AI in E-Commerce: Transforming Customer Journeys a...

ManimozhiRathinam · ‎2025 Mar 08

AI greatly enhances e-commerce by tailoring customer experiences, automating content creation, and improving product visualization. It enables businesses to provide personalized product recommendations, create influencing marketing content, and offer virtual try-on experiences, as well as support customers online through virtual chatbots. AI enhances the online shopping experience for buyers while boosting productivity and generating innovative business insights. By leveraging AI, e-commerce platforms can better understand customer preferences, optimize operations, and drive higher sales, ultimately leading to a more customized and seamless shopping experience. Let's explore how eCommerce businesses use AI to enhance productivity and provide a best-in-class customer experience.

AI Implementation in E-commerce Customer Experience

AI implementation in E-commerce can be classified into two major business areas.

Customer experience - This covers the customer-facing elements of AI
Business operations - improve business operations in a significant way

Before delving into e-commerce AI use cases, let’s briefly examine the advancements, opportunities, and challenges in AI as a technology.

Today, every business is eager to explore implementing AI in their current and future roadmap to enhance the efficiency of their business operations and improve their customers' experience.

It covers small process automation, as well as advanced features such as agentic AI, or AI agents that act independently and autonomously. Through agentic AI, complex workflows can be automated, and efficiency and scale can be achieved without constant human supervision.

When a company considers its AI mission, it needs to look at the following critical aspects:

AI mission - Phase of discovery

There are a variety of industries and businesses, and their AI missions also vary. As a result, IT and business teams must do discovery to develop a strategy that will ensure long-term success. They should analyze AI business cases that are the right fit for the business. As soon as the team has a good understanding of the business cases, they can explore other aspects as well.

Business cases also can be derived based on go-to-market strategies like business-to-business, business-to-customer, direct-to-customer, etc.

Business cases can also be classified into two broad categories: optimizing business operations and providing the best-in-class customer experience.

Once the AI business cases are enlisted, the business team can prioritize and plan for the solution and look at the correct product/framework more suitable for the mission.

While selecting, the businesses should consider the following:

Supervised Business AI framework
List of out-of-the-box AI business cases
Flexibility to develop
Data collection boundaries and limitations
Scalable - extensible framework/Copilot that supports the development of business-specific AI features (custom extensions).
Training model - Configurable with the organization-selected LLM model
Privacy, security, and compliance strategy
AI Ethics checkpoints
Integration options with e-commerce systems
Supervision and evaluation techniques
KPIs to measure ROI

Selecting the product/framework

After the business case discovery, the team also need to consider a unique approach to selecting the correct product.

Machine learning / Deep learning techniques Support for analysis
options for configuration and change them
For Gen AI-based solutions, LLM model or the LLM model that the product uses.
How the Business AI model processes and secures the business data
Data privacy and security features (County )
AI ethics policy for the product
Flexibility to control and fine-tune the results
Transparency in the process
Skillset Required and training

AI business cases

Here are some of the most prevalent eCommerce business cases. Let's examine e-commerce cases based on business features, which will help plan how to prepare and proceed.

Shopping process - Search and Browse

Persona: B2C Customer / B2B Customer / Merchandising manager

Improves customer experience
Reduce the product discovery time

Persona: Merchandising manager

Improves the operation efficiency by automating the recommendations
Improves the average order value (AOV) and reduce the handling cost per order

Trending Search - The trending search terms feature examines the search phrases entered by users and displays the most popular ones as a result.
Recommendations and Merchandising: Promote and advertise goods or services by means of Recommendations and merchandising carousels to provide the customer with the most relevant experience at that exact moment. These capabilities include:
Personalized Products: One-to-one behaviorally driven product recommendations based on each user's product view click path to show the most relevant products to the individual customer.
Related Products: Recommendations that predict the user’s next click and surface the corresponding products to the carousel.
Trending Products: Behaviorally driven product merchandising, using real-time shopping behavior to surface trending products. (Harmonized Recommendations and Merchandising: Combine and test recommendations with merchandising priorities.)
Recently Viewed Products: Recommendations that show recently viewed products list to the user, so they can quickly navigate back to the products they have been viewing.
Complementary Products: The Complementary Products feature displays products complementing the products the customer interacts with on the commerce storefront either by viewing them or adding them to the cart
Replenishment Products: The Replenishment Products feature displays recommendation of products that are replenished periodically

Intelligent Selling Services for SAP Commerce Cloud | SAP Help Portal

Gen AI Business cases.

SAP Commerce Cloud AI Business Cases

Generate Product Descriptions
Generate Product Attributes and Values
Generate a Blog Post
Create Social Media Post
Generate Product Banner Text
Visual Search + Image Generation and Background Editing
Ask Product
Shopping Assistant
Image Generation and editing

Search and Browse

Visual Search or Visual Shopping

Persona: B2C Customer / B2B Customer

Improves customer engagement
create intuitive shopping experiences
Improves product discovery

Persona: Merchandising manager

boost conversion rates and customer satisfaction

With GEN AI-powered visual search, customers can upload images to find similar products in the catalog. Additionally, it detects objects in the image and allows the customer to select a product from the catalog.

Ask Product

Persona: B2C Customer / B2B Customer

Improves order conversion
Reduce complexity in order process by getting answers / solution to their queries

Persona: Sales Manager /Customer Service Representative

Reduce the order placement complexity
Saving cost of the contact centre queries
Sales rep can expedite the order process

Using uploaded product documents and product information, the generative AI will answer questions about the product. For example, if a customer wants to know about the warranty, the materials used, or how it is used, it will provide relevant information.

Shopping assistant -Conversational Agent

Persona: B2C Customer / B2B Customer

Improves order conversion
Improve average order value
Improve repeat purchases
Reduce complexity in order process and helps to arrive the desired product

Persona: Sales Manager /Customer Service Representative

Reduce the order placement complexity and improve product discovery
Saving cost of the contact centre queries
Sales rep can expedite the order process

A shopping assistant is an agent that helps customers discover and compare products through natural conversation. It functions as a plugin that can be integrated into any digital platform storefront.

It understands and processes complex customer queries through intuitive conversations and provides contextual answers, offering product suggestions based on the query. It may ask engaging questions to refine the recommendation

With its natural language capabilities and integration with the product catalog, it can have intuitive conversations with customers.

SAP supports these features with an add-on called CX AI Toolkit

Please refer here for more information SAP CX AI Toolkit | SAP Help Portal

Capabilities:

Integrates with SAP Commerce Catalogs
Natural Language, Intuitive Conversations
Product Recommendations Based on Query
Answer Product Questions
Answer Comparison Questions Across Products
Multilingual
JSON Responses for Easy Consumption (More features are getting released soon)

In future, It can also be enhanced with customer queries on the check-out process, order status and customer service-related queries. It may act as a one-stop assistant for the customer in the e-commerce channel

Generate Product Descriptions

Persona: Product Content, Merchandising Manager / Marketing Manager

Reduce time spent on producing product content, Improve the operational efficiency to onboard products
Increase conversion rate and customer experience

Appealing product descriptions can be generated using existing catalog data, including images, tags, and descriptions. It helps to generate unique and engaging product descriptions in multiple languages

The solution leverages existing catalog data to generate AI- enriched descriptions. It supports prompt-based special instructions for fine tuning the descriptions and enables bulk updates of SAP commerce Product records, ensuring efficient and scalable content management.

Generate Product Attributes - Product Tagging

Persona: Product Content, Merchandising Manager / Marketing Manager

Reduce time spent on producing product content, Improve the operational efficiency by creating quality content for Site search and search engine optimization
Increase conversion rate and customer experience

Product Tagging utilizes image recognition and contextual analysis to automate the generation, of comprehensive product attribute sets. This feature enables the effortless maintenance of rich, consistent product data across all channels. These product attributes can be efficiently used in SEO and internal site search to improve the product discovery

Blog and Social Media posts / Product Banner texts

Persona: Digital Sales Manager / Marketing Manager

Improves the productivity of the marketing team
Increase Channel traffic and product awareness
Increase in conversion rate with effective marketing campaigns

Streamline the creation of professional, personalized content for diverse business and marketing campaigns, ensuring rich and consistent messaging. Generate high-quality content by leveraging prompts and CX product data for targeted marketing objectives.

Generate a blog post- Use product detail from Commerce Cloud to write a blog post

Generate a social media post- Use product detail from Commerce Cloud to write a social media post

Generate product banner text- Use a selected product from Commerce Cloud, guided
by tone, length, and optional special instructions to generate product banner text

Image Generation and Background Editing

Persona: Digital content Manager / Marketing Manager /Product manager

Efficient production of images with minimal effort
Optimize the best media content to give best customer experience
Increase order conversion

The image generation tool enables the creation of engaging product visuals for our eCommerce site, online campaigns, ensuring brand consistency and driving higher online sales.

Product Image Designer integrates AI-driven image generation and image enhancement. It enables on-demand creation and editing of professional product visuals. This solution accelerates product launches, lowers photography costs, and ensures consistent visual quality. Th image designer can

Create AI based new images
Clear /Change the backgrounds of the images to align with brand standards
Improve the quality of the media content

Generate AI images with product labels or logos overlaid on commerce product images - Easily add text and graphics to product images and banners

Assistant Clip.png

Future Roadmap of CX AI -Commerce

Visual Information Extraction - Improved AI insights based on character recognition of images from commerce products in catalog

Commerce Product Review - Generate AI Summary of all your product reviews for a specific product through the Toolkit UI or API, highlight customer sentiment of reviews and highlight keywords

AI Product Translation - Product Description and Attribute generation in multiple languages , translate existing Commerce product descriptions and publish them in product catalog of SAP commerce cloud

Shopping Assistant -Improved version with additional features

Adopting a CX AI toolkit can significantly enhance customer interactions by improving product discovery and optimizing product data and content. The benefits of this toolkit include better search capabilities, enriched product information, and personalized content for social media. These features are helping to achieve enhanced customer experience, increased revenue, and a higher average order value (AOV).

The solution requires minimal setup, offers an affordable entry point with support program available to Customers. SAP is continuously working to give best customer experience, optimize business processes with advanced AI, which is driven by customer feedback and industry needs.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. We appreciate your support and wish you all the best!

Reach out to your SAP representative to explore these capabilities and discuss the next steps.

Enablement Resources:

AI in E-Commerce: Transforming Customer Journeys and Optimizing Business Efficiency