How AI and Big Data Help Create a User-Centric Shopping Assistant App?

Convenience is something that people look out for while shopping. Building an e-commerce store is easy, provided the developer is aware of the basics. What is it that the customers want to see? What is it that Google is looking out for? How can the conversion rates be increased? How to increase the traffic over the app/website?

Basic Features within a Personal Shopping Assistant App

• User Experience: Out of these, it is the user experience that can be rated high. A customer would return or recommend the app in case they are satisfied. Word of mouth rates higher than any other kind of propaganda.

• Search: It is important to have a robust search facility to scroll down the categories, searching at levels, without break or 404 page not found errors. Search suggestions or prompted a search to show the searcher shortcuts while the query is still being typed into the text box, a drop-down list with the suggested completions appears to provide to select.

• Navigation: The application must be easily navigable. The architecture must be well-defined

• Labeling Categories: All the categories and pages must be properly labeled. All the search queries must be mirrored on the app/site and the frequently searched keywords must be checked.

• Contact Details and Feedback: Testimonials, customer feedback, contact details, online customer support, and FAQ’s, help and delivery options – everything needs to be duly reinforced, especially for new and unknown brands.

• Figuring out the key information: User purchase behavior like checking the price of the products, most frequently visited categories etc. must be tracked so that their decision-making process can be tracked while making the purchase.

• Customer Focus: How to keep the customer focused on purchase and conversion goals and minimize distractions?

• Effective Images: Making use of effective images to help customers evaluate the products. These must be optimized for Google while uploading and must also be compressed. All this must be done in accordance with the page weights to avoid slow loading times.

• Recommendations: Suggest and recommend as much as you can as people tend to read reviews, cross verify, have a second opinion before actually making a purchase.

• Visible support options: Tracking of the package, online customer service tools, prominently displayed telephone numbers, emails etc. are vital essentials for a performant e-commerce app.

Retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 till 2021 (in US billion dollars)

This statistic illustrates retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 till 2021. Convenience to customers is directly proportional to the success of the e-Commerce industry. It is the measure of effectiveness and quickness that the marketers. With the increased intolerance for irrelevant content and time constraints, people get easily drawn towards improved search methods, where they get similar suggestions NLP and AI can make semantic search engines more precise and accurate.

Role of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Creating E-Commerce Apps

Search is not only focused on keywords but it also depends upon recognizing types, synonyms, and product relations. Personal shopper assistants are customized to do following functions:

• Enabling voice and image in search engines also make it convenient to search.
• AI enabled smart assistants to make shopping across the various categories easy. They are as good as human customer care representatives – they listen, understand, talk, resolve queries and suggest solutions. E.g: The Northe Face XPS, Rakuten Fit Me, Amazon Alexa etc.
• Analyzing customer search behavior and purchase preferences help anticipate customers’ needs with smart recommendations. ML has made cross-selling and upselling offerings more relevant for the customers.
• AI has also influenced marketing and warehouse logistics.
• AI helps with predictions smartly for sales, fact-based segmentations, and analysis of reviews.
• Analysis of reviews is another AI benefit for e-commerce marketing. This includes analyzing the content of reviews and mine valuable data from page descriptions and reviews.
• It is helpful in speeding up warehouse operations, reduce manpower, cut costs and increase revenue.
• From stacking the products on shelves, packing and shipping the merchandise, AI-based robots are soon being replaced as delivery agents and support staff – which has actually increased efficiency.
• The e-commerce industry is experiencing a stroke of implementation of AI in backend operations. Digital assistants who behave like humans, warehouses operated by robots, delivery of shipments via drones – all and much more looks fictitious but are slowly penetrating into daily life.

How Do Shopping Assistants Help?

Personal shoppers assist customers in booking/processing orders on behalf of customers, via emails, chat or phone calls. A virtual shopping assistant or chat-bot is an AI-based software program that companies use to expand their business. Generally shopping assistants function as follow:

• Process Customer Orders
• Recommend Products Based on Trends
• Process Financial Adjustments
• Support Clients with Exchanges and Replacements
• Maximize Client Base
• Suggest a possible solution to the queries

Shopping/e-commerce chat-bots (virtual assistants) enable Fortune 500 brands to acquire new customers, increase LTV and remove the need for redundant customer care support via automated chat. It as well eases working in shifts, according to various time zones, round the clock. Brands have been able to exceed 65% message open rates, 25% CTR, 4X revenue lift and reduce service costs by up to 20%.

The virtual assistants/chatbots scan the entire product offerings of the site and then offer the customer a unique and innovative shopping experience. Combining chatbots with email marketing strategy can ultimately prove to be a double whammy. Chatbots can be used to mass message customers, can be used to send them old chats or reminder messages when a product is back in stock, or a similar product is available at a lesser price.

Shopping Assistants Examples

Some of the most interesting examples of chat-bots are:

• Aerie’s shopping chat-bot – has helped it with user acquisition
• Nike’s chat-bot has helped it boost conversions from retail messenger campaign
• Ebay’s shopping bot has been an ultimate auction tool for the company

How Intelligent Are Shopping Assistants?

These provide easy and cost-effective solutions through natural language drag and drop interface.

A bot’s capabilities can as well be automated simply but dragging them from pre-built ability library (or even creating your own) can further configure the data source and systems that ability touches in the settings.

A bot can be programmed to recognize the language, which can immensely help in ensuring that it understands the brand or location-specific jargon used by customers to find the products. Bot’s response can also be customized to be more conversational (going all the way along from chit-chatty down to simple commands).

Big data and Artificial Intelligence (Data Intelligence) has powered shopping assistants to perform without human consultation:

• Comparing the price of various products
• Providing discount coupons (personalized)
• Alerting customers in case of unsafe products
• Keeping a track of shopping history
• Tracking the user’s shipments from any merchant

Determinate

Although many people still prefer to interact with real people while making a shopping decision, still virtual assistant programs like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa mimic human interaction to provide factual answers to user requests.

Overall personal shopping assistants help to provide users with a customized shopping experience, continuous learning from interactions with the client (as it becomes possible for machines to learn), process customers’ orders through live chats or telephones, recommend merchandise to clients on every order call, ensure customer satisfaction by presenting them with prime product information, ensure that season must-haves and latest trends are being recommended based on their purchase history and search behavior, identify and resolve any problems that customers have from catalog and internet, ensure to track client packages, support customers for replacement and exchanges,  process financial adjustments as necessary, stimulate feedback from clients, providing expert advice related to fashion trends etc.

Trust us to create an app to level up e-commerce platform i.e. shopping assistant apps, we create Personal shopping assistant apps to make running your business a breeze. It is a no-risk/high reward situation that is effective enough to draw conversions. Want more info? Ensure to contact our experts for more tips, trends in app development and some food for thought.