AI Solutions for eCommerce: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your Business

The technological race in eCommerce has found an emerging player - Artificial Intelligence (AI). And so, businesses don’t want to be left behind in this race.

According to Statista, 87% of businesses say they're implementing AI business strategies due to competitive pressures. And that explains why everyone’s exploring and trying AI solutions for eCommerce.

But before you dive in, as a savvy business owner, it's crucial to understand the ins and outs of AI.

In this blog post, we’ll share our thoughts and observations on the current landscape of AI in eCommerce, how it can be helpful to your business, the challenges, and where we’re heading in the future with AI-powered eCommerce solutions.

Overall Landscape of AI in eCommerce

When we say “AI”, the first thing you might think of could be ChatGPT.

Well, yes, it has definitely taken the AI world by storm. But there’s a LOT more than ChatGPT in the world of AI.

From customer service to order fulfillment, AI is already transforming the way eCommerce businesses operate. 

What’s more exciting is that it’s constantly evolving at a rapid pace.

The Current Business Challenges of eCommerce (That AI Can Help You Overcome)

• Inventory Management

Managing the stock and keeping up with customer demand is one of the most challenging tasks. While you can forecast the demand, you never know when things may change.

According to McKinsey & Company, when using AI-powered forecasting in supply chain management, errors can be reduced anywhere between 20-50%.

• Pricing Optimization

Highly competitive markets make it hard to set a lucrative pricing strategy. You don’t want to reduce your profit margins, and at the same time, you don’t want to lose your customers by overcharging.

• Personalization

Nearly 74% of the companies have some sort of personalization program on their websites. Why? Because customers love personalization. When you offer personalized or customizable products, customers tend to keep coming back for that personalized experience.

“More and more brands are harnessing the power of AI to implement tailored product recommendations, and are seeing results. It’s estimated that 35% of Amazon’s sales come from its recommended products feature.”, says Meghann York, Product Marketer of Salesforce.

• Fraud Prevention

One of the biggest risk elements involved in eCommerce businesses is dealing with fraud. According to Juniper Research, cumulative losses due to online payment fraud may exceed $343 billion in the coming 5 years (2023-2027).

The role of AI in fraud prevention is going to be crucial. In fact, some fraud prevention tools are already in the market and you may expect more AI solutions in this segment in the near future,

• Customer Experience

There have been many new eCommerce businesses in the past few years. And thus, customers have plenty of great options to choose from. If you want to stay in the market for a long time, customer experience is a critical aspect. You need to look for all possibilities to enhance customer experience. 

Key AI Solutions for eCommerce to Tackle Challenges

1. AI-Powered Inventory Management

Demand forecasting is one of the most time-consuming activities and heavily depends on a lot of guesswork. AI can help resolve the demand forecasting challenge with its ability to process a large number of data sets. So, no more guesswork and more accurate forecasting.

Here’s one of the AI-based inventory solutions you may consider:

Remi AI - Demand & Inventory Solutions

Remi AI helps eCommerce and retail businesses with inventory optimization that covers the solutions for the entire supply chain. These solutions include:

• Demand Forecasting AI
• Demand Sensing AI
• Inventory Planning
• Inventory Optimization AI
• Price OPtimization AI

Key Features:

This solution helps you forecast customer demand with the help of Demand Sensing and AI Optimization technologies. It'll enable you to better estimate inventory requirements so that you can properly plan for restocking and distribution.

Remi AI uses ‘Machine Learning Optimization’ to streamline your replenishment parameters, and thus, you can automatically manage your inventory availability and holdings.

It allows you to identify any potential demand and supply imbalances and suggests actions to bring your inventory back in proper balance.

Pricing:

Remi’s website does not have any pricing information, meaning you need to contact its sales team for pricing based on your unique business needs.

2. AI Dynamic Pricing

AI-powered pricing solution can help you prepare better pricing strategies. Here’s one of the popular AI solutions to help you do the same:

Prisync - Competitor Price Tracking & Monitoring Software

Prisync is a widely-used AI solution for pricing optimization that helps you set better pricing through tracking and monitoring the competitors’ pricing.

Key Features:

Prisync allows you to track the pricing and stock availability information of all your competitors and view it inside a single dashboard.

In eCommerce business, you need to stay on top of market conditions. This feature lets you adapt to the changing market conditions and better manage your pricing strategy accordingly.

Prisync takes care of all the technical aspects involved in your pricing optimization—like servers, crawlers, and websites—and helps you focus on your other important business activities.

Pricing:

3. AI-Powered Recommendation Engines

In this section, we’re going to take a look at two different AI solutions.

Coveo - Recommendation Engine

Coveo's intelligent recommender helps eCommerce businesses display the content, products, or services that their customers are looking for or are likely to buy.

Key Features:

It's important to show recommendations to customers based on their journey. This platform lets you display relevant recommendations based on the context of the buyer's journey.

Coveo lets you easily set up recommendation models based on your business needs. For example, you can set up interest-based or ‘frequently bought together’ product recommendations, popular products or services, etc.

Pricing:

Coveo’s website doesn’t have specific pricing information. You need to contact its team for a demo or pricing.

Clerk.io - Personalized Recommendations

Clerk.io is one of the most popular AI-powered product recommendation solutions. It helps eCommerce merchants to increase revenue by displaying products that customers are looking to purchase.

Key Features:

With this solution, you'll get prebuilt smart logics that help you display different types of product recommendations such as hot products, best products for cross-selling, and other logics based on the order and historical data.

The demand for any product may vary significantly based on ongoing trends or seasons. This tool quickly adapts to such changes and automatically revises the product recommendations accordingly.

It allows you to display highly relevant product recommendations on the homepage, category, product, cart, content, and checkout pages.

Pro tip: When choosing the right AI tool from multiple options, you can check and compare the ratings and reviews on third-party review platforms. For example, the below example shows the ratings of Clerk.io on G2 and it also has the option to check out other alternative solutions.

Rating of Clerk.io on G2

G2 reviews platform displaying comparisons of Clerk.io

Pricing:

Clerk.io doesn’t have specific pricing information on its website. You can contact its team for a demo and pricing.

4. AI-Based Fraud Detection

Fraud detection is one of the most critical areas in eCommerce that requires the help of AI. Let’s see how SEON is helping eCommerce businesses with its AI solution:

SEON - Fraud Detection & Prevention

SEON enables you to implement a robust fraud detection and prevention strategy with the help of alternative data.

Key Features:

• Social media lookup: This feature helps you with a comprehensive social media lookup from more than 50 social media platforms.
• Address profiling: It checks if the given address is valid, analyzes the domain’s whois info, and calculates the risk score based on multiple factors.

This AI solution allows you to add its lightweight Software Development Kit (SDK) to Android, iOS, and web apps so that you can take advantage of browser and device identification features.

SEON's whitebox algorithm learns about fraud patterns in your business and retrains itself several times a day to ensure it improves the data accuracy.

SEON has created its admin panel keeping UX in mind. It's not only intuitive but also flexible when it comes to customization. It also allows your team to collaborate and reduce fraud rates by using its powerful features.

Pricing:

The below pricing plans of SEON are applicable for Shopify store owners.

5. AI Chatbot

As your eCommerce business grows, you need to level up your customer service as well. That’s where an AI chatbot comes into the picture.

Tidio - Lyro AI Chatbot

Tidio's Lyro AI chatbot helps small and medium-scale businesses manage customer support at scale. It helps handle common questions from customers and allows the support team to pay the required attention to complex issues or complaints.

Key Features:

One of the most frustrating things for customers is to keep getting the same reply from the AI chatbot when it doesn't have the required information. In such scenarios, Lyro AI redirects customers to the support team for further assistance.

It shows you the statistics related to the answer rate and the number of problems it solved for customers. You can use these data points to see the effectiveness of the tool.

You can monitor the chatbot's conversations on a real-time basis, and if you find the need to jump into the conversation, you can do so to take control of the chat.

Pricing:

Alt-text:

6. AI Page Builders

One of the things about eCommerce business websites is that you need to keep redesigning your store based on different seasons, events, or promotional offers. An AI-powered page builder solution can make your job easier and faster than ever.

GemPages - AI-Powered Image-to-Layout Feature

GemPages is one of the highly-rated page builder apps on the Shopify App Store and is constantly striving to enhance the capabilities of its solution for merchants. And that’s why GemPages has developed GemAI—a powerful artificial intelligence engine of its own.

Using GemAI, the app has recently launched its brand-new feature: an AI-powered image-to-layout feature. It allows you to create web designs based on the visual input.

So, let’s say you’ve found an inspiring web design somewhere on the internet and you want to create your own design. Simply input the image or URL of that web page and GemPages will create the customizable layout based on your reference.

Key Features:

Apart from to image-to-layout feature, there are many other features that can help you design your entire store easily.

GemPaegs has an intuitive visual editor that allows you to custom-design your store pages from scratch—without writing a single line of code.

GemPages has many different elements under design, eCommerce, and marketing categories. These elements help you take your design customization to the next level.

GemPages has an extensive library of templates that are designed by conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts for different niches and purposes. These templates make your job easier and faster without compromising on the elegance of your premium website design.

GemPages can be integrated with many of your favorite and popular Shopify apps. It helps you ensure that your store interacts smoothly with other apps and you can keep your tech stack well-organized.

Learn more: Image-to-Layout: How GemPages' first AI-powered feature helps you build faster

Pricing:

7. AI-Powered Email Marketing Solution

Email marketing is a powerful strategy to increase sales and revenue, and that’s why Seventh Sense came up with this innovative AI solution:

Seventh Sense - Email Delivery Optimization

Putting great effort into an email marketing campaign only to get noticed by a handful of subscribers can be frustrating. Seventh Sense can help you increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns through its unique features. 

Seventh Sense helps you automatically deliver emails to every subscriber at a time when they're most likely to engage with emails. This can increase your open rate and drive better conversions through email marketing campaigns.

Some customers may not prefer receiving email frequently. This tool creates automatic segmentation based on the engagement patterns of your subscribers and lets you email them at as per their preferred frequency.

This feature helps you increase the deliverability of your emails and allows you to pause or make changes to your email marketing campaigns. It can be helpful to balance the load on your customer service and sales team.

Pricing (For HubSpot):

Pricing (For Marketo):

How to Implement eCommerce AI Solutions

Assessing Your Business Needs

First off, you need to identify your pain points and areas for improvement where the implementation of AI can help your business. Start with defining clear objectives for AI integrations.

For example, let’s say you’re running a clothing brand and your current biggest challenge is to provide a personalized experience to your customers. In that case, you should consider the right AI solution for personalized product recommendations OR offer AI-based recommendations for ongoing trends.

Selecting the Right AI Solutions

Since there’s huge potential in the field of AI technology, plenty of established companies as well as new AI startups are looking to leverage the AI revolution. Thus, there are a ton of AI solutions in the market. 

You need to evaluate various AI platforms available in the market before you finalize the solutions for your business. Choose the most suitable AI solutions for your business through research and comparison of different solutions. You can check out user reviews on third-party review platforms like Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, and so on.

Data Collection and Preparation

AI algorithms work best for your business when you train them properly for your business scenarios. Also, you need to gather relevant data to train AI algorithms.

You can collect this data from various sources including your website, customer feedback tools, surveys, social media platforms, and existing historical data. However, make sure the data you’re collecting is high-quality and accurate.

Integrating AI with Existing Systems

It’s crucial to have seamless AI-eCommerce platform integration. Changing from one tool to another tool might take a lot of time, effort, and learning. So make sure to check the solution for compatibility and scalability for future growth.

For example, if your eCommerce store is built with Shopify, it’s better to install an AI solution from the official Shopify App Store—as long as it’s available. It’ll help you seamlessly integrate the solution with your Shopify store and it’ll also easily integrate with other AI solutions within the Shopify ecosystem.

Risk Factors and Challenges in Implementing AI in eCommerce

While the entire world seems to be focused on the benefits of using AI, as a business owner, you must also consider the risk factors and challenges involved in some AI applications. 

Here are some of the key areas where you should be careful:

Maintaining Privacy Compliance

Since data collection is required to train the AI algorithms, you need to ensure privacy compliance and protect any sensitive customer data. Make sure to have robust privacy policies as a preventive measure to safeguard your business. Also, you can implement security measures in your business to protect confidential data.

Risk of Breaching Intellectual Property Laws

Some of the generative AI tools have been trained on large data and pose the risk of copyright lawsuits. In one of the recent incidents, Getty Images reportedly sued Stability AI Inc. for using more than 12 million images without the company’s permission or compensation.

“Generative A.I. is an incredible technology, but for any new innovation we need to build the safeguards for it to be adopted responsibly, not months or years after the release, but immediately when it is released.”, says Edward Tian, Founder of GPTZero.

Possibilities of Inaccurate Data or Information

AI tools are improving technology-wise at a rapid pace; however, we still can’t be absolutely sure about the accuracy of data and information provided by AI tools. It’s advisable to fact-check the data before publishing it to the public.

Risk to Company’s Confidential Data

You need to make sure that the AI solutions you’re implementing in your business are trustworthy and reliable. Apparently, Samsung recently banned its employees from using AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Google Bard after an incident where the company’s source code got leaked.

By proactively implementing security and preventive measures, you can protect your business from any such potential risks or monetary losses.

Why AI is the future of eCommerce?

The overall AI market size worldwide was worth USD 136.55 billion in 2022 and is estimated to grow at a staggering compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030.

Now let’s talk about eCommerce-specific statistics. A recent report by InsightAce Analytic shows the market size of AI-enabled eCommerce solutions was worth USD 5.23 billion in 2022. And it's estimated to reach USD 16.79 billion by 2030.

What does this mean for eCommerce businesses? Well, you can expect further improvements in the existing AI solutions and new AI tools for other areas of eCommerce as well.

In a nutshell, AI will certainly have a huge role in shaping the future of eCommerce.

“AI is an engine that is poised to drive the future of retail to all-new destinations. The key to success is the ability to extract meaning from big data to solve problems and increase productivity.”

- Azadeh Yazdan, AI Partnerships & Business Development | Meta

FAQs about AI Solutions for eCommerce

How AI is Transforming eCommerce?

AI is transforming the eCommerce world in multiple areas by improving and automating inventory management, pricing strategies, personalization, fraud prevention, website designs, and customer experience.

What is The Future of AI in eCommerce?

AI in eCommerce can be anticipated to grow exponentially with the rapid developments in AI technologies. According to InsightAce Analytic, the market size of AI-enabled eCommerce solutions is estimated to reach USD 16.79 billion by 2030.

How to Implement AI in eCommerce?

To implement AI in eCommerce, first of all, you need to identify the key areas where your business requires AI capabilities. Once you identify those areas, perform research on the best AI solutions that are specifically designed for eCommerce businesses. And then, implement and evaluate the AI solutions.