Shopify is an ecommerce platform where both individuals and businesses can design their online store to market their products. In its Shopify Editions Summer ’23 event, the brand has announced its latest innovations, among which are some solutions with Artificial Intelligence that are intended to make some tasks easier for users. And it is the latter that we want to talk about in this article so that you know how you can use them in your ecommerce if you have created it with this platform.
Shopify makes the leap to Artificial Intelligence
More and more digital tools are including Artificial Intelligence in their functionality, and Shopify is no exception. Every six months, the ecommerce platform holds an event to showcase its latest updates, and in the Summer 2023 edition it presented what is the brand’s first AI functionality: Shopify Magic. What is it, and what benefits can it bring to your Shopify ecommerce? We’ll tell you all about it below.
Shopify Magic: AI for your ecommerce
Shopify Magic is Shopify’s first Artificial Intelligence tool that encompasses a set of free features aimed at facilitating the work of sellers, both in the field of marketing and the creation of the online store, as well as in customer service and administrative management of the platform.
In the words of Gonzalo Torres, Shopify’s country lead in Spain, “unlike other generative AI products, Shopify Magic is designed specifically for commerce“.
Specifically, Shopify Magic’s features can be grouped into two tools: automatic text generation and Sidekick. In the following sections, we’ll explain what each of them specifically consist of.
Automatic text generation
The automatic text generation tools that Shopify has implemented are created to help sellers streamline writing-related processes. Using the information that sellers provide to the tool, the tool is able to offer content suggestions such as headings for the online store, subjects for email messages and product descriptions.
Shopify’s automatic text generation works from so-called LLMs (Large Language Models), i.e. from computer programs that understand and process human language and are able to analyze large amounts of text using algorithms that detect patterns and relationships between words.
According to Shopify, this is all you can do in your ecommerce with automatic text generation tools (although beware, some of these functions are only available in English as we write this text):
- Write and edit blog posts and pages.
- Generate product descriptions.
- Generate subject lines and email bodies.
- Create immediate chat responses.
In all cases, Shopify recommends reading AI-generated content before publishing to make sure it is accurate and does not contain any errors.
Sidekick
Sidekick is defined by Shopify as an AI-powered ecommerce assistant created to make things easier for users, both in getting started and in managing and growing ecommerce. In other words, Sidekick is a personalized support tool thanks to the fact that it gathers information from the merchant’s data, context and experience.
Sidekick is the crown jewel of Shopify’s AI tools that businesses can converse with to drive creative processes, streamline workflows, increase productivity and make better decisions.
To give you a better understanding, Sidekick is like a personal guide that can guide owners in creative areas. Bringing its functions a little more down to earth, it can help them, for example, to better segment customers to make marketing campaigns more effective or to optimize discounts, among other things.
Benefits of AI in ecommerce
- Streamlining processes: because AI is partly designed to automate some processes, a great deal of time can be saved. This means that this time can be used by teams to perform other more productive or creative tasks and ultimately increase the company’s performance.
- Decrease and detection of errors: of course, AI tools are not perfect (for now), but they are capable of greater accuracy than humans. Therefore, including them in different processes can reduce the number of errors. And not only that, they are also capable of detecting those faults that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. Therefore, not only do they make fewer errors, but they also detect them better.
- Improved decisions: AIs have analytical capabilities because they can organize huge amounts of data in a short time. This makes them a great source for decision-makers to draw on to make better decisions.
- Empowering the customer experience: AI not only helps companies and their teams, but also consumers directly, providing them with a better experience. For example, it can detect (thanks to behavioral information and past purchases) which items a user might be most interested in and show them more. And not only that, chatbots implemented with AI also help to give a quick response to the user when he has a frequent question and the customer service team is saturated.
If your ecommerce is implemented with Shopify, we encourage you to start experimenting with these new AI tools and see for yourself what they can do for your business. AI is here to stay and we recommend that you start getting used to it as soon as possible so you don’t fall behind and keep your company always up to date. Surely this e-commerce platform will gradually incorporate new features with Artificial Intelligence. And we will be telling you about them.