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How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Change Magento

AI and Magento

Disclaimer: Magenticians does not necessarily agree with the views expressed in this guest post. They are presented to bring to light all diverse views in the Magento and general ecommerce community.

The Magento community is abuzz with how AI will reshape the ecommerce industry. With continuous advances in digital voice technology, AI tools such as Alexa, Cortana, and Watson, are gracing headlines almost daily, hinting at the wide scope of opportunities it has to revolutionize ecommerce stores.

The key question is: Will AI disrupt the world of ecommerce?

The answer – No. Sure, AI will make unprecedented leaps in shaping consumer buying habits and thoughts. But to think it will bring about the inevitable dark future where an army of machines (if not Terminators) rule over man isn’t happening. So don’t fret, the rise in AI won’t cause Judgement Day.

At the moment, AI for e-commerce is mainly used for collecting, deciphering, storing, and leveraging information to provide actionable insights and decisions. Moving forward, analyzing data patterns, behavior, performance, as well as customers’ emotional barriers is where AI software development company will be leading the change in ecommerce.

But what does this mean for Magento?

With this level of AI available applications in e-commerce is immeasurable. Let us just sample a few of these amazing benefits of AI if it is combined with one of the most popular and scalable e-commerce platform, Magento.

1. Creating a Smoother Shopping Experience

E-commerce is used interchangeably with one-click shopping, and AI will only amplify it through its smart context-based search functionality.

At present, both B2B and B2C customers opt for Magento owing to its advanced search options and array of customized extensions (all thanks to its active and close-knit community).

But with AI’s superior context-based search, store navigation on the Magento platform becomes faster and far more user-friendly. For a start, the keyword-based search will no longer run the show as Natural Language Processing (NLP) will drive semantics keywords search. The result? Customers will be able to shop online effortlessly thanks to AI.

2. Providing Exceptional Personalized Experience

With the addition of exclusive ecommerce platforms such as Magento, the ‘click-and-mortar’ model’s growth has been in full swing. But despite this, ecommerce stores still lag behind in replicating the personalized in-store experience found in ‘brick-and-mortar’ stores.

This is where AI can bridge the personalization gap. Through AI driven ecommerce stores, you can deliver customer-centric campaigns from multiple channels to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Irrespective of the channel where your shopper was shopping from, AI can offer up-to-the-minute personalized shopping suggestions through push notifications straight to their mobile phones.

Magento’s advanced personalization options offer these benefits already. These include personalized recommendations, customized tier pricing, shopper based loyalty programs, gift card options, and cross-selling and upselling options.

3. Optimized Customer Support

AI can also step up your customer relations by deciphering experiential sample data to provide efficient customer support in real-time.

Ecommerce stores often get a bad rep for its lack of quick and personalized support. But with machine learning to process customer queries and patterns, AI can automate customer responses that can help you obtain a key edge in attracting and retaining customers.

An example of this is deploying chatbots on the Magento store to boost the Magento functionality.

4. Facilitate Purchase Decisions

This is expected to be the future of AI evolution. There are dozens of innovative companies like Shoptagr that are using the concept of virtual shopping assistant to cut down the time spent by shoppers in buying a product.

According to a study by Adweek, 36% of shoppers spend 30 minutes and 65% spend close to 16 minutes researching online before making a purchase. This is an opportunity ripe for taking for innovators. The future of e-commerce is definitely virtual shopping assistants.

With advanced machine learning algorithms, analytic bots can collect large sums of data through millions of touch points to make purchase decisions stress-free.

Whether it is helping shoppers find the best price, sending alerts of available and restocked products, and marketing great discounts and offers on liked products, Shoptagr is setting the benchmark for success.

By integrating this level of AI expertise into a Magento store, your e-commerce brand will become bulletproof.

5. Prevent Frauds

Accepting payments and financial transactions is a major criteria for e-commerce businesses. With the scale of fraudulent attacks on ecommerce websites that occur on a regular basis, retailers and e-commerce businesses are upping the ante.

According to a study by Reitblat, e-commerce merchants lose a whopping $4 billion due to fraudulent activities. The same study even quotes that big e-commerce merchants actually turn down $20 billion worth of suspicious yet genuine orders for fear of being counterfeit.

So how can AI help in this regard? It can exact the precision needed to identify fraudulent activities amidst a clutter of transactions. Combining AI with Magento expertise is a sure winning combination.

These are some of the features that can be achieved by combining the power of AI with Magento e-commerce platform: superior precision and augmentation when compared to the human brain, impeccable judgment of behavioral and buying patterns, reduced dependency on human intervention leading to reduced time in checking for a fraudulent transaction, and more.

Conclusion

Most e-commerce giants have started putting Artificial Intelligence to their advantage. For example, Amazon has utilized AI to systemize it’s Alexa context-based search for its Gen X customers.

As an ecommerce store owners, you shouldn’t trail behind. Now is the time to embed AI as part of your business strategy on the Magento platform. Its scalable and easy integration features for out of the box extensions make it the perfect candidate to take your store to the next stage of the ecommerce evolution.

Author Bio

Prashant Mahanti is a Marketing Specialist at i95Dev, Magento certified solution provider. Along with Magento development, they provide integration solutions between Magento stores and the most widely used ERP systems.

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