Elevating Shopping Experience: 5 Ways Gen AI is Revolutionizing e-Commerce Product Discovery

Nov 07, 2023

Generative AI (Gen AI) and LLM (Large Language Models), the technology behind it, are re-shaping powerful trends in various industries, including e-commerce. Generative AI is a cutting-edge technology that creates new content (text, images, video) based on a variety of inputs and existing data

“Global Generative AI in e-commerce market value is at USD 529.5 million in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 2,123.6 million. By 2032, at a CAGR of 14.90%.”

Source: Precedence Research

While the opportunities of Generative AI in e-commerce are vast, in this blog, we will focus on its impact on product discovery.

In e-commerce, product discovery is a process where consumers find products that they are looking for or explore new products that fulfill their needs or intent. It is one of the most important parts of the e-commerce shopping experience.

Here are 5 ways is revolutionizing the e-commerce product discovery:

Personalized recommendations
Product descriptions, product media, and content generation
Virtual shopping assistants and chatbots
Search user experience
Rich product information and social proofing

Personalized recommendations:

With several products across online channels, making the right product(s) visible to the consumers that are most likely to buy them is a challenge for brands. A Gen AI-based recommendation system takes AI product discovery to a new level and provides unique product recommendations to each customer by understanding the consumer's preferences and interests. The system uses algorithms that consider a consumer's profile, purchase history, search queries and browsing behavior, product data, reviews, and contextual information (such as a user's location, device, etc.) to generate recommendations for products and services that the consumer would be interested in.

For example, Amazon has one of the best-in-class AI product discovery and recommendation systems, enabled by Gen AI. Amazon provides its customers with product suggestions that match their preferences, search intent, search and shopping history, resulting in improved conversion and customer satisfaction.

Personalized product recommendations

Source: Amazon

Product descriptions and media generation:

Product descriptions, which are also SEO optimized, play a key role in product discovery. With Gen AI and its Natural Language Generation (NLG) algorithms, the process of creating unique and appealing product descriptions for different customer segments, channels, and contexts, can be automated.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a category of Gen AI, can be used to create customized versions of product images using textual inputs and historical image data. For example, a fashion retail brand can generate images of people of different age-groups and ethnicities and render the image most suited to the consumer's demographics.

Virtual Shopping Assistant - Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce has been a hot trend for a few years now. Generative AI in e-commerce enables brands to take conversational commerce to the next level. Online shopping assistants, powered by Gen AI, offer a personalized experience to the consumer during product discovery and selection. Gen AI chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand customer queries and provide human-like responses.

For example, Sephora, uses a chatbot called "Sephora Virtual Artist" which answers customers' questions and provides personalized makeup recommendations. eBay's “ShopBot” acts as a personal shopping assistant, assisting customers in navigating through eBay's extensive range of product listings to discover the most relevant and interesting deals. Customers can engage with the ShopBot using text or voice search, or even by sharing a photo to indicate what they're searching for.

eBay Virtual shopping assistant

Source: eBay

Search User Experience

Generative AI is transforming the search capability from reactive to proactive delivery. Instead of a keyword or query-based search model, Gen AI is moving to a Q&A or dialog-based search experience. It guides the shopper during product discovery, provides recommendations that match user intent and context and provides automation for the next steps - a call to act.

Given this transformation, the user experience of search has adapted from the traditional search bar, results and filters to a more conversational and guided navigation-based user interface.

Traditional Search - Keyword-based search

Source: Asos

Conversational/Guided search

Source: Sephora

Rich Product information and Social proofing

With the increasing number of online channels, and several product variants, maintaining complete and consistent product information is a challenge. By analyzing product data and descriptions published across channels and identifying missing attributes, Gen AI can create intelligent suggestions to improve the product data quality.

Gen AI can also be used to crowd-source customer reviews across all channels (the e-commerce website, social media, etc.) therefore, enriching product information continuously and providing increasing social proof.

Product reviews

Benefits of using Gen AI in e-commerce for Product Discovery

Here are some measurable benefits of using Gen AI in product discovery:

Increased conversion rates:

With the implementation of Gen AI-driven product recommendations, customers are more likely to make a purchase when they encounter products that align with their needs, faster and more accurately.

Reduced customer support costs:

Gen AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can handle a wide range of customer queries and assist them in personalized shopping experiences. This cuts operational costs and ensures faster response times.

Increased operational efficiency for content creation:

Gen AI streamlines content creation - product descriptions, product images and marketing content, thus saving time and cost.

Enhanced user engagement:

Interactive features like visual search and AR/VR powered by Gen AI keep the user engaged with the platform. This engagement also leads to more data collection that can further refine recommendations and product discovery.

The potential of Gen AI product discovery in e-commerce is immense. With continuous innovations, new features and capabilities will continue to emerge. Whether you are a business seeking to optimize your operations or a consumer looking for a seamless shopping experience, Gen AI has an integral role to play in the future of e-commerce.