An Introduction to AI in eCommerce Product Management

Long before ChatGPT and OpenAI, the eCommerce market slowly shifted to include AI solutions to maximize efficiency and boost product management abilities. 

With the overall eCommerce market estimated to reach over $8 Trillion by 2027, the use of AI to aid in scaling, optimization, and product management is likely to become even more prominent. Competition is tough in the eCommerce sector. That is why online retailers left and right are searching for AI implementations that can help them grow and the right AI software providers that can give their brand an edge over the competition.

Trustana stands out as an ideal AI solutions provider for retailers looking to optimize their product management, giving eCommerce stores the ability to manage multiple brands and hundreds of products quickly and efficiently. 

With an intuitive interface and rapid data processing, Trustana allows you to see the big picture of your business with the click of a button, while getting AI recommendations on product descriptions, images, and more, making scaling a breeze.

What is Product Management?

In short, product management includes everything related to your products. It involves overseeing the entire life cycle of a product, from its inception through development, launch, and, most critically, sales. 

Done right, good product management should include a wide variety of skills and processes, such as initial market research and product development to creating something worth selling, good marketing and sales to get the product to the customer, and finally, providing post-launch support, which boosts customer satisfaction as well as your business’s reputation. 

Product management also includes developing a balanced and optimized product offering across all your business products. This means you also need to ensure that the right product is developed, delivered, and marketed to the right markets at the right time to maximize your success.

What is Product Data, and Why Does It Need to Be Managed?

Product data, or product information is on the surface pretty simple: it refers to all the relevant information associated with a product.

Some examples of essential product data include digital assets such as high-quality images, videos, 3D models, and other multimedia assets, as well as a product’s categories and subcategories. 

Of course, this also includes key attributes such as size, color, material, weight, dimensions, technical specifications, and other relevant details.

That’s a lot of data to handle for multiple products, which is why AI solutions are often an excellent tool for getting the most out of product data. When used correctly, this data forms the backbone of any eCommerce business strategy, helping to build the store with the correct product listings, manage inventory, and process orders.

Not only this, but product data is critical for successful marketing campaigns and sales strategy. If you know that customers often buy a specific product during a particular season, you can both market the product more effectively during that time, and prepare any physical inventory you may need well in advance.

Key Features of AI-Driven Product Management

Data enrichment is one of the most significant ways AI can help you with product management. This involves enhancing your raw product data with additional information to improve its quality, completeness, and usefulness. 

The key here is how AI tools and algorithms can analyze this data - data that is often in vast datasets too big for a single person to analyze - and identify patterns, correct errors, fill in missing information, and enhance product descriptions. 

Utilizing an AI tool to both analyze and clean up your product info, provides the opportunity to create even more accurate and valuable data.

This enriched data not only improves search relevance and customer engagement, but also enables even more accurate analytics, helping you as a business owner in your decision-making.

To get a better, more first-hand understanding of how AI can help your eCommerce business, you can sign up with Trustana for a free trial.

The uses of AI come in many forms, whether using AI-powered algorithms to automatically categorize products into relevant categories and subcategories or analyzing product attributes, descriptions, and historical sales data to identify buying patterns.

What This Means for eCommerce Digital Asset Management

Put together in one single AI tool, this allows you or any other eCommerce business owner to quickly and automatically organize your products, with the AI accurately tagging, organizing, and optimizing images, videos, and other multimedia content. 

It also means you can gain greater insight into your customers’ spending habits by using AI to analyze product data and clearly see any links between product choices or buying times.

This allows you to refine your conversion process and boost conversion rates. Once again, AI can help you ensure that visual content is consistently branded, optimized for various channels and devices, and aligned with marketing objectives by scanning and updating your catalog.

Real-World Applications of AI in Product Management

It is estimated that simply using AI for increased personalization can increase eCommerce sales by 7.8%, not to mention the use of AI tools for all other areas of product management and sales. 

In product research and management alone, a McKinsey report found that AI could unlock up to $60 Billion in productivity.

Almost every major eCommerce retailer shows exactly how effective AI can be, with giants such as Amazon already harnessing AI algorithms for tailored product recommendations, dynamic pricing optimization, and personalized search results.

Benefits of Integrating AI into Your eCommerce Strategy

There’s so much that the right AI tools can do, meaning there are many benefits to integrating AI tools and systems into your eCommerce strategy. Here are just three of the core benefits AI tools can provide:

Enhance Your Product Data Accuracy and Boost Customer Satisfaction

By constantly updating and reviewing a store’s products and information, AI can ensure consistency across all pages, whether users browse a website, check out a mobile app, or engage with a chatbot. Consistency boosts trust, and higher customer trust enhances overall customer satisfaction.

This also reduces the likelihood of returns or negative reviews due to misinformation, increasing an eCommerce store’s trust and reliability.

Reduce Your Operational Costs

Through optimization and automation, AI tools can overhaul various aspects of product management such as inventory management, order processing, and order fulfillment. 

This is achieved by AI algorithms predicting demand, optimizing stock levels, automating replenishment processes, and automating order fulfillment, all of which reduce the time and money needed for general operations.

Beyond the fundamentals of eCommerce, AI can also reduce costs in customer support, with AI chatbots handling routine inquiries and providing assistance 24/7, freeing up any human agents to focus on more complex tasks. 

All of these tasks would usually cost a lot more time and a lot more money, whereas a select number of AI tools can now get things done in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost.

Improve Scalability and Flexibility

On top of everything else, AI is also extremely useful for more efficient scaling and increased flexibility.

It does this by handling routine tasks and processes such as catalog management, product categorization, and pricing optimization, making adding new product catalogs and entering new markets much more accessible, not being bogged down by manual constraints. 

Whether it's scaling up during peak seasons or pivoting in response to market shifts, AI equips businesses with the agility and adaptability needed to stay competitive and thrive in the fast-paced world of eCommerce.

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How Can Trustana Help You? 

Many of our clients have seen precisely how AI can boost conversions and increase efficiency, like our client Vallen Asia using Trustana tools for data enrichment and preparation. 

Struggling to manage the vast product listing process as quickly as they wanted, Trustana helped them populate 60+ product specification attributes across products spanning 18 different categories in less than two days - a process that would usually take at least two weeks.

Book a demo today to see how Trustana can boost your eCommerce business with AI-driven solutions. We’re here to help your business succeed and improve in productivity!