Despite your best efforts, is your Magento eCommerce store still falling short of achieving your sales goals?
Well, it probably is the right time to incorporate modern and ‘sci-fi’ technology – Artificial Intelligence -to move your store’s sales graph forward.
Whether we like it or not, our idea of AI is shaped by the sci-fi movies – of a group of super-intelligent human-like robots trying to overthrow the human race! While sentient machines might not take over the world anytime soon, AI can certainly change how you interact with the world!
Ever received a recommendation on Amazon or had a conversation with Alexa or SIRI – AI runs the show from the background. From driverless cars to detecting viruses in the human body, AI is all around us.
The global AI retail market size is projected to leap to $23 billion by 2027 from a mere $3 billion in 2019. AI has the potential to change the way eCommerce businesses work dynamically. It impacts both how companies have been selling their products and the way consumers have been buying them. AI can be the real game-changer modern web stores have been looking for – the solution for their very real-world problems.
Magento is one of the widely used platforms for eCommerce, and it has a multitude of AI extensions that make selling exciting and easier. Regardless of whether you run a small business or an established store using the Magento platform, you can incorporate AI in your store to drive your sales graph up.
Benefits of Incorporating AI in Magento eCommerce Store
In addition to the outstanding built-in features, powering your Magento store with AI is bound to bring you many benefits.
1. Get Personal with Chatbots
When using your store for shopping, your customers expect almost immediate responses from you. Quickly resolving simple queries regarding a product or confusion in coupons can make all the difference between a sale and an ‘almost sale.’ And you wouldn’t want to lose out on a prospective customer simply because you weren’t quick enough.
If you were hoping that your customers will be reading your FAQs, you are highly mistaken. Users wouldn’t want to waste their time wading through pages of product or payment details.
24% of eCommerce companies worldwide wanted to implement AI chatbots in 2020, and the global chatbot market size is expected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025 from $190 million in 2016.
You can add chatbots to your Magento store to address customer queries on the spot, iron out pain points and steer customers throughout the entire sales process.
2. Retarget Market Leads
Most eCommerce stores lose out on a large chunk of potential customers simply because you didn’t follow up the leads. These ‘could be sales’ leads fall through the cracks.
AI can make your Magento store smarter by gathering valuable information on customers and offer targeted ads, coupons, and promotions based on their activities in the store.
Let’s see. We know of AI being used by retail stores –in the form of facial recognition – to identify shoplifters.
So, how is artificial intelligence used in web stores?
Ecommerce stores can analyze dwell times of customers to understand their needs better. For instance, if a customer is spending a considerable amount of time looking at car accessories, this valuable information can be used to push a sale. The next time the customer logs in, you can offer a special discount on their most-viewed products.
Magento stores with AI extensions can collect information on user activity, track their buying behavior, and draw actionable insights. With big data and machine learning, AI’s self-learning algorithms can be used to deconstruct tons of user information to create a targeted and personalized shopping experience for users – without bias or error.
3. Take Personalization to the Next Level
Personalization is not new for eCommerce. But with machine learning and AI, it is possible to offer personalized shopping on multi-channels. You can now interact with multiple customer touch points so that businesses can understand how customers are interacting with their store. You can stand apart from the competition by using AI in your ecommerce store.
Regardless of whether your customers are accessing your store using mobile or desktop, your AI engine will be able to monitor your activities on all the devices to create a seamless universal shopping experience.
4. Offer Smart Search
Which is one of the first things your customer is going to look for in your store?
The search bar, of course!
Magento indeed offers some out-of-the-world search options, but these pale in comparison to what AI can do.
Users absolutely hate having to search for their favorite products. Suppose your customer is searching for a particular brand’s ‘accent tables’ on your site. But if their search is returning empty, they may give up on your store entirely.
Or they’ve been searching for that ‘elusive’ product a hundred times, but they don’t find what they need.
Why?
It could be because of the poor search feature on your store.
Search bars usually rely on the right keywords and spellings to bring up search results. Only when there is a correct match will your search yield any feasible results.
AI-based search doesn’t work on the user’s ability to describe a product – it works on predictive capabilities and context rather than simply banking on the right combination of keywords.
Along with Natural Language Processor NLP and machine learning, AI-based search relies more on context than spelling.
Next in search is the visual search capability of Magento-driven AI store. It could be the most significant game-changer of the eCommerce business.
Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and surely every smartphone has an enviable camera in it.
Haven’t we all liked a product so much but wished it were in another color or at least in a slightly different shade?
Your users can click a picture of their favorite product and search for similar products using the image almost instantly. In addition to finding matching products, AI can also help users find similar products in various sizes, colors, brands, or even fabrics.
5. Enhanced Fraud Prevention
Perhaps one of the significant contributors to an eCommerce store’s credit score is its security standards and fraud prevention capabilities. With the number of payment fraud and theft increasing, it is essential to ensure a safer shopping experience.
One aspect of increasing security is fraud prevention and the other is fraud detection. It is better if you can detect discrepancies before the actual sale.
You can make use of AI to fortify your Magento store by using behavior analysis models. AI can also make it easier for you to recognize and prevent interaction with spurious third-party sites. By using the transaction history of customers, you can highlight the risk level of each customer and keep track of sensitive transactions. If customers are making use of below-par payment gateways, such transactions can be isolated.
Wrapping Up
When you incorporate AI with your Magento eCommerce store, you can easily stay on par with your competition or even raise the bar in service excellence.
The best way to make your store smarter with AI is to get yourself the right Magento developers who can custom-create applications for your needs. You can also look for the right AI extension for your store from the Magento Marketplace to stay ahead of the competition.
