In all facets of marketing, it is difficult to differentiate your product offering and ecommerce is no different. Spiralling operational costs, volatility in consumer demand, difficulties with measurement and price wars are all aspects of ecommerce that have impacted SME ecommerce players in recent years.
So, what is next in the world of ecommerce? AI is going to revolutionise marketing as we know it and we are already seeing examples of this in ecommerce. For inspiration, I thought I’d take a look back on 2024 to see what some of the very largest ecommerce players have in the wings for their customers in terms of AI innovation.
Conversational Commerce
It is anticipated that shopping assistants will become a major component of ecommerce in future years. Enterprise level and platform based ecommerce will see technological advancements that drastically improves the user journey and thus conversion rate of a shopping cart website. Statista projects a 57% increase in conversational commerce investment.
Total spending over conversational commerce channels worldwide from 2021 to 2025: Source: Statista 2024
Amazon AI Shopping Innovations
Amazon themselves don’t necessarily get the AI column inches that OpenAI does but they are very active in the space via AWS with a whole suite of AI APIs and developer tools. Naturally, you’d expect Amazon to showcase AI in the shopping experience early on in the AI adoption curve.
In September 2024, Amazon launched ‘Rufus’ – their first shopping assistant, now available to U.S. customers.
Image courtesy of Amazon
I found it notable that this early execution augments the existing user journey as opposed to superseding the original web 2.0 user experience. This is something that Amazon is incredibly good at: trial and improvement, as opposed to drastic redesigns.
Alongside Rufus, Amazon is doing more to utilise their AI experience to innovate their ecommerce arm. In October 2024, Amazon launched ‘AI Shopping Guides’ which integrates buyer guide information with shopping filters. The aim of this is to appeal to something we have all gravitated towards with the internet: convenience.
Image courtesy of Amazon
AI in Google Shopping
In October 2024, Sean Scott (VP of Google Consumer Shopping) introduced an AI experiment for Google Shopping results. Google embed some text that is similar to ‘AI overviews’ to give the shopping experience some context and provide AI-driven categories/filters to optimise the user journey on a 1-2-1 basis.
Google also introduced ‘virtual try on’, where you can choose from a wide selection of models to create an approximate match on your skin tone, body shape, ethnicity and hair type.
Image courtesy of Google
Walmart’s Wallaby LLM
Walmart has revealed ambitious plans for scaling AI in their operation, introducing Wallaby LLM which will be used to ‘create customer-facing experiences’. Wallaby is trained using their own customer data and will have the ability to respond in a voice that is modelled with Walmart’s core values in mind.
What I found notable about the Walmart example was that it comes across as a very measured, strategic approach to transforming their user experience using AI. They will launch the U.S. version of Wallaby ‘by the end of next year’ – in stark contrast to the silicon giants that appear to be doing everything in their power to win the AI gold rush.
Why is this important?
AI in Ecommerce is coming: Embrace The Change
AI will allow for seamless, intuitive interactions that will completely transform the ecommerce user experience as we know it. Innovations like Amazon’s Rufus, Google’s virtual try-on, and Walmart’s Wallaby LLM exemplify the transformative potential of AI when applied strategically. The approaches here are different, with Google & Amazon looking at continuous innovation and Walmart seeking a large transformation. While tech giants lead the charge, the challenge for SMEs will be to find the best possible solution to adopt these technologies.