Powered by advanced technologies like AI, VR, and GenAI, customisation can create deeply tailored shopping experiences. These innovations enhance ecommerce by offering personalised recommendations, virtual try-ons, and immersive browsing. AI further helps sellers optimise their offerings, improving both consumer engagement and business outcomes in the ever-evolving online marketplace.The 'open secret' to success in business, especially the consumer-facing ones, is personalisation. Consumers are willing to pay more for personalised services.
A McKinsey report suggests that fast-growing companies earn 40% more of their revenue from personalisation than their slower-growing counterparts. The trick is to do it in the most effective, unintrusive, and ethical way.
Broadly speaking, personalisation in ecommerce is about creating experiences that are most attuned to the individual's interests and preferences, based on data about their previous interactions with the platform. Technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), 3D, and others enable unprecedented levels of personalisation, making online shopping more informative, immersive, engaging, and enjoyable.
Elevating the online experience with technology
AI and GenAI are transformative technologies with far-reaching applications across business. GenAI-powered conversational bots help customers discover and shortlist products, answer questions, recommend products based on factors like age or budget, and direct customers to expert reviews.
GenAI can translate reviews to a language preferred by customers or even summarise them if needed, for the benefit of online shoppers. The technology can also enrich the catalogue. For instance, it can render very realistic images of products against a variety of background environments. It can also enable style-made products, allowing customers to use any item as an anchor product to refine their search. This is personalisation of a much deeper level, and it will only get better with time.
A large percentage of online shoppers, millennials and Gen Z, prefer video content. It makes good sense, therefore, to offer them video-based assistance and inspiration-led commerce, where influencers sell products via livestreams. GenAI-enabled 3D videos, with AI-generated scripts, avatars, voice, and models, will become more common.
Searching and browsing are enhanced with the engaging auto play videos and multi-modal search, allowing customers to refine results using visual cues like colours, patterns, and styles. AR, VR, and 3D technologies bring the traditional window-shopping experience online, providing inspiration and guidance in categories like fashion and beauty. Virtual try-ons for products like watches, eyeglasses, jewellery, makeup, furniture, and two-wheelers help customers visualise and choose the best-suited products.
Smartphones are one of the largest-selling online products today. Customers prefer to get a broad idea of what the new user interface will look and feel like. This can be facilitated through a 'try before you buy' feature with a 3D product view, wherein customers interact with a virtual version of the phone's UI and explore app features.
The metaverse enables brands and ecommerce platforms to host immersive virtual worlds where customers interact with products and each other. Customer engagement can be further enhanced through safe, secure, Blockchain-based loyalty and rewards programs.
We will see better and more of such experiences, going ahead. These features combine implicit personalisation, based on data from previous interactions, and explicit personalisation, where customers provide information for tailored recommendations and experiences.
Personalisation on non-product fronts
Personalisation also benefits sellers who sell their products on online marketplaces. AI and GenAI can speed up and improve interactions with sellers, acting as personalised account managers. The onboarding process for sellers is crucial in their choice of ecommerce platform they choose to associate with -- can be made simpler and smoother with the help of innovative technologies. AI provides data-driven insights to help sellers understand customer behaviour and optimise their offerings.
As ecommerce platforms firm up their tech stack, incorporating innovative technologies suited to their business models and objectives will be beneficial. As AI evolves, ecommerce platforms will deliver increasingly better experiences to consumers.
The author is CTO of Flipkart. Views expressed are personal.
