Maximize Your 2024 Black Friday E-commerce Sales With AI Shopping Assistants

Black Friday attracts millions of shoppers every year who are looking for the best deals and promotions. For online retailers, it’s a critical opportunity to supercharge sales and expand customer reach—but in today’s oversaturated e-commerce market, standing out is more challenging than ever. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of e-commerce sites jumped from 9.2 million to over 26 million. Now with generative AI entering the public domain, conversational commerce tools powered by artificial intelligence are a surefire way to gain a competitive edge and turn the holiday season into a goldmine. Backed by data, experience, and examples, this article explores how to optimize your website for high traffic volume with AI customer solutions so that you’re ready to tackle Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and all the other seasonal sales periods this year and beyond!

Black Friday 2023 Key Data: What to Learn From Last Years’ Holiday Season Trends

Retailers Start Their BFCM Promotions Earlier Than Later

Holiday promotions, ads, and anticipation seems to start earlier each year as many retailers aim to accommodate consumers eager to get a head start on their holiday shopping. The National Retail Federation (NRF) reports that 55% of Americans take advantage of these early sales, with 35% even purposefully making purchases the week before Thanksgiving. 

These increased sales opportunities extend beyond just Black Friday. Last year, Adobe Analytics found that Cyber Monday generated a record-breaking $12.4 billion in revenue, with an average spend of $15.7 million every minute.

Black Friday Engagement Continues to Grow

Participation in Black Friday continues to grow year over year. 76.2 million consumers shopped in-store during the 2023 event, while 90.6 million took advantage of online promotions. Clothing, toys, and gift cards were among the most popular purchases:

E-commerce as Black Friday's Winning Formula

Black Friday online sales reached a record $9.8 billion in 2023, an increase of 7.5% compared to 2022. This impressive growth highlights the increasing importance of e-commerce as a purchasing channel during the holiday season. With half of consumers shopping online several times a month, it aligns perfectly with current shopping preferences, ensuring your brand reaches consumers at every touchpoint.

The Rise of AI Shopping Assistants

What are AI Shopping Assistants?

To better maximize your Black Friday conversions, it's important to understand what AI assistants are and how you can use them as part of your sales strategies. 

AI shopping assistants are chatbots equipped with enterprise-ready generative AI that assist online shoppers across the buyer journey, from first touch on your site through post-purchase. They are effective tools for facilitating better brand-customer interactions and helping to drive e-commerce website visitors to buy by providing tailored, always-on product recommendations and customer support.

In 2024, using AI shopping assistants in conversational commerce is more relevant than ever, as this combo meets online shoppers' expectations of both immediacy and personalization.

Where Generative AI Comes In

Having chatbots as messaging channels for your e-commerce platform powered by enterprise-ready generative AI makes personalization scalable. It ensures that your website can handle large volumes of customer interactions while maintaining a level of engagement and personalization on par with a human respondent.

In a recent Ipsos study, 74% of American consumers cited generative AI as being a great tool for helping them get detailed information on the products they’re interested in. This underscores the growing importance of conversational commerce in the digital buyer journey.

"Generative AI offers an unprecedented solution because it meets the need for more conversational interactions between brands and consumers on e-commerce sites."

Julien Hervouët, CEO of iAdvize

How to Get Your Website Ready for Black Friday 2024

Proper preparation is key to ensuring your e-commerce platform can manage the Black Friday shopping influx.

Ensure Your Website is Equipped to Handle Increased Traffic

Black Friday, like winter and summer sales, is a high-traffic period for e-commerce, and increased visits mean more conversations. While instant messaging can initially help with the amount of incoming requests by allowing your customer service agents to have multiple conversations simultaneously, an influx of thousands of requests reveals its limitations.

To better scale conversational commerce operations, retailers can boost their website’s automation rate by integrating generative AI-powered shopping assistants that handle an infinite volume of brand-consumer conversations quickly and accurately.

After implementing an AI assistant, the French fashion brand IKKS was able to assist 52% more of their site visitors around the clock. AI tools like these help online businesses achieve their goals while controlling costs. They can significantly increase the volume of interactions resolved without the need for human help, freeing up customer service agents to focus on more complex requests and reducing burnout.

"When you know that 50% of people abandon an online purchase because they can’t find information about a product, you realize the importance of providing a quick response regardless of the time of day, the moment in the day, or the number of people seeking information.”

Aurélie Labatut-Leroux, E-commerce and Omnichannel Director at IKKS

Optimize the User Experience (UX) to Better Facilitate Site Navigation and Purchase Decisions

In the shopping journey, everything starts with discovering the site and its products. The vast majority of visitors turn directly to the search bar, but 80% leave due to a poor navigation experience. 

Generative AI can be an ally in remedying this problem and reinventing the first step of the customer journey. It’s now possible to provide your online shoppers with personalized product recommendations based on their search criteria. This means visitors can discover your products through a conversation with your AI shopping assistant or a customer service agent, instead of spending time ticking boxes and choosing filters that provide less relevant results.

To get a better idea of what this means, watch the video below.

But how can you ensure that your site visitors use your shopping assistant? This is the question that led to our latest product feature innovation. Conversation Starters are intuitive conversation prompt buttons placed on e-commerce product pages. Each suggested question is personalized based on each visitor’s browsing habits and the types of products they’re viewing. 

Implement Solutions for Quickly Answering Frequent Questions

Throughout the online buyer journey, the discovery and consideration phases are crucial steps. However, the Baymard Institute notes three main factors that lead to consumers abandoning their cart before following through on a purchase: 

• Unexpected shipping costs
• Being forced to create an account
• Lack of trust

When it comes to online shopping, customers have many questions, and simple, rarely updated FAQ pages are typically insufficient sources for getting answers. Generative AI solves this problem by providing answers to frequently asked questions without any training necessary by the brand.

Your customer service teams will also benefit from not having to handle these repetitive questions. AI assistant chatbots extend to the agent side, with the same capabilities as customer-facing ones. Customer service agents can use tools to get summaries of the conversations they’re having with a shopper, to rewrite answers, or get a suggested response, ultimately making them faster and more efficient.

The Advantages of Conversational Commerce for Handling High-Traffic Periods on Your E-commerce Platform

24/7 Customer Support Availability

One of the major advantages of chatbots and automated systems is their ability to provide constant customer support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Unlike human support teams limited by traditional business hours, chatbots never experience burnout and are always on to answer customer questions and assist with purchases. 

This uninterrupted availability ensures that every customer interaction is handled immediately, reducing wait times and frustration. They’re a valuable aid during times of high traffic on your site, as support for your customers and your agents.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Chatbots powered by generative AI can process and respond to a wide range of inquiries, whether that be inventory questions, delivery details, return policies, or discounts. They’re now able to offer a more frictionless, intuitive shopping experience than older-generation chatbots or self-service options. 

They create a customer experience similar to speaking with a human, meaning that retailers can maintain, or even increase, their website’s level of customer satisfaction while automating the conversations they’re having. 

Efficient Automation That Reduces Costs 

One of the main advantages of conversational commerce is its ability to automate repetitive tasks, enabling businesses to get substantial cost savings. Gartner found that, on average, companies see a 70% reduction in support calls, chats, and emails after implementing an e-commerce chatbot.

Forrester discovered similar insights, where automation has been found to significantly reduce costs by offloading basic support tasks from teams and allowing for a more strategic allocation of resources.

Building an Effective Digital Holiday Promotional Strategy

Pinpoint Your Top Business Objectives

Ready to get started? The success of your conversational commerce strategy starts with defining key objectives. Are you most interested in enhancing customer service, sales growth and profitability, or something else? This will help you pinpoint the right use cases for your business needs and find the best solution for addressing them. To help you with this process and easily create a roadmap for launching an AI chatbot, fill out the checklist below. 

Launch Your E-commerce AI Shopping Assistant

When it comes to promotional events, timing is everything. Fortunately, integrating an AI shopping assistant is quick and easy. 

It's important to make sure your chatbot and other conversational commerce tools are well-configured and ready to answer all types of questions long before Black Friday and other seasonal sales periods. The most secure way to do this is to set them up to pull data exclusively from your knowledge base, product catalog, and FAQs. This ensures they only provide accurate and controlled responses informed by only brand data, not pulling from the internet or other unapproved sources.

An example of this is B2B childcare brand, Wesco, that successfully automated 75% of their website’s conversations and achieved a conversion rate of over 10% in just three weeks!

Integrating Essential Data Sources

Correct data source set-up is the key to a successful conversational commerce strategy. Without it, your chatbot won’t be nearly as effective. To maximize its capabilities, connect it to the following databases:

• Your Knowledge Base: Detailed, well-defined FAQs that will allow your chatbot to handle all your frequently asked questions.
• Your Product Catalog: A CSV file with complete and accurate product descriptions.
• Your Product API: For large product catalogs, a product API that updates in real time to keep your chatbot up-to-date on your brand’s information.

Once your data is connected, there's no need to train your chatbot, as it will already have access to all the necessary information to generate high-quality responses. You can then update your knowledge base as needed to reflect price drops, inventory availability, and other relevant changes.

“The AI works immediately on its own, and there’s no need for training. In our experience, if you give it the right data, it works very quickly. We’re very satisfied—the results are great, and this is just the beginning.”

Géraldine Poupin, Web Quality Manager at Wesco

A 2024 Black Friday Powered by Conversational Commerce

By offering personalized and around the clock customer support, AI chatbots have proven themselves to be helpful for improving website conversion rates and the online customer experience. Early preparation and proactive engagement are key tactics to maximizing this tech’s use during seasonal sales periods, like Black Friday. 

Get more details on AI shopping assistants built for e-commerce.