Don’t Use AI for eCommerce When It Is Completely Unnecessary
When communicating with our clients, I have discovered an interesting thing: many ecommerce business owners believe that by installing an artificial intelligence system (AI), they will get some kind of a super coach, which will work for them right out of the box.
But the idea that artificial intelligence will advise you how to run your business without any problems is not true. Some ecommerce managers honestly believe this and invest in an AI system without realizing what it actually does or why they need certain features if they can be done cheaper and faster without using AI.
Search Functionality with and Without AI
Let’s take product search as an example of important functionality on any ecommerce portal. I would like to illustrate the idea with an example of an app called Elastic App Search, which provides rich functionality when searching for products within the store. But I’m sure most people don’t know about these available tools because they are usually too busy running their business’s day-to-day operations to search for them on top of everything else going on in the company.
To understand what people are searching for and how they communicate, it’s important to observe the language itself. The most relevant search engine in this case would be one that takes into account both synonyms of words as well as typos, while ranking results based on relevance with complex, full-text indexing. This should be a system that provides a morphological analysis also.
Businesses can miss the key point here — that people enter product names in a way they understand these words. If customers do not see your business in their search results, no one will buy anything on your site. The ability of search engines to find your business is critical in this regard. It needs more synonyms so clients will not be confused, guessing what word was actually meant by the more formal phrase, “product name.”
When the search cannot find a product by synonym, chances are likely the problem is that only formal product names from supplier directories were used. In real life, people refer to products in slang. For example, “clothes washer” is typed instead of “washing machine,” and so on. By knowing the most complete semantics of product names, we can greatly improve search results, and even raise certain products in the search to stimulate sales.
In general, AI can provide effective business value only if this technology is taken seriously. Datasets need to be searched, prepared, then models built, trained on datasets, and checked to determine which one is better, then trained again on new data, and looped through these stages again and again. In addition to the AI software, you need a professional data scientist to work with and to rent very powerful servers that can cost you thousands of dollars a month.
The use of artificial intelligence is a cyclical process that requires constant model retraining and results evaluation. Business owners must be sure they have the proper tools for their needs before implementing AI into production systems.
Elastic App Search Compare to Azure AI Search
Elastic App Search is a full-text search solution that makes it easy to add powerful and relevant searches to any application or website. Elastic App Search works by indexing your product data and making it searchable in real time. When a shopper searches for a product on your site, Elastic App Search will quickly return the most relevant results. Elastic App Search is fast, scalable, and easy to use, so you can be confident that your shoppers will always find what they want to buy.
What are some benefits of using Elastic App Search for product search in ecommerce? Here are just a few:
- Elastic App Search is fast and scalable, so it handles large catalogs with ease.
- Elastic App Search provides relevant results that match the shopper’s intent.
- Elastic App Search is easy to use and set up, so you can be up and running quickly.
- Elastic App Search provides valuable search analytics that can help you improve your product search experience.
Elastic App Search works right out of the box, while Azure AI Search has to be trained regularly on datasets before you get trusted functionality.
Azure AI Search is a cloud-based search service that helps users find information stored in various types of content such as text, images, and documents.
Azure AI Search offers many of the same features as Elastic App Search, including the ability to index data, provide relevant results, and measure search analytics. However, Azure AI Search also offers additional features such as cognitive search and entity extraction.
Cognitive search is a feature that allows Azure AI Search to understand the context of a query and return results that are semantically related to the query. For example, if a shopper searches for “red shoes,” Azure AI Search would not only return results for red shoes, but also results for other items such as clothing and accessories that are related to the query. Azure AI Search also offers a few other features that are not available in Elastic App Search.
To summarize, Elastic App Search is a full-text search solution that is easy to use and set up. Azure AI Search offers additional features such as cognitive search and entity extraction. Both solutions are suitable for ecommerce product search, but Azure AI Search comes at a much higher price point.
In addition to subscribing to Azure AI software, you also need to hire a professional data scientist(s). Consider this a mandatory labor cost with any AI service.
Azure AI Search is more expensive than Elastic App Search because of the cognitive search and entity extraction features. If you need these features, then Azure AI Search is the better choice. However, if you don’t need these features, then Elastic App Search is a more cost-effective solution. To learn more about full-text search solutions for ecommerce, please contact the Virto team. We would be happy to discuss your requirements for powerful search features to run on.
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Summary
Installing AI software out of the box will only yield unproductive results if no further work goes into making adjustments or changes after installation. Many business owners make the mistake of starting to use AI when it is completely unnecessary and the same functionality could be reached in a less expensive and faster way.
Above, I have said a lot that AI should not be used where cheaper tools can be used for achieving your business goals. However, this post was not written by me, but by an AI writing service called Jasper. Simply because my time to write this post would be worth more than using AI. This is a provocative case that I think you will especially like.
Author: Oleg Zhuk
Business Product Owner at Virto Commerce
