With billions of internet users globally, e-commerce provides a major destination for impactful brand interactions that deliver results. The accessibility of the internet has turned shopping into an activity that can be done any time. Making online purchases from your favorite brands is easier than ever. Experts predict that the growing industry’s valuation will increase to $5.5 trillion by 2027. By the same year, almost one quarter of retail purchases will be completed online.
While desired user journeys and increased revenue are often two main e-commerce goals, brands face the challenge of creating unique experiences and meeting demand. Over 70% of consumers desire to have personalized brand experiences, making this a pivotal opportunity for companies. In order to accomplish this, leading online shopping platforms rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously deliver seamless experience and drive in-web purchases. Amazon, AliExpress, and Ebay represent the most visited e-commerce platforms and they all use AI. This integration allows AI to apply insights from user behavior to also create customized experiences that funnel visitors to product listings, product detail pages, or product purchases. Industry giants have fully leaned into e-commerce, but the great news is–small businesses can use it for their benefit too!
Developing ways to create better experiences and drive conversions is difficult when you don’t have the employees, time, or resources. AI alleviates this hurdle by ideating for you, compiling insights from user data, and optimizing for more desirable user outcomes.
Constantly Growing Audience
As the internet and social media continue to grow, so does traffic to the brands that users enjoy the most. The ability for brands – no matter the size – to go viral at any given moment also creates a pressure to stay prepared for influxes in completed purchases. By incorporating AI into their e-commerce strategy, small businesses can ensure that their brand keeps up in a constantly changing industry.
Journey Tracking
Small businesses can analyze website journeys, social media traffic, view the most successful posts, and use that data to further drive interactions and purchases. By observing user journeys
Easier Shopping, Increased Revenue
AI has the ability to gain insights from user journeys and use that data to create more seamless shopping experiences. That sweater a user forgot to buy? Use AI to show previously viewed items or full carts. Need more users to check out your new collection launch? AI can make it the first thing that users see when they visit your brand’s website. Access to such a smooth purchase process makes customers want to complete more purchases, which further increases revenue for small businesses.
Though e-commerce is a lucrative opportunity for small businesses, there are some potential roadblocks that should be noted:
Keeping Up with Website Traffic
In a rapidly growing industry, small businesses may have a difficult time keeping up with high website traffic. If businesses are not able to keep up with demand from their audience, they will no longer be seen as a credible brand. AI can be used to automatically deliver large amounts of personalized experiences.
Lack of Trust
As technology continues to develop, so does the pressing issue of data and privacy. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is an e-commerce standard that all brands and platforms must adhere to. As a major platform that uses AI optimized checkout, Shopify is labeled one of the safest e-commerce websites because the platform is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant.
Target Audience
Knowing and understanding your target audience is essential in maximizing the benefits of e-commerce. AI analyzes data, industry trends, and website content to optimize for your specific audience.
Refunds and Returns
Each company’s respective refund and return policy can differ significantly. Making sure that the information regarding such policies is easily available to customers. AI can also be used to experiment against different policies and see which one works best based on your audience.
Competing with e-commerce giants isn’t easy, but AI is here to help small businesses change that and make a huge splash while doing it. Amazon, Overstock, Shopify use artificial intelligence to gather cross-channel data, drive website optimization, deliver desired experiences, and encourage completed purchases. When applied to strategies for small businesses, AI can deliver extraordinary results:
Increased Engagement
AI-powered tools easily boost engagement by helping businesses deliver unique experiences to users based on trends, behavioral data, and cross-channel analytics. By using generative AI to create desirable experiences, small businesses can increase engagement, push personal recommendations, and achieve results.
Meet Demands
By incorporating AI into their digital strategy, small businesses can ensure the ability to keep up with the demands of their audience. AI can meet high website traffic and automatically deploy UX solutions.
Target Audience
Pinpointing target audience is a challenge regardless of the size of a company. However, AI analyzes dense industry and behavioral data so smaller teams without bandwidth do not have to. E-commerce is particularly popular amongst Millennials and Gen-Z users who are more likely to rely on reviews and user generated content before purchasing a product. AI can also be used to create experiences that make it easy and simple to review products.
Ethical Data Practices
It is essential for both small businesses and larger businesses to handle sensitive data ethically. AI platforms are also required to abide by data privacy policies, which pushes the businesses using them to stay in code and sharpen their own policies as well.
Picking the right AI experimentation platform is especially important for small businesses looking to make their mark in e-commerce. Evolv AI provides small businesses with specialized tools that understand their goals, scale business, and drive results. Our a-la-carte options allow businesses to build Evolv AI packages that align with their budget. Our platform empowers small businesses to achieve competitive results and increase revenue with less resources than large corporations.
Generative AI - co-create with Evolv AI’s platform to form experiment variations that align with business goals, remains informed by audience data, and drives social media engagement.
Automated Recommendations - automatically identifies website optimization opportunities and generates personalized recommendations targeted to the customer journeys you want to optimize for, and how to improve digital experiences.
Knowledge Management - upload brand and style guides into Evolv AI’s platform to apply unique context to Auto Recommendations and tailor recommendations for your business. This feature facilitates retention, reapplication, the sharing of experimentation insights and cohesion between cross-platform messaging and design.
Audience Building - Segments users together based on specific characteristics, or actions performed with flows. Save and apply them for further personalized use cases like marketing campaigns, variant testing, behavioral analysis comparisons, personalization, ad targeting and more.
Behavioral Analytics - goes beyond basic web analytics by focusing on understanding the detailed actions and interactions of users within digital platforms.
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E-commerce is a growing shopping sector that continues to be an area of major opportunity for small businesses in particular. Many small businesses are outpaced simply because they did not have the resources to compete. AI evens the playing field. In the age of technology and the influence of social media, small businesses can make a significant cultural impact with far less resources than large corporations.
With the help of leading technology like Evolv AI, small businesses can not only surpass e-commerce goals, but revolutionize their digital presence and compete with industry giants. Increased engagement from social media flows and journeys adds to a brand’s digital presence. With the rise of e-commerce and access to state-of-the-art AI technology, now is the ideal time to explore how Evolv AI can help small businesses stay ahead in this space.