How to Improve Every Step of the E-commerce Journey with Generative AI

Have you ever spent hours looking for the perfect product, only to give up after scrolling through dozens of pages without finding what you’re looking for? If you’re responsible for an e-commerce site, you know this isn’t ideal for your site visitors. In fact, a staggering 97% of online shoppers leave your e-commerce website without making a purchase. With only 3% of visitors converting into customers, your sales funnel is leaking. But why is this happening, and how can you fix it? Imagine optimizing every step of your e-commerce customer journey with generative AI. This article walks you through what this revamped experience looks like, and how you can apply it to your online business. 

More of a visual learner? See how you can improve every step of the e-commerce buyer journey with generative AI in under 4 minutes in the video below!  

Spotlighting the E-commerce Sales Funnel

The process that turns online shoppers into repeat customers is a journey closely monitored by e-commerce professionals and those constantly seeking to optimize it to ensure commercial success. This journey can be broken down into three main stages: engagement, discovery, and conversion.

As we mentioned earlier, the e-commerce sales funnel is far from perfect. In fact, it has leaks. To help patch them, it’s time to rethink these three key stages of the customer journey and view them through the lens of generative AI's capabilities.

Step 1: Engagement

Let’s start from the first moment a shopper lands on your e-commerce website. As consumers browse, they’re often left to figure out pretty much everything on their own—which can be intimidating and frustrating. To improve the shopping experience, you need to show them the value of having a conversation with your brand.

You can achieve this by quitting old-school e-commerce chat notifications and adding personalized, easy-to-use question prompts that automatically adapt to each shopper's preferences based on context clues. This will scale personalization across your website from the very beginning of the customer journey. 

The AI that powers these question prompts simplifies the e-commerce search experience. It takes into account:

• The user’s progress in the purchasing journey
• The products they’ve viewed
• The specific rules of each brand (like highlighting common questions or showing an offer based on need)

This type of engagement, called Conversation Starters, triggers 10 times more conversations (which leads to 10 times more conversions!). See how it works below. 

Step 2: Discovery

Offering the right products at scale is essential for a successful customer journey. 8 out of 10 visitors abandon their search and leave your site because of choice overload. Having options is great, but scrolling endlessly can be overwhelming and tiresome for customers. 

One of the main issues is that there are typically only two ways to search on your site: the search bar and the sort-and-filter function. However, the results generated often don’t match the customers’ needs or require extensive clicking, leaving users with a poor experience. 

Site visitors want to be able to express their needs with a simple message written in plain language. Brands can offer this experience from the start of the purchasing journey by leveraging a generative AI assistant that can understand that input and suggest products that fit the criteria.

As you’ve likely noticed, AI can provide expert advice and suggestions throughout the buyer journey and even recommend products. This capability far surpasses that of traditional chatbots and creates a more frictionless customer journey. Additionally, this type of interaction helps to significantly boost customer loyalty.

Step 3: Conversion

Now that your visitor has found the right product, what obstacles might they be facing to add to cart and convert? Surprisingly enough, the answer may just be information. 

We know you’ve built and populated your product pages with tons of useful detail, but consumers don’t want to read through all of it to find the answer to their specific question. Or if they do, they often can’t easily find what they’re looking for. 

In fact, 50% of visitors abandon their purchase because they don’t find the information they need. That’s a lot of missed revenue! Other times, your customers need reassurance before finalizing their order. Sure, the information about shipping times or returns lives on FAQ pages, but it's not easy to find and usually forces them to leave the checkout page, which isn’t ideal.

At the end of the day, the most important question to a customer is their own. With a generative AI chatbot connected to your brand ecosystem, product information, and knowledge base, you can offer your customers a shopping assistant every day, every hour, and to answer every unique question. 

This is the key to patching your leaky sales funnel. It’s also a great way to relieve your customer service agents! A win-win.

Generative AI offers a wealth of opportunities to enhance your e-commerce strategy and improve the user experience. This is why investing in a platform that leverages this technology for the purpose of improving customer interactions is essential to growth for online businesses today.