Focus: Artificial Intelligence and E-commerce

Artificial intelligence has become the biggest driving force for the development of e-commerce. This article will take you through the importance of artificial intelligence in the field of e-commerce.

Overview

E-commerce has developed strongly in recent years, and artificial intelligence has become a powerful driving force.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 80% of customer service work will be replaced by artificial intelligence. Companies such as Alibaba, Rakuten, and Amazon use artificial intelligence technology for comment mining, developing chat bots, product recommendations, and processing big data.

Ubisend report provides a set of interesting data:

One in five consumers buy goods and services from chatbots;

Consumers spend more than ￡317.74 through chat bots;

40% of consumers search for offers through chatbots;

Google spends ￡400 million to acquire artificial intelligence companies: DeepMind;

Artificial intelligence has three key elements: data mining, natural language processing, and machine learning. The three promote the rapid development of e-commerce companies. Artificial intelligence allows machines to learn to perform tasks that previously required manual work, which gives us time to focus on our business strategy.

The development of artificial intelligence is strong, and it has achieved excellent results in many fields. The most attractive one is the application in visual and voice search.

According to Branded3, the proportion of voice and image search is expected to reach 50% by 2020, and by 2021, the early brand re-designed website for visual and voice search will increase e-commerce revenue by 30%.

Image search technology has promoted the development of clothing e-commerce, and has also helped the retail and medical industries to promote the development of small businesses, giving them unprecedented opportunities to survive.

Metadata and tags have always been indicators of search engines that identify correct images and files, usually done manually. Use artificial intelligence technology to automatically classify images and mark products to ensure consistent search results.

Most brands recognize images or videos that are relevant to their brand, and many consumers express negative or positive comments about a brand through images or videos. However, they do not always fill in the tags for the information in the picture. According to Forbes, about 80% of social media images cover brand logos, but users usually don't mention the brand or product in the published text. Through the integration of artificial intelligence social listening tools, the brand can use it for effective analysis of visual content.

Artificial intelligence combined with e-commerce can understand user needs, generate potential customers, and improve user experience. Major e-commerce companies have invested heavily in exploring how to use artificial intelligence to enhance brand competitiveness and customer loyalty.

So far, the popular application of artificial intelligence in the field of e-commerce:

Assistant and chat bot

Assistants and chat bots can respond to customer inquiries and make product recommendations for users (eg Alibaba)

Intelligent logistics

Automated warehouse operations and delivery processes (eg rookie)

Recommended system

By analyzing the customer behavior on the website, combined with the recommendation algorithm to predict the products that the customer may like and make corresponding recommendations (eg Taobao)

case study

Alibaba

Alibaba launched Tmall Elf and Ali Assistant, and its customer service chat bot handles up to 95% of consulting business, including voice and text consulting, and is powerful. Alibaba said that artificial intelligence can promote internal and customer service operations. In addition, Alibaba uses artificial intelligence to map the most efficient logistics routes. The promotion of intelligent logistics has reduced vehicle usage by 10% and driving distance by 30%.

eBay

eBay uses artificial intelligence to maintain consumer interest and enhance the company's competitive advantage. eBay Shopbot uses natural language processing technology to find products that are of interest to customers. Customers can communicate with robots via text, voice and photos taken on their mobile phones.

ASOS

Fashion retail e-commerce ASOS is committed to investing in artificial intelligence technology and speech recognition technology. The company introduced image recognition technology that enabled the ASOS App to match the user's photos to the clothing that was sold online.

Rakuten

Rakuten, Japan's largest e-commerce site, uses artificial intelligence technology to predict customer behavior. Analyze hundreds of millions of products and conduct recommended sales. In addition, they use real-time data to accurately segment buyers. In Rakuten Fits Me software, image recognition technology helps increase customer satisfaction and sales efficiency.

benefit

1. Customer-centric

Consumers are not trusting e-commerce companies because they are not recommended by themselves. Artificial intelligence can mine user preferences and find the most suitable products for users.

2. Relocate potential customers and improve sales processes

According to Conversica, at least 33% of sales leads are not effectively tracked, and many sales teams are unable to manage large amounts of customer information. Artificial intelligence can help shorten the sales cycle and find consumers on the right platform and time by adjusting the solution.

Take North Face, a large e-commerce retailer, for example. They partnered with IBM to launch a Watson-based application to better understand consumers and find the most suitable products by asking them questions, such as: “Where are you? Where and when do you use your running clothes?” Next, the app will analyze a large number of product data, travel guides, blogs, etc. according to the needs of users, and select and recommend the most suitable products for customers according to actual use and climate characteristics.

3. More personalized

Boomtrain is an artificial intelligence platform for marketing. It handles billions of user operations every day, acquires each user's points of interest and user behavior in real time, and then automatically communicates with users through email, push, and text messages. Artificial intelligence can monitor the entire process and provide a picture for the user, sending information to the user at the right time, helping the e-commerce retailer to enhance the user experience and make the recommendation more personalized.

4. Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

The e-commerce space pays special attention to the user experience. “Chat Robots” automate order processes, reduce costs, and provide 24/7 customer service to collect valuable data while tracking customers. According to Juniper Research, by 2020, chatbots will save $8 billion a year.

5. Improve the quality of recommendation

Combined with artificial intelligence technology, brands can more effectively predict customer needs and purchase behavior, and provide personalized recommendations. Take Taobao as an example. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze the collected user data, and comprehensively considers customer information, customer preferences, customer history purchase behavior, third-party data, and context information to provide personalized advice to customers.

6. Intelligent agent

The new intelligent negotiation system has been widely used in e-commerce and is mainly used in three scenarios: matching buyers and buyers; promoting transactional achievement; providing institutional basis.

7. Filter false comments

False comments have become a thorny issue for online retailers. According to a survey by Dimensonal Research, 90% of respondents said that comments would directly affect their purchase behavior. To avoid product sales caused by false information published by competitors or robots, many e-commerce companies use artificial intelligence to enhance verification and filter useful reviews to counter grassroots marketing.

8. Automation

Artificial intelligence does not mean that the machine will take over everything. Many people are afraid that robots will replace humans in the future, but robots are just a means to assist retailers in precision marketing. With the continuous expansion of the e-commerce industry, it is bound to have more and more customers, and the demand for automation will become more and more urgent, and will become the investment focus of e-commerce. More importantly, as the number of e-commerce companies grows, the number of repetitive tasks increases, and the use of robots to deal with problems is an excellent solution.

According to Martenchtoday's survey, Amazon will spend $5 billion on technology investments, and Alibaba plans to invest $150 in research and development over the next three years.

Conclusion

The application of artificial intelligence in e-commerce will affect transactions, customer retention, customer satisfaction, etc., and quietly change the way online trading.