Written in partnership with Allison Schingel
What gets customers and what keeps them coming back? It’s a question that’s on the mind of every business owner. As more and more people shop online, e-commerce businesses need to be thinking up innovative ways to respond to growing demand and attract potential patrons.
Nataraj Sindam’s expertise in business mentoring, product development, and AI technologies can help provide those in the e-commerce industry with fresh ideas to take their enterprise to the next level. His project 100 Days of AI will inspire anyone to use this exciting, emerging medium to improve business operations.
As Sindam has written in his project, Generative AI can assist e-commerce companies by scaling up media production and providing detailed analytics with guided recommendations for any business. Especially for smaller shops, AI allows companies to cut down on time spent on simple tasks like writing product descriptions and responding to common customer complaints, and helps owners be productive where it really counts.
Finding Words that Work
Even if you’re only selling a few items, those items will need interesting titles, headlines, and product descriptions. If you want to promote your store, you’ll rely on emails, text campaigns, and even blog posts as potential marketing materials.
Running an e-commerce business requires a lot of writing. Generative AI can be very helpful in this regard; you’ll no longer have to waste time listing all the features of a given product and trying to make them sound as appealing as possible. Instead, you can use tools like Chat GPT and Notion to write your copy for you.
Nataraj Sindam specifically names Notion as one of the best AI tools for startups. It can complete blog posts, come up with ideas, check grammar, and even translate copy to different languages. These translations can help your e-commerce business reach audiences all over the world, greatly expanding the scope of your customer base.
If you’re on Shopify, then Sindam suggests the use of Shopify Magic, the platform’s very own generative AI suite. Features include the writing of product descriptions, product headlines, email subject lines and full email messages, and blogs. Shopify Magic also goes beyond words—it has an image generation feature as well, so you can use many different kinds of media in your promotions.
The right copy attracts and converts the audience you want. With new AI tools to help you write, getting customers will be much easier.
New Paths for Customer Service
E-commerce isn’t quite the same as shopping in person, but e-commerce businesses should still expect that customers will need some support. Instead of store clerks to guide purchases, make suggestions, and accept and respond to complaints, online customer service models perform these actions. While people have generally taken on the brunt of this work, new generative AI models can help provide smooth, efficient, and satisfying service.
As an expert in startup ventures, Nataraj Sindam knows what it takes for a business to succeed. He’s enthusiastic about Karna’s AI chatbot, which handles a host of customer service needs. This chatbot has risen to handle ⅔ of all inquiries, and customer satisfaction surveys have proved that it works just as well as a person. A tool like this cuts down on costs while improving productivity. For a small business, in particular, using generative AI for customer service can make a big difference.
Shopify Magic can also come in handy during the customer service process. With its expert text generation, this tool can help you write specific responses to a host of customer inquiries. You’ll be able to respond much more quickly, which will make your customers happier.
Time to Launch AI Features in Your Product
For startups and companies that are catering to e-commerce businesses, Nataraj as a long time product manager developing cloud technologies suggests adopting AI to develop features that will solve customer problems. He suggests examples like Klarna, Amazon & Shopify which have deployed AI based features that have solved customer problems that were not possible to solve before.
To get started he advises development teams to start experimenting with AI services provided by Open Ai, Perplexity, Google Gemini & Azure Open AI. The beauty he suggests is the barrier to entry in developing generative AI features is low as all the services charge based on usage, teams can scale AI expenses as they grow their business and avoid huge input costs that we would see in general in other businesses.
Optimizing Ventures with Analytics
After a certain number of sales, any e-commerce business will want to analyze what’s working and what isn’t. AI-generated insights into the most popular products and customer comments can make a big difference in overall productivity and profitability.
Sindam recommends the generative AI tool Yabble, which relies on customer feedback to optimize your business. It takes all customer comments and categorizes them, giving structure to major takeaways. It also uses GPT-3 to translate data sets into important themes underlying customer sentiment.
Generative AI can also read patterns in data to create hyper-personalized ads, and it can draw up ads for top-performing products, too. Using these tools to analyze what’s working in your business helps save time and energy in the short- and long-term, and lets you focus on what matters to you most.
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