Why Is There So Much Interest in Generative AI in eCommerce?
As per Shopify’s Global eCommerce Sales Growth Report, global eCommerce sales are expected to grow by 8.9% in 2023, reaching a whopping $5.8 trillion. But as this industry continues to evolve, so does the need for innovation to stay competitive and meet customers’ changing demands. The advent of generative AI solutions can accommodate just that.
The Soaring Interest in Generative AI in eCommerce
Generative AI has captured the attention of e-commerce businesses for several compelling reasons:
Product Content Creation
Product data is critical to eCommerce success, for it amplifies the visibility of the product, builds trust among customers, allows them to make informed decisions and more. However, having requisite product data across every product listing has always been a challenge. But generative AI solutions are changing this.
According to 73% of B2B and B2C marketing executives, their organizations are already employing generative AI tools to aid in the creation of text, photos, videos, and other types of content. In the eCommerce space, generative AI can assist in generating product descriptions that are both informative and persuasive. It can also create visually appealing product images and advertisements, helping businesses showcase their products effectively.
The Power of Personalization
The importance of hitting home when it comes to an eCommerce personalization strategy can’t be stressed enough. According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect businesses to provide personalized interactions, and 76% are disappointed when this does not occur.
In such a highly competitive market, providing personalized shopping experiences can be a differentiator that sets a brand apart. Favorably, generative AI solutions can analyze vast amounts of customer data, including browsing history, purchase behavior, and preferences, to create tailored product recommendations. In fact, generative AI can help create tailored rewards and create more personalized loyalty program experiences.
This level of personalization can significantly enhance customer experience management, increase conversion rates, and foster customer loyalty.
Customer Service
The ability of generative AI to make sense of substantial volumes of data makes it viable for granularly analyzing customer interactions, preferences, transactions, and more across platforms. This way, it can forge meaningful conversations whenever customers reach out on the support channels.
On the backend, generative AI can also better equip customer support agents to better respond to sophisticated cases by summarizing the complaints, summarizing customer journeys and case histories, suggesting improvements, and more.
It’s noteworthy that although empathy-driven and relatively complex cases were previously routed to human agents, they can now also be accommodated by AI. Generative AI solutions can bring human-like bots to the mix, predict customer needs, and proactively solve their problems. This, in particular, is immensely valuable for eCommerce sites that struggle with allocating substantial human resource bandwidth to their support channels.
Dynamic Pricing
There are a lot of moving parts to consider when it comes to setting up the right price for the products. It’s imperative to strike a balance between customer affordability, competitor prices, and the price point that will generate optimal revenues.
Generative AI solutions can assist in dynamic pricing by analyzing internal and external data to create customized price points for every single product.
Prevention of Fraudulent & Phishing Activities
Every year, eCommerce companies are predicted to lose $48 billion to fraud. It’s critical that eCommerce businesses have set security frameworks powered by AI in place to curb potential threats. After all, AI can help analyze transaction patterns, identify anomalies, and alert businesses to potential threats.
Generative AI solutions can go a step ahead by more profoundly identifying links within anomalies and establishing a channel with customers to keep them aware of frauds and scams.
Some Challenges eCommerce Businesses Need To Be Aware Of Data Requirements
Generative AI models are trained on large datasets of text, code, or images – and this data needs to be high-quality and relevant to the model’s intended use. eCommerce businesses may need to invest in collecting and cleaning data before they can train a generative AI model for their specific use case if they aren’t going for an off-the-shelf implementation.
Model Bias
Generative AI models can be biased, reflecting the biases present in the data they are trained on. This can lead to the generation of unfair or discriminatory content. Therefore, eCommerce businesses need to take steps to mitigate bias in their generative AI models, such as using debiasing techniques and auditing their models for bias.
Conclusion
Generative AI has emerged as a potent force in the world of eCommerce, offering businesses a multitude of opportunities to improve customer experience management, streamline operations, and make data-driven decisions. While the benefits are compelling, eCommerce companies must keep aware of any ethical concerns that may transpire.
That said, implementing generative AI solutions should be approached with a more holistic focus. In the long run, generative AI, when deployed as an enterprise-wide solution, has the potential to drive innovation and agility and create new revenue opportunities for your eCommerce businesses.
At Ignitiv, we empower eCommerce businesses to create superior digital experiences on the back of advanced technologies. Our domain expertise can help you in channeling the full potential of generative AI to benefit your business. Contact us to get started today!
