10 Ways to Effectively Use AI in Small eCommerce Businesses

Technically, not using AI at all is way better than using AI wrongly. Presently, there’s a lot of hype surrounding the use of AI in eCommerce business. With these here practical tips, you can cut through the hype to get real measurable results in your eCommerce business. Using AI wisely is actually the key.
 
1. First Experiment with Free AI Chatbots 

Experts recommend that using free AI in your business is really helpful. Until you find at least one direct benefit of using advanced AI in your business, it is best to stick with free AI tools. Versatile AI Chabots like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini do render tremendous service to business owners. Even though these Chatbots are not perfect, they do get the job done, even at experimental stages.
 
2. Widely Brainstorm with AI

Business owners can engage AI as brainstorming partners. It can be effectively used to brainstorm product names, YouTube headlines, character names, character backstories, social media tags, and much more. You must be careful though because AIs aren’t quite perfect at drawing engineering diagrams from text-based prompts. They can make things that are pretty or seem real, but they're not really too good at diagramming concepts.
 
3. Start Small but Scale Gradually
 
Sometimes even common sense dictates this. You can always start small and scale gradually using AI tools. You can deploy AI effectively for setting up cloud services, building out IT infrastructure, and lots more. Make adding AI a carefully managed process. You must know it well including its strengths and weaknesses, before you do much with it. Get to know what works for you and what doesn't. Look out for those things that take too much of your time and use AI effectively to reduce the time and even costs.

4. Value Time as Your Key AI Metric
 
Just as we measure ROI as a key metric to make business investments, we can also measure time return as a key metric in the deployment of AI. You can for instance be assured using time metric, how much time is freed up when AI is deployed. You’ll know exactly how much time your AI project saves for you when taking management decisions. You can from there be able to guesstimate how much value AI provides to your business to justify its cost of deployment.
 
5. Carefully Pair Your Expertise with AI 

AI is no replacement for your own expertise. Use AI to complement it effectively. No need looking to use AI for headcount reduction, especially if you're a small business. Granted AIs can do a lot for a business, but they're also classic management challenges. It helps to value them as very bright but annoyingly troublesome helpers. To succeed with them, they require constant guidance and course correction because they’re tools after all. Chatbots should for instance have a very low degree of autonomy because from one prompt to the next, they could get confused along the way.

6. Avoid AI Coding Unless you Know Coding Yourself 

AI coding can be astonishing, game-changing, and have an ROI almost beyond comprehension but there’s still a snag. AI coding tools can also be incredibly stupid, thickheaded, stubborn, and do at times take exactly the wrong approach to any problem. In such scenario, AI can confuse you and compound matters if you don’t know anything about coding yourself. If you know coding, you can actually act anytime you run into a snag or need to fix something AI is not doing right. 

7. Use AI for Quick Analytics Reports 

Feeding data into AI can always give you quick analysis. You can for instance use QuickBooks' reporting tools to generate a report showing the yearly P&L for the last five years. When you export it as a PDF into the free tier of ChatGPT, you can input questions and get quick answers about your business overview. Depending on the business questions you feed into the process, you can get some visual analysis in form of charts/graphs showing income, expenses, and net income trends by years.

8. Don't Spend on AI Just Because It's Hot 

It is not advisable to invest in AI because everyone is hyping it as really hot new thing around. Invest in AI only if you can see how it will benefit your business. Exact same way you wouldn't spend on any piece of equipment just because it's cool. You only buy equipment because it opens a new business opportunity for you. If it also helps you improve productivity, or helps you reduce costs, it’s ok to have. AI should be treated exactly the same way. So, if you don't know how AI will help your business, it is best not to spend on it. Simple! You don't have to spend on anything AI until you do know how it will help out.
 
9. Make AI Spend Monthly, not Yearly
 
This is more of a money tip and less of operational tip. Significantly, AI costs directly impact the resources of a business. Therefore, scheduling and budgeting for the cost of AI is good for the cash flow of the business. For this reason, until you're completely sure you want to integrate a given AI service into your business long-term, it is best not to sign up for a yearly commitment. Granted some AI services may require yearly payment commitment, but you must carefully weigh this commitment against your cash flow if you must use such AI tools. If you make monthly commitment, you may pay a bit more but the costs blend more easily into your cash flow. 

10. Clearly Define What You Consider a Win

Time is the most important metric in AI use. AI tools are good if they can help you make some tangible time savings. If you have few hands as employees, AI tools can be really handy to take care of routine and repeated business chores. Any AI tools that help to reduce time on a project directly impacts costs as well. Getting a job done faster increases productivity and saves costs on time. That's how you look at AI by having your eyes on such tangible wins.  

5 Effective Tips for Boosting eCommerce Sales

If your eCommerce business is currently not making good sales, chances are high that you are doing many vital things wrong. As online shopping is increasing in popularity, so should online sales. If your business is missing out on this train, come closer, pay attention here! Irrespective of whether you’re running a side hustle from your garage or managing a full-blown e-commerce empire, getting your online sales strategy right can make or break your business. This is one vital fact many eCommerce business owners presently worry about. Significantly, too many great products fail not because of the quality of the products but because their owners don’t seem to understand what today’s online shoppers really want. These here are five effective strategies that are really essential to boost eCommerce sales.

1. Make Your Website User-Friendly

The design and deployment of your eCommerce website are very important to its usefulness for online sales. Your website is your digital storefront where online shoppers first make contact with your business. You must ensure it is well optimized to make it user-friendly. This means it must load fast and easy to navigate. Its aesthetic appeal must be such as to easily arrest the attention of online shoppers who are notoriously always in a hurry. If your website is confusing, cumbersome and slow, its bounce rate will be embarrassingly high. Real attention must always be paid to this as well as its checkout and payment process. On your eCommerce website, here is the trick that really works. The easier you make it for people to give you money, the more money people will give you. Never forget that.

2. Effective Customer Service 

In eCommerce business, poor customer service is a business killer any day. Just one unsatisfied and frustrated customer can leave reviews capable of scaring away hundreds of potential buyers. You can take deliberate steps to safeguard against this. Since you know that most customers always want quick responses to their inquiries, easy returns without guilt trips, and real humans, not just chatbots, prioritizing customer satisfaction can help boost sales significantly. If your customer service people are well trained and responsive, they can easily turn angry customers into raving fans just by handling complaints well. That’s powerful stuff for boosting sales.

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

Presently, over 70% of shoppers are doing so via mobile devices particularly smart phones. So, if your website is not optimized to work perfectly on phones, chances are, you’re quite literally throwing money away on lost sales. Optimizing your website to work perfectly on phones can literally double your conversion rate within a short while. Once in a while, always test the accessibility of your website on your own phone. If by doing so you encounter serious challenges, it is a pointer to what your customers go through. Arrange to fix the problem as quickly as possible then watch out for your conversion rates percentages.

4. Get Your Business on Social Media 

Many popular social media platforms are equipped with in-house marketing tools you can always take advantage of. Hugely popular social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook are now legitimate sales channels, and smart eCommerce businesses are cashing in big time. The trick to marketing on social media is to always create content consistently that doesn’t appear like advertising. The aim is to get meaningful engagement on your content and draw more users to it. The key is quality content appearing consistently and really authentic. This is what attracts users to your content and to engage with it.

5. Use Analytics Data to Drive Sales

You cannot be right all the time if you rely on your gut feelings to market online. Your best bet then is to rely on analytics data. Google Analytics is free and tells you everything you need to know about your website visitors. Which pages do they love? Where do they bail out? What products do they actually buy versus what you think they should buy? If you market on social media, the in-house analytics tools on each platform are also very helpful. It is advisable to start with simple metrics. You can easily track your most popular pages and products. Discover exactly where people drop off in your sales funnel. You can test different headlines, images, and prices, and pay attention to seasonal trends. Above all, don’t just collect data—you must actually rely on and use the data to make important business decisions.

Final Words

Boosting eCommerce sales isn’t exactly very difficult if you know what you are doing. Once you have in place a website that works, user-friendly, mobile optimized, and functions well, you are good to go. Having the business on social media that engages real people is also important. Next is to habitually make data-driven decisions and have in place an effective customer service that makes people want to come back to your business. This is what significantly drives conversions and sales over a prolonged period of time.