There are many ways to leverage AI and plenty of AI tools for ecommerce in 2024—where do you begin?
In this guide, we'll walk through the top AI tools for ecommerce in the market right now, how to choose the best options for your unique needs, and how you can start implementing them to save time and sell more in 2024.
Benefits of using AI Tools for Ecommerce in 2024
Personalized Customer Experiences
Before AI, we grouped users based on their attributes and behaviors, we tailored our messaging to each group of users, and feature offers to the ones we think might convert.
There were only so many segments and messaging we could manage.
AI tools today have powerful data analysis capabilities that can help us segment users in a more granular manner to boost our ecommerce merchandising strategies. They can analyze what they prefer based on large data sets and deliver the right messaging and offers when the time is right.
Imagine an AI tool that dynamically adjusts your website for each visitor based on their browsing behavior, location, and purchase history. Product recommendations become hyper-relevant and users are more likely to convert.
Optimized Marketing Strategies
AI provides deep insights into customer data, allowing you to optimize marketing campaigns for maximum impact.
Instead of blasting generic promotions, you can run predictive, data-driven campaigns tailored to each segment.
With AI, you could automatically retarget cart abandoners with personalized discounts or send replenishment reminders when customers are due for a repeat purchase. Your marketing becomes smarter and more effective.
Streamlined Business Operations
Beyond customer-facing functions, AI streamlines backend operations like logistics, inventory management, and fraud detection.
Intelligent forecasting helps optimize inventory levels across warehouses. There's less need for someone to analyze past data to decide how much inventory to bring in and when to stock up.
AI could also flag suspicious orders in real-time, protecting your business from fraud.
This helps you save a lot of time, human resources and money.
Scalable Growth Potential
Many ecommerce AI tools provide ready-to-use assets like popup templates, playbooks, and seasonal designs. Small teams can leverage these so you don't have to build anything from scratch.
And as your business grows, AI tools can scale seamlessly. You can start automating the repetitive parts of your business, like answering similar questions via chatbots.
Or you can use analytics to provide rich personalization for each of the thousands and millions of customers you have.
With AI, you also don't have to hire as you scale—no training and retraining each newcomer.
To conclude, AI helps ecommerce businesses gain a competitive edge through data-driven strategies, operational efficiencies, and scalable personalization—all contributing to higher sales and customer satisfaction.
How to Identify AI Needs in your Ecommerce Business?
Pinpoint Key Business Goals
The first step is to pinpoint your core business goals and challenges. Where exactly are you looking to improve efficiency, boost sales, or enhance customer experiences?
For example, are you struggling with inventory management, looking to offer better product recommendations, or aiming to improve customer service response times? Jot down these goals, don't limit yourself at this point.
Map Out Potential AI Use Cases
Next, brainstorm the potential use cases where AI could lend a hand for each of these goals. Examples include:
- Personalize product recommendations with AI-powered data analytics
- Optimize inventory management with predictive analytics
- Improve customer service response time by automating it with chatbots
- Reduce instances of fraud with fraud detection and security monitoring
- Increase conversion rates by enhancing search and product discovery
Prioritize Based on Impact
With a list of potential use cases, prioritize them based on estimated business impact. Which areas have the biggest possible upside in achieving your goals?
Perhaps better product recommendations could significantly boost conversions and average order value.
Or maybe a conversational AI assistant could slash customer service costs while delivering faster, 24/7 support.
Rank your use cases and start with the highest impact opportunities.
Assess Data & Tech Readiness
AI is only as good as the data powering it. Assess if you have sufficient, high-quality data for training AI models in your prioritized use cases. You may need to integrate data sources or cleanse datasets.
Also, evaluate your technical capabilities—both infrastructure and employee skills.
Do you have the computing power, integration APIs, and internal expertise to successfully deploy AI at scale?
By methodically identifying needs, use cases, priorities, and readiness, you'll be equipped to strategically implement AI and reap its rewards for your ecommerce business.
What to Look for in AI Tools for Ecommerce
With AI tools rapidly evolving, it's crucial to choose ones that actually drive sales and maximize profits, rather than the ones that look nice. Here are some key factors to consider:
Streamlined Workflows & Automation
The best AI tools should simplify and automate repetitive tasks, freeing up time for higher-value work. Look for features like:
- AI writing assistants to generate product descriptions, ads, and marketing copy with a few prompts. This can significantly boost content output.
- Product data enrichment tools that take away the manual work of searching for product data, filling up attributes, and standardizing them.
- Project management capabilities to automate task creation, optimize workflows, and provide smart recommendations based on data analysis.
- Customer segmentation based on behavior and preferences to enable personalized marketing campaigns.
Boosting Sales & Customer Engagement
Beyond streamlining operations, top AI tools should directly drive sales and delight customers through capabilities like:
- Visual search and virtual try-ons to enhance product discovery and decision-making.
- Personalized product recommendations based on customer data to increase average order value.
- AI chatbots providing instant support by answering common queries around the clock.
These engaging features can substantially boost customer engagement and conversions.
User-Friendly & Scalable
When evaluating options, ensure the AI tool is intuitive for your team and integrates seamlessly with existing systems. It should:
- Provide effortless onboarding and training resources.
- Scale easily as your business grows, preventing future migration headaches.
- Allow feedback and suggestions to continuously improve functionality.
The best AI assistants for ecommerce balance powerful capabilities with a user-friendly experience adaptable to your needs and current workflows.
8 AI Tools for Ecommerce to Drive More Sales
Below, we've listed the top AI tools that support every aspect of your ecommerce growth strategy, such as personalization, content creation, and dynamic pricing.
1. Hypotenuse AI - All-in-One AI Platform for Ecommerce Content
For large ecommerce brands launching thousands of products every month, creating and managing content can be a struggle. There’s missing data everywhere and resource-wise, it’s tough to ensure quality, brand consistency, and accuracy for every single product.
Hypotenuse AI is an all-in-one content platform for ecommerce brands to enrich their data, create and manage product content, enhance images, and optimize their product pages for SEO. All you need is some product information, bring them onto the platform, and you can get on-brand and SEO-optimized product pages out in minutes.
Features
- Bulk workflows: Generate large quantities of product descriptions, category descriptions, metadata, and more, in just a few clicks.
- Bespoke brand voice: The platform trains an AI model on your best content and guidelines to write in your brand voice.
- Product data enrichment: Enrich your product attributes from URL, sheets, UPC, or images automatically. Ensure high-quality and accurate data throughout.
- SEO optimization and monitoring: Instead of manually researching for keywords and writing for SEO, Hypotenuse AI creates product content already optimized for SEO. You can also track key SEO metrics and continually improve performance.
- Image standardization and enhancement: Their AI can improve the resolution of blurry images and standardize image elements like backgrounds, sizing, and shadows.
Pricing
Starts at $150/month for ecommerce brands with smaller catalogs. For enterprise plans and bespoke features, contact Hypotenuse AI for custom pricing.
Rated 4.7/5 on G2
2. Dynamic Yield - Personalization Tool for Enhanced Shopping Experiences
As the ecommerce market grows, personalization is no longer a good to have—shoppers now expect tailored experiences throughout their buying journey.
Dynamic Yield is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses deliver hyper-personalized experiences across channels, including web, app and emails. With Dynamic Yield, you can create dynamic content and messaging tailored to each customer's preferences and behavior.
Features
- Web personalization: The platform allows you to tailor static content elements like buttons, layouts, and banners to users or customer segments.
- Product recommendations: Dynamic Yield uses purchase data and reinforcement learning to recommend products to user segments.
- Personalized and predictive messages: The platform sends personalized emails, SMS, and push notifications at the right time to capture the sale.
Pricing
Dynamic Yield has not provided pricing information.
Rated 4.5/5 on G2
3. Blueshift - Customer engagement tool for personalized campaigns
A customer’s shopping journey doesn’t end the moment they leave your website. It’s important to carry on the engagement on the channels they are on, at the right time.
Blueshift is an AI-powered marketing automation tool that specializes in cross-channel customer engagement. The platform unifies and activates customer data in real-time so you can create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns across various channels such as email, SMS, in-app messages, and more.
Features
- Customer retention and engagement: This feature allows you to target users with timely, relevant messages between transactions and makes it easier for customers to find suitable products.
- User journey orchestration: Blueshift helps you create dynamic campaigns based on multiple conditions across different channels to shift users down the funnel.
- Customer nurturing: The platform allows you to deliver personalized cross-channel communications and product recommendations to drive cross-sell and up-sell offers.
Pricing
Starts at $1,250/month for their cross-channel marketing package that includes orchestration, optimization, and personalization.
For their Customer Data Platform capabilities, they offer a starter plan for up to 100k events tracked.
Rated 4.4/5 on G2
4. Intercom - Customer service platform for 24/7 customer support
When shoppers browse products in physical retail stores, they can get instant responses by asking your retail assistants. For ecommerce, it’s important to replicate this experience so users don’t get confused and leave your site without a purchase.
Intercom is a customer service platform powered by AI. With Intercom, you can provide instant and accurate responses 24/7 and manage communications across multiple channels seamlessly. Plus, its analytics provide valuable insights to continuously enhance the customer journey.
Features
- Fin AI Agent: This feature learns about your product and brand so it can respond to customers with accurate answers in your brand tone of voice.
- Fin AI Copilot: Intercom’s AI Copilot provides instant answers to your support agents by digging into your support materials so they can save time searching for answers and provide quicker responses to shoppers.
- AI Insights & Reporting: The platform also provides reports on common topics to help you address them better. You can also view metrics like team productivity and ratings to understand how your team is doing.
Pricing
Their plans start at $29 per seat/month and go up to $132 per seat/month for large support teams that require more team features like workload management and a real-time dashboard.
Rated 4.5/5 on G2
5. Gorgias - Customer experience platform that integrates with ecommerce platforms
Ecommerce customer support agents typically don’t just answer questions, they also resolve operational tasks like editing orders or shipping information.
Gorgias is a customer service platform specifically designed for ecommerce businesses to support this. It centralizes customer interactions from various channels like email, live chat, and social media into a single dashboard, enabling support teams to provide efficient and personalized customer service.
Features
- Ecommerce integrations: Gorgias has deep integrations with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, which enables support agents to view customer order history and perform actions such as refunds directly from the support ticket.
- Workflow automation: The platform allows you to set rules to route tickets and personalize responses using custom ecommerce variables.
- Support management: On the Gorgias platform, your support agents can manage interactions and operations across multiple channels.
Pricing
They offer tiered pricing that depends on the number of support tickets you have per month. Past 6500 support tickets, you will go on their enterprise plan.
Rated 4.6/5 on G2
6. Prisync - Price monitoring and dynamic pricing tool
Pricing can be a tough nut to crack. Many factors come into play such as competitors, market conditions, and customers’ willingness to pay.
Prisync is a competitor price tracking and automatic repricing engine that is ideal for businesses of any size in the ecommerce industry. It allows retailers to monitor competitor prices and stock availability, providing them with the insights needed to adjust their own pricing strategies dynamically.
Features
- Competitor price tracking: Prisync allows you to track competitor product price change and product availability so you can adjust your prices accordingly.
- MAP (Minimum Advertised Price Monitoring): This helps you track the prices offered by your resellers so that they don’t sell at a price lower than you’ve set.
- Dynamic pricing: This feature helps you set prices automatically based on market prices and stock availability. This helps you maximize profit margins.
Pricing
Their plans start at $99/month for up to 100 products and $399/month for up to 5000 products if you’re using their URL Based Competitor Monitoring.
You can also go with Channel Based Competitor Monitoring that focuses on specific sales channels at $599/month for up to 5000 products. Or the hybrid model which allows you to monitor both sales channels and URLs at $799/month for up to 5000 products.
Rated 4.7/5 on G2
7. Algolia - Search tool that improves user experience and product discoverability
With large catalogs, shoppers can get overwhelmed, some of your best products can also be buried by everything else.
Algolia is a SaaS platform that allows ecommerce brands to add AI-powered search to their website without the need for engineers. Algolia enables users to quickly find the most relevant products using a search engine that can predict and understand user needs.
Features
- AI Search: This feature allows ecommerce brands to surface products based on semantic terms and keywords, as well as show results that AI predicts to be the most relevant.
- AI Browse: Algolia helps you build category and collection pages dynamically, and automatically boost popular and trending items.
- AI Recommendations: This features uses behavioral cues to recommend products and drive cross-sales, helping you increase conversions and basket size.
Pricing
Algolia offers a free plan that includes up to 10k search requests per month. The prices scale according to number of search requests and any premium features you require.
Rated 4.5/5 on G2
8. Weglot - Translation tool that simplifies localization
For ecommerce businesses selling to a global market, it can be hard to translate and localize all your product descriptions and other product content due to sheer volume.
Weglot is a translation solution that simplifies website translation, making content accessible in multiple languages. It offers an easy-to-use platform that automatically detects and translates content, enhancing global reach and user experience.
Pricing
- No code integrations: Weglot integrates with popular ecommerce solutions like Shopify and Woocommerce to offer language translation and localization.
- Multilingual SEO capabilities: The platform automatically translates your subdirectories and metadata to ensure that your product pages appear on search engines.
- Alternative translation suggestions: While Weglot offers translation, it also connects with AI translation tools and allows you to order professional translations to get to a quality that you’re satisfied with.
Pricing
Weglot starts off free, for up to 2000 words and 1 translated language. It scales according to the number of words and languages you require. Their higher-tiered plans offers more features and flexibility.
Rated 4.8/5 on G2
How to Implement AI Tools in Your Online Store?
Identify Your Goals First
Before diving into implementing AI tools, take a step back and clearly define your business goals. Do you want to boost sales, enhance customer experience, streamline operations, or all of the above? Having specific objectives will help you choose the right AI solutions and measure their success.
Conduct a Tech Audit
Next, assess your current technology stack and capabilities. Identify areas where AI can fill gaps or enhance existing processes. This will give you a clear roadmap for integrating AI tools seamlessly into your ecommerce operations.
Choose Relevant AI Tools
With your goals and tech audit in hand, it's time to explore AI solutions tailored to your needs. Here are some popular options:
- Chatbots & Virtual Assistants: Provide 24/7 support using AI-powered chatbots to answer common queries, freeing up staff for complex issues.
- Recommendation Engines: Leverage AI to analyze customer data and suggest relevant products, boosting average order value.
- Computer Vision: Use image recognition to auto-tag products, improving search and discovery.
- Customer Analytics: Gain insights into browsing patterns to create targeted marketing campaigns.
Start Small & Monitor Results
Don't try to implement every AI tool at once. Begin with a pilot program focused on one or two high-impact use cases. This allows you to test, refine, and ensure the solutions deliver intended results before scaling up.
Continuously monitor key metrics to measure the performance of your AI tools. Make adjustments as needed to optimize for maximum benefit.
Educate & Get Employee Buy-In
Change can be daunting, so get internal champions on board early. Educate employees on how AI will enhance their roles. With their support, you'll have a smoother implementation process.
Implementing AI may seem intimidating, but by taking a strategic, phased approach, you can reap the benefits while ensuring a seamless transition. The key is finding the right balance of AI tools to elevate your unique business needs.
Conclusion
So that's the scoop on AI tools for ecommerce in 2024. The key is finding the right solutions tailored to your business needs and goals.
Don't get bogged down trying to evaluate every tool and AI possibility out there. Focus on a few core areas that can move the needle, like personalized search and recommendations, automated marketing, or inventory and pricing optimization.
Remember, technology alone isn't the answer—you've got to marry it to strategy and your existing operations. But applied wisely, AI can take your ecommerce business to the next level.
