Leveraging AI in Your Ecommerce Business Strategy

By: Melanie Lusnak

At a glance

• The main takeaway: Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how ecommerce businesses operate. Businesses can leverage AI to adapt to market changes and keep a competitive edge.
• Impact on your business: Leveraging AI may be appealing and can be quite cost-efficient, but it is important for small businesses to practice caution. In this article, we explore the key things to watch out for when implementing AI in your business.
• Next steps: Aprio is your full-spectrum advisor for every aspect of your business. Reach out to Aprio’s Managed Services eCommerce Team to know more.

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The full story:

AI is transforming how ecommerce businesses operate: maximizing profits and efficiency, improving the customer experience, increasing brand loyalty, and helping a business grow and stand out. Businesses leverage AI to adapt to market changes and keep a competitive edge in today’s digital landscape.

AI can help business owners make data-driven decisions that can boost operations and improve the overall customer experience through personalization, customer behavior analysis and data analytics, and optimization of business features.

Large businesses are able to hire entire teams to run various aspects of the business. However, this is not always the case for businesses of all sizes. Small businesses do not necessarily have all the resources to build a whole team that can manage different departmental functions. Leveraging AI may be an appealing and cost-efficient alternative, but it is important to practice some caution.

In this article, we explore the key things to watch out for when implementing AI in your business.

The role of AI in ecommerce

According to The Business Research Company’s Artificial Intelligence In E-Commerce 2024 Global Market Report, AI in the ecommerce market is expected to reach $14.07 billion in 2028 due to increased online shopping. The implementation and investments in AI in ecommerce may be responsible for the projected increase, with consumer behavior relying on AI-powered product recommendations and businesses focusing on integrating AI into their processes and fraud detection.

In the ecommerce industry, AI helps retailers offer personalized recommendations to customers, automate business processes to maximize productivity, identify revenue opportunities, and make data-driven decisions for strategizing business efforts.

Benefits of using AI in ecommerce

AI can truly be a game-changer for small businesses across industries. Here are the key benefits of leveraging AI in ecommerce:

One of the most notable positive impacts of AI is the ability to improve the overall customer experience through personalization. Based on a customer’s online behavior, AI can offer personalized recommendations, which can also help increase customer retention. It is an opportunity for retailers to make a lasting impression on their customers. AI can also offer real-time assistance to customers through chatbots or virtual assistants.

AI helps streamline business operations, so retailers can maximize productivity and focus more on other operational aspects of their business. For instance, AI can automate repetitive tasks, assist in managing logistics and inventory, and use pattern recognition to detect and prevent ecommerce fraud.

Because AI can analyze large amounts of data, it can provide retailers with data-driven decisions that are instrumental to growing their business. AI can predict future trends, while machine learning can analyze past behaviors and patterns — and both can help retailers create proactive strategies for long-term ecommerce growth.

Integrating AI in your ecommerce business can help you spot suspicious behavior, analyze competitors’ behavior and trends, and predict market demand. These proactive steps are significant factors in boosting ecommerce growth.

As with any other type of business, leveraging AI in your operations can offer a competitive advantage. AI is likely to continue growing as it continuously adapts to current market trends, and your ecommerce business must, too.

Key things to look out for when using AI for ecommerce growth

According to Hostinger Tutorials, here are four challenges that retailers might encounter when implementing AI in their ecommerce business:

While AI is appealing due to its convenience and cost-efficiency, small businesses may encounter challenges implementing the infrastructure needed to properly train machine learning algorithms and other components necessary for AI to work properly. This is where having the expertise of a professional, third-party outsourcing team can come in handy. Understanding how AI works and having the resources to deploy it is significant for successful AI adoption.

Take ample time to train yourself, your leadership team, and your employees to use AI in your business processes. Understanding what types of prompts to use, verifying that what’s produced is coming from a reputable source, understanding what hallucinations are, and adding human involvement are essential to implement AI into your business processes.

Remember, AI cannot fully work on its own; it still needs the ‘human touch’ to see its full potential and how it can benefit the business.

For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking at using AI, many times it is going to be an extra option that they pay for in an existing product. Understanding whether their (and in turn, their customers’) data will be used for training AI models, and if it is, whether it will be anonymized, is critical, along with knowing how/where/how long data is retained by third parties. Making sure any platform they are using has cybersecurity certifications and policies in place that align with their needs is key. This is why it is essential to take a second look at your cybersecurity strategies and consider preparing a legal document disclosing what data is being collected, as well as its purpose and who has access to it.

Discrimination can happen from data that is too limited or algorithms not trained properly. Having proper training in place for employees can help users spot biases to help prevent discrimination. Making sure that there is still enough human oversight and data analysis is super important. That is why everyone in the business must how and where AI is implemented into their processes; all employees should go through training before using AI. Transparency is key to ensuring fair, unbiased decisions.

The bottom line

The ecommerce industry has become incredibly competitive since the pandemic. Thousands of online retailers were introduced, with each having their own unique way of selling. AI is expected to grow even bigger in the coming years, and many businesses will continue to invest and implement AI in their operations.

As AI continues to influence the ecommerce industry, ecommerce business owners should continue to invest time into understanding how AI can benefit their business. Aprio’s Managed Services eCommerce Team is your full-spectrum advisor for every aspect of your business. Schedule a consultation today to learn more about how we can help you.

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