Shopify boosts AI offerings to spur merchants’ sales

The e-commerce giant revealed a succession of AI-related products Monday during its semi-annual showcase event called Shopify Editions, which spans over 150 new offerings this round

Shopify is boosting the amount of artificial intelligence embedded in its platforms.

The Canadian e-commerce giant revealed a succession of AI-related products Monday during its semi-annual showcase event called Shopify Editions, which spans over 150 new offerings this round.

Among the buzziest are a new artificial intelligence tool that will suggest personalised responses merchants can use to reply to customer emails.

AI will also crop up when merchants are looking to categorise their products, suggesting attributes such as colour, size, material and style information that businesses can use to increase the discoverability of merchandise and encourage sales.

The new features Shopify is launching come as a race to adopt artificial intelligence takes over the world, pushing a growing number of companies to determine how the technology could be used to enhance productivity and efficiency.

The firm’s offerings build on last summer’s event which introduced the world to Sidekick, a chatbot its merchant customers can use to ask questions about business operations like why sales dropped or what they can do to drive traffic in key months.

While thousands of merchants have early access to Sidekick, it has not fully launched. Shopify says it will keep adding users this year.

The new services are meant to make the firm’s platform “more powerful,” said Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s president, in a statement.

We are confident these updates will continue to make it easier for our merchants to do what they do best and focus on scaling their businesses, he added.

Away from artificial intelligence, the firm will give Canadian merchants access to a program which lets them set more precise budgets for social media campaigns and only charges them if new customers make purchases.

Merchants using Shopify’s point-of-sale technology will also get the option to generate digital receipts for customers with one touch.

The point-of-sale app will also notify businesses processing a return if the item being brought back is outside of the company’s return policy, taking uncertainty out of the hands of retail employees.