“The old ways of doing business and the old businesses themselves are under attack and the new ways of doing business will in many cases spawn totally new businesses,” - Michael Aldrich, the Godfather of online shopping
Much like the electronic shopping evolution of 1979, modern ecommerce has entered a new era. Once rooted in basic processes and manual tasks, it has now expanded into a dynamic industry driven by artificial intelligence and advanced technologies. This transformation has not only reshaped how brands operate but also revolutionized the shopping experience for consumers.
Gone are the days of guesswork—whether it’s understanding customer personas or managing inventory, AI now streamlines and optimizes every aspect of the ecommerce process. Ecommerce is growing at an astonishing rate, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.8%, more than twice the speed of traditional retail. This growth is fueled by AI’s ability to enhance customer insights, refine operations, and boost overall efficiency.
You might use tools like ChatGPT or Grammarly to fine-tune your emails or have experience with AI in consumer apps like Rufus or chatbots. But as an ecommerce brand, how do you strategically select and implement AI to optimize your business operations?
Our experts use AI to create exceptional customer experiences and drive growth for our brand partners. Spreetail’s success as the #1 omnichannel accelerator in the industry is built on leveraging AI to enhance our optimization, delivery capabilities, and integrated fulfillment network. It is what has allowed us to sell a wide range of products and ship them across the globe.
Choosing Your AI Opportunities
As AI and technology continue to evolve, each new advancement brings along trends and best practices that can help brands maximize their tech investments. However, not every shiny new software tool is essential, or even plausible, for brands working with limited budgets and resources. Deciding where to focus to create the most impact can be challenging. Here’s our advice on how to prioritize effectively:
- Pricing: Pricing systems are becoming more adept at adjusting using a variety of factors, including demand predictions, seasonality, competitor data, buyer behavior, and inventory levels. This enables sellers with advanced systems to offer the most reasonable prices. Marketplaces are also improving their technology to monitor trends across ecommerce sites, suppressing listings that aren't competitively priced. This not only helps to prevent gouging but also benefits sellers who use sophisticated technology to ensure they are consistent wherever their products are sold.
- Content: Brands that harness AI and sophisticated content optimization technology can enhance their listing quality on a large scale by continuously adapting to buyer interactions. For shoppers, this technology presents three clear benefits: easier discovery of brand listings, access to vital information for informed purchasing decisions, and product visualizations that often exceed the in-store experience.
- Delivery Promise Optimization: Buyers expect fast and on-time delivery, so a great fulfillment network is essential. The challenge lies in ensuring that each listing accurately represents the quickest possible delivery without risking overcommitment. To tackle this, marketplaces are leveraging predictive technology algorithms, with the best marketplaces using advanced AI models that continuously adjust based on actual delivery outcomes. Brands with delivery speed advantages can boost conversion and customer satisfaction by automating the representation of their network's capabilities on all marketplaces, ensuring that buyers always get an accurate and swift delivery promise.
The Listing Advantage
Consider the customer journey. Whether researching products, making a purchase decision, or simply browsing the latest trends and sales, every online shopper shares a common behavior: they review product listings.
While AI has revolutionized warehousing and fulfillment, it's your product listings that offer the greatest potential to boost sales. The average shopper spends only about 62 minutes a week shopping online, with 40% spending 30 minutes or less. That’s a limited window to make an impression.
To maximize this opportunity, your listings need to be optimized with keywords tailored to the specific marketplace algorithm. Listings are the easiest and most impactful place to start. AI-powered systems can distill vast amounts of data into specific listing optimizations to enhance findability, click-through rates, and conversion while advanced technology integrations can establish a consistent omnichannel brand presence, and deliver a top-notch customer experience.
- Product Recommendations: By integrating tailored recommendations into product listings, brands can increase the likelihood of conversions. Showing customers items related to the product they are already interested in helps extend the purchase decision.
- Pricing Optimization: Machine learning models can monitor market trends, competitor pricing, and customer demand in real-time allowing brands to automatically adjust prices while tracking variations and discrepancies across channels. This ensures that listings remain competitively priced while maximizing profits, helping brands respond quickly to market fluctuations.
- Visual Content: Augmented reality allows customers to visualize products in their own space before purchasing. Brands can incorporate AR features into their listings, such as allowing shoppers to “try on” clothes or see how furniture fits in their home, leading to higher engagement and reduced return rates.
- Content Creation: AI can generate product descriptions, titles, and keywords optimized for search engines. By using these AI tools to create high-quality, SEO-friendly content, brands can improve their visibility on marketplaces, attracting more potential customers to their listings.
- Findability: The first step is making sure listings can be easily found by buyers. Listings should be regularly optimized with high-search-volume keywords, insights from competitive listings, and performance metrics list shipping speed, order defect rate, and customer experience.
- Customer Feedback: Analyzing buyer feedback across all online channels will reveal insights that can be used to improve listings. Positive feedback should be amplified in listing content, and negative feedback can be addressed by more accurately representing product information.
- Competitive Listings: Insights from high-performing competitive listings will yield learnings about consumer behavior that can be used to enhance listings.
- Image and Video Optimization: Advanced image and video analysis technology allows algorithms to understand and optimize the content of visual media, much like they have done with text.
“One area of technology that Spreetail is particularly excited about is the ability to understand the visual experiences that buyers react best to. Advanced image/video analysis technology and trained AI models allow us to categorize and detect visual features that result in better traffic, conversion, and customer feedback.
One of our most powerful tools, The Listing Doctor, leverages this advanced image processing to track content changes and monitor performance, ensuring your listings remain consistently optimized across catalogs and retail channels. This proactive approach enables our team to identify and resolve issues within hours, not days, driving significant improvements in BSR (Best Seller Rank), conversions, and revenue.” - Brock Butler, VP of Engineering
Investing in the Future
From AI-generated content to advanced visual search and blockchain integration for enhanced security, the potential for AI and other technologies to transform ecommerce is vast. As these technologies continue to evolve, they will enable even more personalized, efficient, and seamless shopping experiences for consumers, while driving growth for businesses.
Is your brand riding the coattails of this revolutionary innovation?
Spreetail’s mission is to help our brand partners grow their ecommerce market share. We accomplish this by staying on the leading edge of ecommerce technology solutions to accelerate innovation and deliver game-changing results.
Buyers shopping online should be able to quickly find the products that meet their needs, get information personalized to their buying criteria, and know that they are getting a competitive price and the fastest delivery speeds. The future of online shopping, enhanced by AI-powered technology solutions, will make it possible to do this at scale, rivaling the experience of the best brick-and-mortar retailers. Spreetail intends to be at the forefront of this revolution.
If you're interested in learning how Spreetail uses technology to drive exceptional success for our brand partners, connect with our team of experts. They will identify key opportunities and craft growth strategies tailored to your goals.
Digital Marketer
