The Foundation of eBay in 1995 revolutionized the retail industry with the conception of e-commerce. E-commerce was a technology that was going to change the world, transform how products are bought and sold and change the customer’s preference forever.
With the advancement in technology and the birth of new gadgets and tools, e-commerce was taking many new shapes and many alternatives to eBay emerged. This leads to high competition in this sector. Many new companies emerged capitalizing on new technologies in the market such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, User Experience Design, Cloud computing, chatbots, etc. These technologies helped make this market open to innovations of various kinds. These technologies made the process of shopping easier for the customers and exemplified the user experience.
Some of the technologies which are used to enhance e-commerce services are:
1. Artificial Intelligence: This technology can be used to track customer behavior and how to understand how they purchase and make other decisions like searching for a product, filtering out prices, choosing a category, or sorting the products based on categories. Artificial Intelligence can be used for both customers and the company’s benefit. This is because the company can gather key insights from customers’ behavior helping them to improve their marketing strategies. For customers, it’s beneficial as they will get a personalized user experience that will make it easier for them to shop. This enables various personalized recommendations for the customers.
2. Automated Marketing Campaign: Marketing is a cumbersome process. It requires constant tracking of customers and their behavior. The data gathered from the customer behaviors can also be used to make the process of marketing automated which can save a lot of cost to the company as it will require fewer people to be hired.
3. Chatbots: Chatbots are a revolutionary technology that would change the stock markets forever. These refer to the automated chat assistance services which are embedded in the website which can respond to a customer’s query without the need for any manual human assistance. The chatbots ensure that customers are hooked up on the website further improving the customer experience.
4. Voice-Search: Voice-Search helps the users avoid the tiresome process of typing long product names. With voice search integrations in various e-commerce sites. The customers can now search for their favorite product instantly. Also, this feature when integrated with voice assistant technologies like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc has the potential to bring far more changes to the way shopping is done. The rapid rise of voice assistant devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home signifies the same.
These technologies will not only help the company but also help the buyers and the sellers. Artificial Intelligence will track essential data about customers help them find the best product for them to buy and also help the sellers understand the customer’s needs and behavior in a better way. These technological factors create unique selling propositions for different e-commerce companies as they compete to provide the best user experience.