Artificial Intelligence and Big Data have been emerging and popular concepts in this digital era. These convergent technology trends are gradually redefining the IT industry. Now, these two popular technologies are not merely topics covered in movies or books; every industry, including eCommerce, is actively embracing them to optimize their offered services.

The eCommerce landscape is set up with a major objective of providing an exceptional offline shopping experience to the customers in the online space. This goal is accomplished by offering buyers a seamless and straightforward way of navigating their desired goods and services. The development of artificial intelligence and big data analytics has proven to be the latest technologies that the eCommerce industry needs today.

Today the customers value convenience while doing shopping online, the market is ready to respond to their demand by shifting towards artificial intelligence and big data analytics integrated app that is why most of the retailers are moving towards online business. The trend of convenient and targeted shopping started with apps and websites of individual brands like eBay, Amazon, and Flipkart. And now, from startups to large enterprises, all are keen to have their individual platform for doing shopping online.

Let’s have a quick glance over various mind-boggling stats about Big data and AI:

90 percent of the world’s data has been built in the last 2 years alone.

The data volume created by the U.S. companies alone every year is enough to fill 10 thousand Libraries of Congress.

All the connected cars are making a push to be one of the most important new digital platforms, with 220 million on the road by the year 2020.

Most of the companies only analyze 12 percent of the data that they have.

By the year 2020, there will be more than 50 billion smart connected devices all across the world, analyzing, collecting, and sharing data.

Bad data costs about the US $3.1 Trillion annually.

The data investment in the financial services industry will account for approximately $9 Billion in the year 2018 alone.

AI’s impact on marketing is growing rapidly, predicted to reach nearly $40 billion by the year 2025.

The salaries of data scientists are rapidly improving with demand.

The Internet of things will save customers and businesses US $1 trillion a year by the year 2022.

Today’s generation is starved for a prompt response while they are shopping on different eCommerce channels, therefore, Real-time retailing came into the picture which provides the thrill of instant chatting and the potential for discussion. In this article, we will explore how these trending concepts are restructuring and revolutionizing the e-commerce industry.

Salient Features of a User-Centric Shopping Assistant Application

#1. Superlative User Experience

It is critical for your shopping assistant mobile app to offer a positive experience to users. With its help, it’s possible to get a positive recommendation from the client which can make them revisit your online store again. You should also remember word of mouth is also a great means in order to reach more people than any other kind of propaganda.

#2. Provide Search Suggestions

It is extremely important to have a search service helping you scroll down the categories and search at different levels without any 404-page error not found. Also, it is equally important to show search suggestions while typing the query in the search box. Showing a drop-down list of suggested keywords can help the users select the best option.

#3. Easy Navigation

The mobile application should be easily navigable. Therefore, it’s crucial to have well-defined architecture.

#4. Properly Label Categories

It is crucial to label all pages and categories properly. In addition to this, ensure that all search engine queries are reflected in the web and mobile applications. Also, do not forget to check the keywords that are being searched.

#5. Provide Correct Contact Details & Feedback

It’s also extremely crucial to check the contact details, testimonials, customer feedback, customer support, and FAQ’s help along with various delivery options, especially for unknown and new brands.

#6. Keep Track of the Key Purchase Information

You also need to have an eye on the purchase behavior like most frequently visited categories, checking the price of the products, etc. This will help you to learn more about the buying patterns and devise an effective sales strategy.

#7. Customer Focused

With its help, you can determine different ways to keep the customer attracted to your products and convert them into successful sales opportunities with minimal distractions.

#8. Properly Optimized Images

Ensure that the optimized images for Google are considered in order to evaluate your products. You should also make sure that these pics are compressed according to the page weight so that it doesn’t result in slow loading times.

#9. User Recommendations

Provide options to the visitors so that they can recommend or suggest after reading as many reviews as possible. They should also be given an option to cross-verify and have a second opinion before deciding to purchase a product.

#10. Viable Support Options

Your mobile app should offer different features like prominently displayed telephone numbers, emails, tracking of the package, online customer service tools, to name a few. That’s why many app development companies fully utilize these features in the process of app development.

What Role Does Big Data and AI Play in Creating eCommerce Apps?

Search is not just focused on specific keywords, but it also depends on identifying synonyms, types, and product relationships. Personal shopper assistants have been adapted and followed to do the following:

Enabling image and voice in search engines also facilitates the search.

Analysis of customer purchase preferences and search behavior helps to estimate the needs of customers with smart recommendations. Machine learning has made upgrading offerings and cross-selling more relevant for the customers.

AI-enabled smart assistant in order to make shopping easier in various shopping categories. They are as good as human customer care representatives — they understand, listen, address questions, talk, and suggest solutions. Such as Rakuten Fit Me, The North Face XPS, Amazon Alexa, etc.

Artificial intelligence has also influenced marketing and warehouse logistics.

Artificial intelligence helps manipulate predictions for fact-based segmentation, sales, and analysis of reviews.

Analyzing reviews is another artificial intelligence benefit for e-commerce marketing. This includes analyzing reviews and the contents of my valuable data from reviews and page descriptions.

It’s helpful in reducing manpower, accelerating warehouse operations, cutting costs and increasing revenue.

From stacking products on shelves, shipping goods, and packing, AI-based robots are soon to be replaced as support staff and delivery agents- which in fact increased overall efficiency.

The e-commerce industry is experiencing a stroke of AI implementation in the backend operations. Digital assistants who behave like warehouses powered by robots, humans, delivery of shipments via drones — all seem far more imaginary but are slowly but steadily entering daily life.

Shopping assistants: Are they helpful?

Individual shopkeepers assist customers in booking & processing all the orders on behalf of customers via chat, email, or phone call. A virtual shopping assistant or chat-bot is an artificial intelligence-based software program that firms use to expand their business. Generally, the shopping assistant functions are mentioned below:

Process Customer Orders

Process Financial Adjustments

Recommend Products Based on Trends

Support Customers with Replacements and Exchanges

Maximize Client Base

Suggest a possible solution for any queries

Shopping/e-commerce chatbots (virtual assistants) also allow Fortune 500 brands in order to increase LTV, acquire new customers, and overcome the requirement for unnecessary customer service support through automated chat. This makes easier to work in Pali, by the hour, by different time zones. In addition to this, brands can reduce message opening rates by up to 65%, increased 4X revenue, CTR by 25%, and service costs by 20%.

Virtual assistants or chatbots can also scan all products provides on the website and then provide the customer with an innovative and unique shopping experience. The combination of chatbots with an effective email marketing strategy can be a double blow. Chatbots can be widely used for mass messaging clients, they can also be used to send old chat messages or reminders when a product becomes available, or a similar product is available at a much lower price.

Examples of Shopping Assistants

Some of the most interesting examples of chat-bots are:

The chatbot of Nike has helped it boost the conversion rate from retail messenger campaign

The shopping chat-bot of Aerie has helped it with user acquisition

The shopping bot of eBay has been an ultimate auction tool for the firm

How Intelligent Are Shopping Assistants?

All these provide cost-effective and easy solutions through natural language drag and drop interface.

The capabilities of any bot can also be automated simply, but by dragging them from the pre-built skill library (or even creating your own library-specific for your purpose) you can further configure the data systems and source that the skill touches in the configuration.

A bot can also be programmed in order to recognize the language, which can immensely help to make sure that you understand the specific brand or jargon of the location used by clients to find the products. The response of Bot can also be personalized to be more conversational (from chit-chatty to simple commands).

Artificial Intelligence and Big Data (Data Intelligence) has helped shopping assistants to do various tasks without human consultation:

Providing discount coupons (personalized)

Comparing the price of various products

Keeping a track of shopping history

Alerting customers in case of unsafe products

Tracking the user’s shipments from any merchant

Determinate

Although most of the people still prefer to interact with real people while making a purchase decision, virtual assistant programs like Cortana, Siri, and Alexa mimic human interaction to offer concrete responses to user requests.

In general, personal shopping assistants help offer users with a personalized shopping experience, process customer orders through chats or Live phones, continuous learning of customer interactions (as machines can learn), recommend products to clients on each order call, guarantee customer satisfaction by presenting them with all the privileged information about the product, make sure that the essential goods and services of the season and the latest trends are recommended based on the purchase history of customers and search behavior, identify and solve any specific problem that customers have from the catalog and the Internet, be sure to support customers for replacement, track customer packages, and exchanges, process financial adjustments as crucial, stimulate customer feedback, offer expert advice related to the fashion trends, etc.

Let’s Wrap Up:

All the examples and facts outlined in this article show that artificial intelligence continues gaining ground, assisting online marketers in an array of ways. Personalized image recognition software, Big Data solutions, and deep learning help personalize offers, build customer confidence, expand business limits, increase sales and many more.

It is clear that artificial intelligence is staying in eCommerce for a remarkable period of time. And the query is not whether companies believe in this technology or not, but who’ll be the first to adopt AI-driven solutions and implement them in their digital marketing strategies to leave the competition in the dust.

You can hire mobile app developers to create an app to level up the e-commerce platform, which is, shopping assistant applications. Also, there are many mobile app development companies that create personal shopping assistant applications to make your business very easy. It is a risk-free and high reward situation that is quite effective enough to generate conversions.