How AI Optimizes Online Merchandising

With the newest AI technology, online merchandising has never been more accessible. AI capacities reduce manual effort and create a seamless and streamlined customer experience. As the global AI market keeps growing, the merchandising benefits do too. The future of AI is already here; it removes the guesswork from your marketing strategy and creates a merchandising system that works. Let’s take a look at how.

Reduced Manual Effort

To achieve online merchandising manually requires a lot of effort. It’s time consuming and is prone to human error. With AI in control, the process is made more efficient and sustainable. The workload is decreased, as automated rules, patterns and strategies can be put into place. If any gaps or inconsistencies are spotted, they can be rectified. 

Since merchandising layouts need to change according to the seasons, this is fairly regular. AI can automatically decide when to change the layouts and how. This can be based on data gathered. They can also be scheduled to happen in advance, so a huge workload doesn’t fall all at once.

When it comes to the specifics of merchandising, such as product descriptions and high-quality images; AI can help create these. Systems such as ChatGPT can be used to make relevant and appealing product descriptions. Other AI image creation software can make sure that your visual merchandising is on point.

Optimized Search Experience

‘Searchandising’ is the art of combining search and merchandising. This is crucial for both your site search, and merchandising strategy. Providing a personalized search result for each shopper has a big impact on the effectiveness of merchandising. The deeper data that AI collects helps to enable this. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subset of Machine Learning that can help regulate the language used in your search. It is that that creates language translation capacities, semantic based search, product categorization and chatbots. Having these included in your search strategy can make a huge difference. 

An AI driven search understands the context and user intent. It doesn’t just return results based on the keywords. This creates a meaningful search that shows shoppers they are cared for. This hugely improves the user experience. 

Top-Tier Recommendations

Personalization is one of the main benefits that AI brings to online merchandising. Since each shopper has unique interests and needs, the merchandising they view should be relevant to them. There is nowhere this is more important than in product recommendations.



Cross-sell and Upsell capacities rely on meeting the needs of each shopper. This can be based on on-to-one data. This looks at data stored about the customer, maybe through their account, or from a real-time click profile. If this is not available, then one-to-many recommendations can be provided based on product popularity. 

Recommendation widgets can be generated by AI that can be placed throughout the shoppers journey. Placing widgets in product pages, search results or even checkout pages can have a huge impact. Having unique merchandising capabilities at different stages of the journey can make all the difference to the user experience.

Next Level Visual Merchandising

AI has the ability to take visual merchandising to the next level. We’ve already seen how images can be optimized, but images can even be active. Hyper-tagging links images to product pages, or even to social media.

Visual discovery is a new way of product inspiration that ties well with the rise of social commerce. More people than ever are shopping through their social media channels, where they feel comfortable. AI makes the transition between the two places seamless. 

Providing more opportunities for product discovery, as well as an easy checkout experience on any channel is a huge benefit.

Conclusion

When it comes to merchandising, AI can fully influence purchase behavior. Optimized product displays and rankings with set strategies based on available data has great benefits. This is simply something that could not be achieved without modern AI capacities. The more data available, the better the merchandising. The result of this is continuously improved outcomes for both the merchant and the shopper.