In the eCommerce landscape, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping the game. This blog series explores how AI’s intelligent algorithms are revolutionizing online businesses, from personalized product recommendations to efficient inventory management. Join us for insights on leveraging AI to enhance the digital shopping experience and overall success in eCommerce.
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Devashish Goyal, Founder & CEO, OhLocal
In the current era of digitization and globalization, when technology is undoubtedly causing disruption to almost every other industry sector, the online commerce segment is, of course, no exception. The pandemic-led dramatic shift in consumer behavior and market dynamics and thus the accelerated focus towards ‘online-first’ and ‘digital-first’ shopping experiences have added fuel to usher in a better future for the new-age commerce ecosystem, wherein multiple latest and emerging technologies are already playing, or are bound to play a pivotal role, in the times to come.
Probably one of the biggest technological frontiers that have been contributing majorly in the recent past vis-à-vis positively reshaping e-commerce and online shopping is Artificial Intelligence AI. In particular, AI has been proven to be a boon in creating best-in-class, tailored, and customized shopping experiences on a plethora of online shopping, e-commerce, and m-commerce marketplaces for today’s consumers.
With the optimal use of AI and allied technologies, e-tailers or digital sellers are nowadays able to regularly and consistently learn, track and analyze their customers’ online behaviors, and parallelly able to use the predictive analytics powered by AI to near-accurately forecast their future purchase decisions – which in turn is leading to increased repeat buys and customer loyalty over a period of time. In addition, AI coupled with automation also empowers sellers to share personalized offers, product recommendations, and deals to prospective and existing customers or target audiences.
Not only does AI help online retailers in significantly improving user experiences and internal efficiencies in terms of demand forecasting and business intelligence, but also in making better pricing decisions for their products/offerings and in optimizing product placements as well. The cutting-edge analytics capabilities enabled through AI utilization can even allow small to medium-sized local merchants order the just right amount of stock that they need at a given time, so that their brick-and-mortar stores would never end up with too much or too little in terms of inventory. In a similar way, for e-commerce players or online-only brands, AI can be used to enable better warehousing and inventory management so as to optimize profits and manage product returns seamlessly. D2C (Direct-To-Consumer) brands can also gain significant advantages with AI-based imaging and semantics, and further Natural Language Processing (NLP) – a subset or emerging branch of AI — can go a long way to help them in writing attractive product descriptions and features to better place their products.
On the other hand, AI acts as a catalyst for today’s consumers to connect with the right products to suit their needs, in the right place, at the right time. There are many more futuristic and transformative uses of AI that can be applied for revolutionizing the entire online shopping ecosystem – an important component amongst them being the increasing foray of online sellers into the domain of AI-based ‘conversational commerce’ domain, mainly through the deployment of chatbots.
As a matter of fact, in today’s hyper-connectivity era when many brands are promising 24X7 service and deliveries, chatbots powered by AI can be a great way to interact, engage with customers and increase sales via personalized offers to them, irrespective of the time when they are visiting your online store! AI-enabled chatbots or apps can also be used to address consumer grievances or needs without any manual intervention. Another interesting use-case of AI can be for creating smart bidding platforms for online-commerce that aggregate local retailers and in parallel provide the cheapest pricing-based products of choice to consumers, who can thereby avail best of both worlds in terms of online as well as offline shopping.
In Conclusion 
Given that AI wonderfully enables computer programmes to actively understand and analyse human speech and human shopping behaviour, it can prove instrumental in the near future in assisting the modern shoppers to search and find products online in a manner similar to seeking help from a customer service representative in a physical store. It is crucial to realize that the capabilities of AI in the online shopping arena are ever-expanding, and are continuously getting better year on year with the optimizations and further advancements in areas like Computer Vision and Machine Learning.
At the global level, already well-known companies like Amazon and Netflix are reaping the benefits of being early-adopters of AI. India must not and will certainly not lag behind; and it’s high time that Indian companies or brands in the country’s ecommerce and online shopping space embrace this new reality and stay prepared for the up-and-coming tech revolution that will be ushered primarily via AI and other technologies.
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Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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