AI will drive $260 billion in global online sales and $1.6 trillion in in-store sales this holiday season, according to Salesforce. Not entirely surprising given that 62% of consumers say they now trust AI to guide their brand decisions, on par with traditional search.
But as consumers rapidly test out and become regular users of these new tools, brands are scrambling to adjust their strategies so that they show up in searches on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and other “AI answer engines.”
“The paradigm has massively shifted in [ecommerce],” said Travis Hess, CEO of the newly rebranded Commerce (formerly BigCommerce) on this week’s episode of the Retail Remix podcast. “The customer is the new channel, and organizations, regardless of size, need to go across every surface where consumers want to engage them, and they need to do so with value and with personalization.”
But how? Luckily Hess has the beginnings of an answer (there are no final answers yet since, as he said, “we’re kind of all rewriting the rules of the internet.”) As the umbrella organization for ecommerce platform BigCommerce, shopping feed software Feedonomics and website builder Makeswift, Commerce operates some of the essential “plumbing” that will feed this new world of AI-powered discovery. Listen to the episode to hear:
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- How to capture some of the projected $260 billion in sales AI is expected to drive this holiday season;
- How to adapt your ecommerce strategy for contextual discoverability; and
- Why a brand’s “content supply chain” matters more than ever, and how to enhance yours.
“Regardless of where you sell through or how, it’s never been more important to own your customer data,” said Hess. “You’ve got to be able to go where your customers want to engage you. I think that doesn’t paint you into a corner, it future-proofs you in a way that sets you up for success, regardless of what comes out as it relates to innovation. Because the data is going to be the big unlock at the end of the day. And I don’t mean just product data, I mean inventory data, pricing data, customer data — all these different data inputs that need to be harmonized and enriched and then syndicated out to drive these sorts of experiences at scale.”
Listen to the whole episode here or wherever you get your podcasts:
