Revolutionising Your E-commerce Business with AI: Tools, Tips, and Strategies

Ready to revolutionise your e-commerce business using artificial intelligence? That's exactly what we're diving into in today's solo cast.

Strap in as we explore how tools like Google's Bard and ChatGPT can be used strategically to supercharge your marketing strategy and boost sales. It's not all plug-and-play though - effective deployment of these tools demands a well-thought plan and sustained effort.

We then shift gears to delve deep into personalising marketing efforts and optimising search functions with AI. Discover the potential of tools like Klaviyo, Nosto, Klevu, Searchspring, and learn how they can take your user experience to the next level.

Tune in, this episode is brimming with insights that can help you harness the power of AI for your e-commerce business.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, welcome to the Big Commerce Podcast.
Hello, welcome to a brand newepisode of the Big Commerce
Podcast.
My name's Luigi, i'm your hostAnd today is a solocast where
I'm going to be talking to youabout how, as an e-commerce
merchant, you can startleveraging AI in your website to
help grow sales, improve yourservice and market better.

(00:23):
If this is your first timelistening to our podcast,
welcome.
The Big Commerce Podcast is ane-commerce podcast for merchants
of all stages of growth, andeach week we bring you guests
from our e-commerce ecosystem,from our tech partners and also
merchants.
So AI, artificial intelligencebeen a lot of talk over the last
six plus months, and how canyou use it as a merchant in your

(00:46):
business?
Now most of us will have heardof platforms such as ChatGPT and
Bard from Google, but really,how can you start leveraging
these platforms to make not justyour job more efficient, your
colleagues and your employeesmore efficient, but actually
integrating with technology tohelp grow sales, to increase

(01:07):
engagement and, fundamentally,to increase your bottom line?
So let's start with the thingsthat are a bit more immediate.
So ChatGPT or Bard from Google,b-a-r-d, which is in beta, but
really only Bard from Google isreally unavailable in select
countries.
Those are the kind of toolsthat you could be using to

(01:30):
really write good content from amarketing perspective.
So we've all maybe had a go atChatGPT and so forth and gains,
but actually if we reallyunderstand how it works and feed
it the right information, we'reable to create a very
comprehensive and very targetedmarketing campaign.
So let's start with content.

(01:51):
Most of you should have a blogof sorts that should be
releasing content at least on aweekly basis to really drive
those long-tail keywords basedtraffic where people are for new
customers.
Those blogs will rank highly inGoogle if you're using the
right terms as well andanswering the right questions.

(02:11):
So listen, answer the public,for example, to find which
questions you could answer inyour blog post.
These are all things that youcan be supported by with systems
like ChatGPT from OpenAI andalso GoogleBard.
So don't expect it just towrite the whole blog post for
you.
You have to feed it in someinformation.
So let's not assume this isgoing to be a way to just lazily

(02:34):
be able to write our content,because fundamentally, just like
marketing 101, it is all aboutinvestments.
So the more effort you put in,the more time you put in, the
better the input, then thebetter the output.
So first of all you need tostart off by writing a content
plan, a content marketing plan,and again you can leverage

(02:54):
ChatGPT to help you put thattogether, to look for the
subjects that your customerswill be able to find you from.
So write a really descriptiveprompt about what type of
content you want to be writing,what the purpose of that content
is, who the audience for thatcontent is, how long that

(03:16):
content should be, the thingsthat it mustn't include, the
tone of voice.
So the prompt should be initself quite a few dozen words
so that the systems canunderstand what type of content
plan they should be puttingtogether, what kind of
suggestions they should begiving you.

(03:37):
Pretty much, given that thefirst draft is going to be not
the final product.
You're going to have to refineit, maybe take some things out
or maybe be a bit more specificon the others and regenerate.
But once you've got enoughcontent for, say, two months so
whether that is eight to tenposts, or if you're planning on

(04:00):
doing two a week, then obviouslytwenty, sixteen to twenty then
you can start working with theseplatforms to write the actual
content.
Now you've got to balance alsothe length of the blog post that
you want to write.
So if you're looking at writinga piece of content that's going
to be twenty minutes long toread, you've got two problems

(04:20):
with that.
First of all, you're going tohave to understand where are you
getting that content from.
If you're going to be linkingto sources, you're going to have
to do that research yourself.
And secondly, who's going toread a blog post for twenty
minutes?
If somebody's going to taketwenty minutes, you should be
looking at other forms of mediasuch as podcasting and YouTube
videos and so on.
So really try and keep itsuccinct to kind of five minutes

(04:40):
of reading time at the most Andif you need to, you can break
it down into three or four postsand drip feed those out two,
three times a week.
But remember you've got to talkabout, you've got to understand
what question you're answering,what keywords you want to focus
on, the audience, the tone ofvoice that the content has to be

(05:00):
written in.
Also the language is itAmerican English, is it British
English, and so on.
The length maybe kind of anemotive element as well.
So use those systems to startwriting content, but again,
don't just kind of gloss over it.
It is something that requiressome effort on your part in
order to be able to get the bestout of it, and I would

(05:22):
recommend you do two or three ata time.
Even if you're only posting itonce or twice a week, you can
start scheduling things out,because then really you've got
to start plugging in your socialmedia campaigns to promote
those blog posts as well.
So the first one there iswriting content for your content
marketing strategy.
The second one is usingplatforms like Bard and ChatGPT
for writing content for yourwebsite.

(05:43):
So, whether that's forcategories or whether that's for
the about us, the contact us,those kind of content-based
pages, maybe you can kind ofenhance the paragraph, maybe,
you know, kind of add a bit moreof an emotive element to it,
less boredom, less kind ofmonotone approach to it.

(06:05):
So, again, that's number two.
Number three and this is whereyou start getting to more
specialized platforms, such asJasper, is using AI to optimize
your product description pages.
So writing your productdescriptions, writing your SEO
tags, so, like the title tag,the meta description tag, known
which keywords to focus on thetone of voice and the length.

(06:29):
So Jasper is a paid for system,jasperai, but actually, if you
can find those efficiencies inthat, it's giving you very good
content, it's reducing the timethat you need to spend in order
to optimize one or two orproducts or even categories of
products, then obviously thatinvestment starts to pay off in

(06:51):
itself, and so that's anotherway that you can use AI to
improve your website.
It does again require somepatience.
You've got to learn the prompts, maybe optimize them, but you
know, within a couple of hoursyou can easily be churning out a
raft of SEO improvements toyour website, and then just a
matter of implementing thosedirectly into your product

(07:14):
records.
We've also spoken to merchantswho are leveraging the APIs that
these platforms use in order tobe able to answer customer
queries.
So compatibility betweenproducts or foods, for example.
If maybe you're selling foodsor wine and you want to know
compatibilities, that's whereyou can utilize AI.

(07:34):
Now, that will require a bit ofdevelopment.
It's not as easy to spin up,but actually, if you find that
maybe you're lacking thatexpertise internally as a
company so maybe you know thatfood pairing for wine, for
example, resides with one personwithin the business and they're
quite busy then that's whereyou can start leveraging the
tools out there to kind of sayright, if somebody's you know is

(07:58):
looking for a wine that pairswell with you know, white fish
and chicken, and maybe it's abit of a sweeter dish or a bit
more salad, whatever it is, itcan actually give you those
types of pairings.
So that's obviously an examplefor food and wine.
but you can have other things,like, if you're selling fish,
for example, compatibility withthose, compatibility with you

(08:19):
know, possibly with car parts aswell that you obviously need to
do some research, but thepossibilities there are endless.
So speak to your if you don'thave an internal development
resource, speak to your agencyand understand how they can
leverage the APIs to enhance,and it might even give you a,
you know, bit of an angle whenit comes to your competitors,
because you've got this kind ofinteractive approach where your

(08:42):
customers can ask, you know, inessence different questions and
get those responses which arebroadly quite accurate.
So remember to make sure thatit is accurate to do some
testing, because fundamentally,what you're doing to do is
misinform the customer, butcertainly that's one of the ways
that you can use AI to enhanceyour product descriptions and

(09:05):
offer a bit more of an engagingexperience to your customer.
You may also have seen thatthere are AI image generators
available from.
Even Adobe's got its Fireflysolution, but if you Google,
you'll find there's plenty of AIimage generators.

(09:25):
Some of them are extremely good, but again, it requires some
investment on your part to beable to feed it the right
prompts and make those smallnuanced changes to get the image
that you want.
Some of them are free becausethey're a beta.
Some of them are paid for andyou'll find the right solution
for you.
But instead of just using kindof just standard stock
photography, you can reallystart making custom imagery, not

(09:47):
necessarily for the product,but possibly for marketing
assets for your website and forsocial media, based on these
image generators, and it's areally, really good way,
especially for those that maybedon't have the resources or the
time for kind of designing a lotof these images.
It's a great way to utilize AIand get the returns of, you know
, having some unique productimagery there that can be really

(10:10):
compelling and be a benefit andasset to your, to your website.
So that's pretty much it,covering very briefly how you
can utilize the tools are outthere yourselves in order to to
improve content, whether that'simagery, that's text and so on.
But there's also plenty oftools out there in the market
that leverage AI, kind ofutilize AI in their system to

(10:34):
help make the merchants life, tohelp make the merchants job
easier, and there's everythingfrom our partners gorgeous, for
example.
Gorgeous uses AI in terms ofcustomer service.
So the response is there.
so it means that the customercan, in essence, self-serve,
saving you time not having tohave a you know, whether it's a

(10:56):
dedicated customer service agentor even multiple customer
service agents having a manuallydeal with customer requests.
You can utilize the chatbot,for example, to automate
responses.
If you're putting out thingslike a knowledge base, it can
reduce waiting times and so yourcustomers should be slightly
happier.
And if you've really workedhard on making sure that this,

(11:16):
the information has beenprovided, they'll get the answer
that they want and thereforethey'll, you know, kind of
finish that experience on a high.
They'll deliver, got theinformation that they wanted.
They haven't had to speak tosomebody and also, you know,
have got to man that 24-7.
So, especially, you know, inthe age of cross-border trading,
you can really offer a 24-7service and obviously, for those

(11:39):
cases that can't be answered byby chatbot, then using a system
like gorgeous for kind ofticket management is is great,
so gorgeous.
Gor, gis.
There's other systems as wellZendesk, for example, sales,
fire and a lot of them will alsohave kind of AI capabilities.

(11:59):
But gorgeous.
We've found that when we'veshown into our merchants and to
our prospects, they'veimmediately kind of fallen in
love with this.
Just the system that thereseems to answer a lot of our
merchant requirements from amarketing perspective.
Another one of our partners isclaveo.
So one of the most importantelements of marketing is really

(12:22):
targeted marketing.
So personalization, making surethat that marketing is tailored
to the person that's receiving,the receiving end of that
market, whether it is emails,whether it's social media posts,
whether it's any form of othercontent.
Really it's about being able toresonate with with that
marketing, and so the greatthing about claveo is using the

(12:44):
AI tools, especially onmarketing automation.
So whether you're doing flowsand those types of campaigns,
you know if they don't open, ifthey don't click, if they bought
this product, if they've notbought an X amount of time, all
those systems and really the AIin there can help you build out
really good campaigns fromanything from being able to
generate the subject line allthe way through to segmenting

(13:07):
customers based on based onthose attributes.
So claveo is is a fantasticexample of how they're
leveraging AI in their productto enhance the experience and
make it easier for merchants tooffer very good marketing
without the massive investmentthat can.
That can go without.
Just on the subject ofpersonalization and search as

(13:30):
well, we've been speaking aboutpersonalization as an industry
for about two years now, kind ofduring COVID, where everyone
was marketing online, whereeveryone was selling online.
It was really about trying tomake that experience more
tailored for the customer or forthe visitor.
So a lot of our partners, suchas Nosto and Cleavoo, they use

(13:54):
AI for a personalizationperspective.
So make understanding what typeof product the customer is
searching for and what they'regoing to want to see.
That's going to be more likelyfor them to check out.
If somebody's searching formen's shoes, then they're not
necessarily going to beinterested in seeing children's
trousers or women's blouses.

(14:15):
Those kind of systems thatstart to build a picture of the
customer within their algorithmand start passing through and
displaying products that thesystem believes the customer is
most likely to want and beinterested in.
Again, make that experience,just improve that experience.

(14:35):
Just improve that experience,given the customer a more
positive one.
So obviously these tools nowstart to come with a cost.
There's been a lot invested increating them and there is an
ROI element to it as well, butit's worth evaluating From a
search perspective.
Even our partners, searchspring, for example, have a very good

(14:56):
search tool that's alsoAI-powered, and BlueMute as well
for those that are a bit morein the enterprise space.
So a lot of these tools have AIbuilt into them.
They're constantly improvingthem, but they do come at cost.
From a licensing perspective,there's been a very quick dive

(15:18):
into how, as a merchant, you canreally start capitalizing on AI
.
Some of these are out of thebox.
Some of them you're maybereally familiar with and some of
them you may have to delve infurther and maybe do some
development work on.
But there's a possibility for,across the spectrum, for you to
be able to go in and writecontent, write strategies,

(15:38):
optimize content, write contentin different languages as well.
You could also get away withtranslating content, especially
if you're doing cross-borderJust make sure that somebody's
always checking that All the waythrough to serving your
customer things like customerservice and responses and then
giving your customer a verypersonalized and engaging
experience through search andmerchandising and

(16:00):
personalization.
If you've got any questions,feel free to reach out.
We've changed the domain name.
It's info atthebitcommerspodcastcom.
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If you've enjoyed this episode,please leave us a review on
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for any future episodes, pleasefeel free to reach out to us by

(16:22):
email or on social media.
Thank you very much forlistening and until next time.
Goodbye you.