Approaching Tamebay’s 10th birthday, we’ve asked our party sponsors to give a view on what the next 10 years will hold. Karolina Kulach is a content marketer and non-fiction writer, specialising in global ecommerce and online sales trends. Here, on behalf of WebInterpret she considers the possibilities of AI (Artificial Intelligence).
WebInterpret understands the importance of an online sales solution that is automated and makes the complex global selling process simple and effortless. We wanted to share with you a glimpse of the future of ecommerce.
Software currently requires a lot of human intervention. This will change in the near future thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). We may be on the verge of a completely new ecommerce reality.
Consider this: today’s retailers have to match product categories, attributes, sizes…etc, which involves a lot of manual work. Artificial Intelligence can perform most of this product tagging on a larger scale. As a result, complex tasks will be carried out by machines with minimum human supervision. For example, WebInterpret’s technology can import a raw catalogue and have it fully structured, localised and listed on multiple channels with minimal human intervention.
The key is to think ahead and recognise the importance machine learning and big data analysis will accomplish. This is our focus at WebInterpret: we’re working towards complete automation of processes, but with the human brain in mind…
The future isn’t about choosing machines over humans, but combining both to deliver the best results. In ecommerce, we’ve observed that combining human expertise with continuous machine taught software to accurately generate product listings with buyer’s satisfaction as the key to delivering consistent quality.
In our business environment we have been affected by critical errors, for e.g. when converting sizes from one country to another made by human translators. Automating the process by teaching our machine to convert sizes based on brands has since reduced these critical errors significantly.
This was a progressive move: the number of errors decreased significantly. Our understanding and belief that humans could do a better job than machines meant rejecting progress. Machines produce more repetitive and consistent content 24/7 , repetitive work which has a low value for human satisfaction. Human intervention and expertise is still required to create, improve and control the automatic process.
Ecommerce is going global
The increasing role of cross-border trading will mean fiercer competition not only from local businesses, but from everywhere. The best advice for online sellers? Start selling internationally as soon as possible: the globalisation of marketplaces is inevitable and is already taking place.
Once you have established your presence on a given market, you’re already one step ahead of competitors who are only about to come from other countries!
So go global! With today’s technology, it’s become easier and more affordable to sell worldwide than ever before. There are markets with inventory shortage where retailers can generate great sales with minimal effort. Test multiple markets and invest in the most successful ones.
(Do you like a party? Don’t forget that we are having a birthday party to mark our 10th anniversary milestone. And do come and join in the celebrations.)
