How to Leverage AI in Fashion for Your eCommerce Business

The recent announcement from OpenAI Dev Day has excited us about what we can now build to enhance the online shopping experience. However, it's also overwhelming to figure out where to begin.

So, what can AI do for eCommerce?

As a starting point, AI can automate nearly every repetitive task from marketing to operations. However, one of the most pressing challenges in eCommerce is matching the right products to shoppers and delighting them. AI can be the driving force behind delivering better-matched products, resulting in the desirable outcomes every retailer wants: higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates.

A Quick Note: Why don’t shoppers convert from your eCommerce website?

Shoppers have increasingly low tolerance for poor shopping experiences, and as retailer product catalogs grow bigger, it is getting harder and harder for shoppers to find matching products. 

Specifically, shoppers aren’t converting because:

1- Search doesn’t understand shopper intentions, so results aren’t accurate
2- Personalization, such as recommendations, is too general to convert
3- Shoppers struggle to navigate long text filters that are filled with fashion jargon

Shoppers are having a hard time finding the relevant products they want. Retailers miss out on sales opportunities.

Retailers know this. Shoppers know this. So, what’s the solution?

Here’s what AI in eCommerce can do for your eCommerce:

1. AI improves speed: While AI isn’t meant to be a replacement for a human, it can improve the speed at which humans do work.

-In only a few seconds (versus hours), AI can tag products for filtering, create product descriptions, or sort products.
-Struggling to find the right products to complete the look? AI can automate complete the look for every product.

2. AI improves scalability: For tasks that would require manual configuration or hours of manual labor, AI makes it easier to scale.

-AI can create personalized curations for each individual shopper, based on their specific tastes, preferences, and history.
-AI finds matching products for a shopper, retrieving them based on customer support or chat.

3. AI relentlessly analyzes: AI provides the ability to analyze customer data in ways that humans can’t, because of its ability to detect patterns.

-AI can easily analyze every single click or view from shoppers, and make an inference on her next favorite items.
-AI effectively analyzes a shopper’s trends to merchandise for shoppers.

AI Offers a Unique Solution to Conversion and Bounce Rate Problems

Every retailer wants to provide a seamless product discovery experience, but many are trapped in a vicious cycle of growing product catalog, with limited solutions.

With a lack of engineering resources to build in-house AI, retailers are strapped for time and resources, and left without product discovery that can meet sophisticated shopper expectations. 

Fortunately, there are AI tools for eCommerce that are solving these specific problems effectively and efficiently, and customized just for fashion retailers.

As a retailer, you can use AI in eCommerce to help in:

-Creating individualized recommendations for each shopper that inspire

-Curating cohesive shopping experiences

-Enabling shopper discovery of the full depth of a product catalog

-Personalizing in an affordable and scalable way

-Acquiring rich product data to create advanced filtering and recommendations

-Allowing shoppers to intuitively search and avoid getting stuck by confusing fashion jargon

But, what are the specific tools that can enable retailers to achieve these benefits?

[This is part of Your 2024 AI eCommerce Guide. You can access Chapter 1 through this link, and Chapter 3 is on the way.]