Artificial Intelligence (AI) is hands down the biggest revolution of the 21st century. Its adoption rates have grown to such an extent that in the next couple of years, the AI industry will be valued at over $118bn. With companies reporting up to a 40% increase in their productivity thanks to AI and investments in AI showing 6x growth, we are all witnessing one of the finest phases of tech evolution.
As online store owners, we cannot overlook or undermine the importance of AI. Its amazing capabilities should only be leveraged for the growth of our Shopify business. Statistics also reveal that close to 43% of the consumers out there reported that AI interactions have only offered them optimum customer experience in terms of handling complaints and resolving conflicts. Apart from chatbots, there are tons of ways we could implement AI for our Shopify store.
So, if you are a Shopify store owner or an aspirant looking to start an online store and wondering if you should deploy AI for your operations, here’s a detailed write up on why AI is as mandatory as it gets and how your business could benefit from it in diverse ways.
Let’s get started.
Why Online Shopping Is All About AI Engines
Offering convenience to consumers is one of the key goals of eCommerce stores. From smartphones and other portable devices, consumers can seamlessly order their preferred products and services. What AI incorporation does is make the process more enriching and rewarding.
From the data it generates on our usage, it consistently learns our tastes and preferences. With this insight, it uses recommendation engines to precisely present our products and services that we need as consumers. Now, this is a benefit for customers and a major revenue avenue for business owners.
While this was just a basic example of AI in action, here’s a compelling compilation of some of the most popular reasons why you should incorporate AI in your Shopify store.
Why AI Integration Is Inevitable For Your Shopify Store
1. Personalization
Personalization is a very vast concept that requires effort and massive volumes of data. When done right, personalization can yield profitable results. Statistics also reveal that over 80% of the consumers prefer buying from eCommerce stores that offer personalized services.
With AI integration in your Shopify development, you can extensively study your users individually, understand their preferences, their tastes, likes and dislikes, and more, and push products and services they are most likely to buy. Besides, personalization also enables you to
- track abandoned carts and send personalized deals and discounts to encourage them to complete sales
- send out personally curated newsletters
- visualizations of their purchase history
- implement rewarding systems and do more.
2. Smart Marketing
With consumers becoming smarter by the day, advertisers and marketers need to be a step ahead to push sales and drive brand value. Artificial intelligence is the most ideal tech concept to help us do that.
With AI incorporation for your Shopify store, you can make way for smart marketing to study the effectiveness of previous campaigns, analyze subject lines or ad copies of emails and social media posts, predict market or consumer behavior trends, tailor email copies, refine marketing objectives and more. Shopify’s ad kit for social media platforms lets you do all this with ease. With money being channelized into these marketing funnels, working on meaningful RoI through AI becomes mandatory.
3. Recommendation Engines
Shopify has a very specific recommendation app for your store. With recommendation engines, you can show your customers products that they are most likely to buy. From the outlook, it could appear that it is the same as personalized services but if you refine the concepts, you would understand that recommendation here comes from other data touchpoints such as what their friends are purchasing, trending product combos (headphones and their protective cases), new arrivals and more.
Apart from these, there is also a smart search available for users to see products and services that we push and upsell from the backend. The best part is every single recommendation can be studied for effectiveness and optimized for results as well.
4. Automation
Online shopping involves tons of trigger points for customer interaction. From the time users decide to sign up on your Shopify store and wait for their OTPs or verification numbers to the time their invoices and bills arrive in their inboxes, eCommerce involves tons of emails, messages, and engagement. While this is from a customer perspective, as business owners, we also have interactions with our vendors, supply-chain networks, affiliates, and more where additional documentation, recurring billing, and more are part of the process. When so many technicalities and tasks are involved, the only ideal solution to deal with them is automation.
In a few steps, you can automate all your redundant processes and offer seamless experiences to our customers and vendors. With automation, we can send welcome kits and newsletters to new subscribers or customers, remind users to complete a purchase, segregate and target diverse consumers, minimize cart abandonment, manage inventory and payroll and do more.
5. Future-proof Virtual Stores
An online business with obsolete tech infrastructure is just weeks or probably months away from becoming extinct. Seriously, there are companies working on implementing voice searches, beacons, IoT-enabled shopping experiences, and more. From a customer standpoint, AI integration in your Shopify store is basic and fundamental. With its deployment, you are making your eCommerce store future-proof “ at least for the next decade. Besides, you are also cutting down on major operational and organizational expenses. AI offers you instant tangible results both for you and your customers.
Wrapping Up
Implementing AI for your Shopify store is not as difficult as it sounds. There are tons of plugins and tools available for integration. All you need are airtight goals, strategies, and key metrics to set up, supervise and track performance and results. When you have these in place, you can be sure of consistent growth in the eCommerce spectrum. So, implement AI if you haven’t already and look for creative ways to leverage its complete potential. Good luck!
