Impact of GenAI on eCommerce

The impact of Generative AI on e-commerce is huge. Global retail e-commerce sales in 2023 reached an estimated 5.8 trillion USD. Projections indicate a 39 percent growth in this figure over the coming years, expecting it to surpass eight trillion dollars by 2027. Generative AI-driven productivity is set to provide substantial lift to the economy, likely delivering a boost worth USD 650 Billion over the next decade and lifting real US GDP by nearly 2.5% by 2033, as per an EY report.

GenAI is an AI technology that is based on deep learning, multi-modal neural and large language models that process data and generate content in the form of natural language, text, code, music, videos. In a typical e-commerce ecosystem, huge amounts of data are generated and exchanged across multiple systems. This data when leveraged in combination with powerful GenAI technology would lead to transformed experiences for the users across the value chain. GenAI is poised to accelerate overall productivity through:

• Automation of tasks like content creation, reporting, for process efficiency
• Enrichment of user experiences through specific solutions that offer personalization, convenience and self-serve capabilities across value chain
• Innovation by providing opportunities to creators, developers, brands.

With both e-commerce and GenAI technology being in a steep growth path, several opportunities are presented across the e-commerce user journey to transform end user experiences. These opportunities in the form of GenAI solutions when employed would impact the following KPIs in an e-commerce business:

• Click through rate, search conversion
• Add to cart rate
• Reduce drop offs from shopping cart
• Average order value/basket size
• Improve customer loyalty through better engagement
• Help customers find relevant offers
• Contextualize customer journey, improve customer lifetime value
• Build credibility with customers
• Provide better self-serve capabilities
• Operational efficiencies for business users in generating variations of content
• Optimize delivery experience through route optimization
• Automation of customer support processes like returns, re-order, cancellations

Let’s identify some of the potential GenAI solutions that could be provide value to the customer and business user (marketers, merchandisers, operations teams, customer support) groups.

Potential Solutions for Customers

Shopping Assistant: Most common version of an assistant is in form of chatbot. This version of GenAI based assistant would contextualize conversation to the user, accept questions in natural language, images, voice and can provide response in multiple forms (product recommendations, order status, respond to image, voice search, create return request, reorder, shipping labels).

Contextual Search: GenAI powered search solution that receives broad search queries from customers and generates contextual product previews and guide terms to help customers navigate from within the search dialog.

Landing Page Content Optimization: Generate backgrounds for campaign banners or product images on the landing page to engage customers based on their personal preferences.

Product Variant Visualizer: Generate preview of product images and details with variations and provide visibility of availability based on personal preferences.

Contextual Reviews: Generate top positive and negative keywords from the customer reviews to provide a snapshot to the customer.

Comparison Assistant: Generate preview of product comparisons based on the shopping and user context, and preferences. This could be embedded into the chatbot interface to provide simpler adoption by customers.

Offer Recommender: Suggest offers relevant to the cart and consumer preferences (delivery incentives, amount off, free products).

Delivery Optimizer: Suggest delivery and shipping options for the consumer based on availability, warehouse location, delivery address, price sensitivity, and such factors.

Cart Visualizer: Solution could be embedded into the chatbot, and on request by customer the chatbot could respond to queries like “shop by a specific look” with a simulation of the cart based on the look contextualized to the customers location, preferences.

Potential GenAI solutions for business users

Marketing Assistant: Chatbot envisioned for the marketing, operations, customer support teams to ask questions in natural language and receive response/recommendations.  Supports product assortment planning, provides reports on store and customer intelligence.

FAQ Generator: Store operations team could generate FAQ section for specific products or to detail policies across the store. This could be reviewed by marketers before publishing it to end customers.

Media mix optimization: Bid for the right keywords and placements on search engine results pages and marketplaces. Reports with recommendations for marketers on mapping products with long tail searches based on keywords history and current business targets.

Asset Tagging: Auto generating tags and labels for digital assets to allow for smoother digital asset management and search within the site.

Marketing Banners: Create marketing banners for US across the site based on offers available in the store.

Cross-channel Product Content: Generate/simulate product detail page based on multiple factors and provide preview for marketer to approve.

Ratings & recommendations optimizer: Automatically apply reviews across variants of same product, generate previews of cross and up-sell recommendations for marketer to approve.

Offer Content Creator: Generate and preview promotional banners to marketers based on available offers on the site to be applied on the shopping cart.

Fraud Reporting: Report daily order summary with potential fraud and recommendations for orders in the manual review queue.

Order Traceability: Visibility of orders flow from across channels, following through to the end of fulfillment to the customer

Returns Creator: Generate shipping label for returns and send to customers, manage refunds, exchange, re-order for customers based on inputs provided over chatbot.

Campaign Recommender: Generate campaign content for review by marketers to re-engage with customers who haven’t purchased during the last few months.

Exploring current e-commerce shopping trends, available GenAI capabilities, and key priorities all lead to these solutions. The detailed methodology and the framework to adopt and apply governance around GenAI technology in e-commerce is further explored in a whitepaper, available for download here.

Connect with Infogain’s Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) team when you are ready to accelerate your organization’s GenAI + Commerce transformation journey.