you can take the copy exactly as it is from chat tools and use it in your business. Other times, you can change a few words to make it sound better, and then run with it. Either way, it cuts down on the time-consuming and exhausting process of writing copy from scratch.

Recommended Tools: ChatGPT, Jasper AI

9. Predictive Sales & Demand Forecasting

Accurately predicting consumer demand and future sales can be a complicated task. However, though the use of sophisticated demand and sales forecasting tools, businesses can more easily plan and make decisions based on real data and trends.

Without AI assistance, demand planning requires analyzing a lot of different inputs, including but not limited to:

  1. Past sales
  2. Cost per conversion and budget of PPC ads
  3. Publicly available market data
  4. Surveys and focus groups
  5. Market studies
  6. Regression analyses
  7. The professional opinions of sales staff
  8. The professional opinions of outside experts

AI is able to weigh many of these factors and provide sensible demand and sales estimates based on them. When combined with the results of focus groups and professional opinions – which require human input, it can become much easier to accurately estimate future sales.

Once you can accurately estimate demand and sales, a lot of things start to click into place. Profitability improves, it’s easier to map out your sales and promotion strategy, and financial forecasting becomes more accurate.

Recommended Tools: Smart Purchase Orders 

Final Thoughts On AI In Ecommerce

As you can see, there are many ways that artificial intelligence can help your business make more money. It’s a good time to start researching the available AI tools to make sure you are taking advantage of the many benefits they can provide.

When combined with human intuition and oversight, AI can dramatically reduce the amount of time required to handle common eCommerce responsibilities, leaving you with more time to grow your business!

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