Sep 26, 2018 By Nick DelTorto

This Holiday, Let AI Do The Heavy Lifting While You Focus on Strategic Initiatives

in Commerce, Retail Insights

During busy holiday preparation, it’s easy for retail brands to get caught up in their own perception of “perfect” product sets or assortments. As retailers, we want to mean something to our customers, but our customers may want us to be something completely different. Not every shopper wants to buy the family a full set of matching pajamas; maybe they just want a pair for themselves! Fortunately for retailers, the machine-learning technology that AI powers has only one bias — data. It does what data tells it to do so that the best outcome — a sale — has the highest probability of happening.

Earlier this year, we released a report that analyzed the business impact of AI-based personalization. It found that personalized product recommendations drove just 7% of visits, but an astounding 26% of revenue. Additionally, consumers who clicked on AI-based product recommendations placed more orders, spent more, and made more repeat visits.

Like voice search and “click and collect,” AI is nearing a tipping point in digital commerce. Retailers and brands are always looking for ways to move online shoppers toward a purchase, especially during the peak holiday period. Brands like Marks & Spencer made AI an integral part of their strategy. And they are moving the needle on results as they deliver relevant, personalized shopping experiences individually tailored to customers.

Holiday Relief – Reduce Manual Tasks and Improve Insight with AI

The AI of today helps save time so you can focus on more strategic initiatives. This is a crucial benefit for the holiday season, when there is never enough time to fully prepare for the mad rush of traffic to your site. Imagine the insight you could gain, the holiday campaigns you could launch, if your merchandisers and marketers were freed from the tedium of labor-intensive tasks.

AI does this, in eliminating the need to manually merchandise categories or pair complementary products every quarter, month, or week. So the question now is, will there be time to implement this amazing technology before your holiday code freeze? Yes! In fact, that’s the whole point of Salesforce Einstein; it’s baked right into Commerce Cloud Digital, does not require a data scientist, and can literally be implemented with a series of clicks.

AI For Commerce

Since the last holiday season, Salesforce has introduced new AI capabilities for commerce that predict and personalize more aspects of the shopping experience. One of the most exciting is Einstein Search for Commerce, which identifies popular search terms missing in your dictionaries through a comprehensive analysis of all searches made on your site, and automatically pairs missing terms with an appropriate synonym list. For example, a search for “trousers” also returns “pants” and “bottoms,” while a search for “pink” also returns items in “fuschia,” “blush,” and so on. This is huge, since consumers who use site search are 2.4 times more likely to buy, and also drive more revenue. In fact, the 9% of shoppers who use search across Commerce Cloud customers drive nearly one quarter of their overall sales, according to a report by Commerce Cloud and SapientRazorfish.

Einstein Search for Commerce is a game-changer, and complements other AI capabilities that will help retailers drive revenue this holiday and beyond:

Einstein Commerce Insights

This shopping-cart-analysis dashboard empowers brands to understand which products are most commonly purchased together. It also gives merchandisers a granular view of shopping activity, including product-specific sales and top co-purchase products.

Einstein Predictive Sort

This awesome feature uses machine learning to personalize the order in which products appear in search and category pages on ecommerce sites — all customized based on the customer’s tailored preferences.