How AI E-commerce Customer Solutions Can Boost Your Sales

What if your online customers had their own personal assistants to enhance their buying experience? What if you could support site visitors long after your last employee went home for the night? What if you could supercharge your customer service agents’ productivity while collecting valuable customer data? With artificial intelligence in e-commerce, you can achieve all this and more.

Many brands all over the world are adopting this exciting technology to enhance the automation capabilities and user experience of their e-commerce platform. By 2026, Gartner expects 80% of businesses to onboard AI chatbots. This form of artificial intelligence creates hyper-personalized content that can effectively guide shoppers through every phase of the buying journey. And 74% of American consumers want it to give them detailed information on the products they’re interested in. 

In simple terms, generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard provide natural language responses to human prompts and questions. When used in e-commerce and business settings, it brings a new standard of personalization to the online shopping ecosystem and moves consumers through the buying funnel more smoothly and efficiently.

Copilots powered by generative AI help customers make decisions at every stage of the buyer journey, whether they’re still discovering a new need, choosing a product to meet that need, or making the final buying decision. Once a product has been paid for, virtual assistants can also provide personalized post-sale support that gives brands a distinct advantage over competitors.

The best generative AI technologies have an exceptional grasp of language, to the point where it's difficult to tell them apart from a human agent. They have several key functions in the e-commerce market:

• Increase e-commerce conversion rates by as much as 10x.
• Offer product recommendations based on each buyer’s shopping history and intent.
• Work through buyers' product delivery preferences.
• Suggest that buyers process their purchase soon when product stock is low.
• Provide trustworthy information on product features around the clock, even after staff has gone home.
• Suggest products based on buyers' budget, climate, style, browsing habits, and more.
• Create a personalized checkout experience complete with new product suggestions.
• Adapt its language to achieve consistency with brand identity.

The purchase that follows is just the beginning. Once your consumers have unwrapped their package, the conversation can continue. Your AI assistant can help with things like answering post-purchase questions, creating shopping lists for the customer's next visit, or even transferring customers to an on-demand brand advocate to get expert advice from someone already using the products they just bought.

Filling digital carts has never been easier, and it’s adding value to customers’ shopping experiences. There’s a reason that six in 10 global e-commerce decision-makers already rely on generative AI's product recommendation capabilities. Online businesses that use it have increased their revenue up to 15% and their return on investment up to 20%.

Generative AI isn’t a neatly wrapped solution with guaranteed results. Like any tool, it must be implemented with a comprehensive strategy to deliver positive results. Responses created by free AI technology, or those with access to the public internet, like ChatGPT, can generate duplicate content, use old information, or hallucinate, causing damage to your brand reputation.

Personalized AI copilots can deliver the ‘wow’ factor brands need to increase conversions, boosting customer retention by 15%. The most innovative brands are leveraging them—and for excellent reasons. Payne Glasses is the perfect example. This eyeglasses retailer multiplied its conversion rate by 10 through the implementation of a generative AI chatbot on their website. Prior to its launch, the company’s small team struggled to meet customer support needs, particularly outside of business hours. They needed to optimize their sales opportunities and reduce their agents’ workloads.

97% of shoppers leave e-commerce sites without buying a product. Even so, a Google study revealed that 60% of shoppers gather insights about their desired products online first, and nearly 3 out of 4 Americans (73%) shop online several times a month. AI copilots can support this research process.

Payne Glasses added a shopper copilot to their customer experience strategy to answer customer questions and help agents juggle more requests. The new strategy took just two weeks to implement, and the results were impressive. Their website conversion rate grew to 23%, and their customer request volume was cut in half.

Generative AI is competent enough to engage with even the most unique clientele. Pop-culture collectibles specialty manufacturer, Sideshow, needed a solution that could respond to the nuanced, specialized questions of their target market. AI was up to the challenge. Through pre- and post-sales AI-managed customer support, Sideshow was able to increase their e-commerce conversions by 8x.

Their solution not only matched their brand voice, but also connected potential buyers to human respondents when needed. They chose an AI chatbot that could process customer data while simultaneously remaining compliant with all consumer data protection regulations, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Digital helpers are slowly transforming the relationship between brands and their customers. Today’s marketing-averse buyers are actively looking for brands that engage with them on a one-on-one level. 

AI goes even further by leveraging data to upsell and cross-sell, and this is why leading brands like Amazon and eBay rely on it so heavily. It can boost click through rates, curate a customized buying experience, and increase conversions exponentially. 

This doesn’t mean that generative AI-powered tools don’t come without ethical implications. Today’s consumers value transparency and accountability, so data protection should be at the center of all information use.

The CCPA requires businesses to give customers control over the information businesses collect about them. This bill was used as a model that has been replicated in several other states. No U.S. business can afford to handle data carelessly, so it's imperative that brands choose to work with generative AI providers that can ensure security and compliance.

Today’s buyers have lofty expectations. It’s no longer enough to respond to emails 24 hours after they’re sent. Online shoppers expect companies to understand their unique needs, and when they do, they feel more loyal to that brand. E-commerce websites can be a frustrating experience, but generative AI assistants are reducing much of that stress.

AI can reach customers across channels. It can be placed in their inbox, waiting to deliver a personalized message. It can be in their live chat window, ready to assist when needed. It can be on the websites they browse, gathering information about their product preferences. It can even be on an app ready to guide them through an online store’s inventory. 

Buyers never have to shop without a personal assistant again. That’s why leading brands like Samsung, Kendra Scott, and IKKS are using it to enhance the buying experience.

Artificial intelligence has become remarkably adept at generating conversational text, but buyers can sometimes discern the difference between human and machine. However, nothing can replicate personalization quite like a real person. 

Sometimes a human agent simply says it best, so when your digital assistant can’t do the job, it’s important to have the right mechanisms in place to transfer that conversation to your staff. Generative AI copilots can support your employees on a daily basis, allowing them to handle several conversations simultaneously and making them more productive.

Humans can’t be everywhere at once, but AI assistants can help fill the gaps. This means your staff can go home at the end of the day, knowing that buyers still have access to an advanced shopper assistant in their absence.

Applications of generative AI in customer-facing e-commerce are still new. But in the coming years, they will evolve into a critical piece of the e-commerce customer experience toolkit. 

Tomorrow’s technologies will use data from a wider range of sources to answer inquiries. This way, they’ll gain a more nuanced understanding of buyers’ questions. It’s forecasted that AI as a service solution will soon include hallucination management tools and provenance detectors to validate data. No wonder conversational commerce is projected to grow to $290 billion in the next three years!