Intelligent solutions to support shopping online
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of the e-commerce industry as a digital new normal takes over. Here are four Tech Offers riding the wave.
Since its inception, e-commerce has been relentlessly nipping at the heels of traditional brick and mortar stores, steadily gaining ground each year as technology and logistics advance. Last year, when the pandemic shuttered physical storefronts, e-commerce cemented its role as an indispensable part of the global retail ecosystem, capturing over US$4.2 trillion in sales worldwide. Quickly recognising the shift to an online space, retailers have been leveraging digital technologies to transform their websites and business processes to meet demand surges.
When moving a business online, there are many factors to consider: product categorisation, user experience, website functions and more. Here are four Tech Offers designed to improve the existing e-commerce experience for your business.
Automating product identification
As companies look to sell their products online, they are faced with the tedious task of product categorisation—the process of labelling and organising products on a website as well as identifying missing labels or errors in the specifications. Manual tasks like these tend to be laborious, inefficient and not scalable in the long run.
To potentially save thousands of manual product inspection and categorisation hours, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology company from New Zealand has developed a software capable of automatically categorising products and including product attribute information. This software can be integrated into any company’s existing infrastructure and has proven itself to be accurate on over a million products.
Beyond providing a productivity boost and reducing human errors, the system also provides potential clients with powerful data for recommender systems like age suggestions for children’s toys and baby products. It also ensures clients meet regulatory requirements by identifying missing labels or information. Currently available as a working solution on the market, the technology is used and loved by enterprise customers.
Of chatbots and customer service
There is one major key advantage that’s lost when businesses move online—the all-important personal touch. To fill this need, companies have adopted chatbots for a more helpful and authentic user experience. However, developing a bot that emulates human conversation and answers complex questions remains a challenge.
To ensure a comfortable and familiar shopping experience, a Singapore-based company has developed an AI-powered multilingual chatbot platform that transforms the way online business communication is handled. Unlike existing chatbots in the market, this platform is powered by deep learning models and natural language processing technology to provide more accurate answers.
This chatbot offers a complete all-in-one solution—including an automatic question generation tool, a dedicated frontend and backend interface for better integration, an autocomplete function to predict users’ questions, and more. Not only can it provide customer service support, answer online sales enquiries or recommend, reserve and book products, the platform can also double up as a digital concierge and serve as a query portal to facilitate logistics.
A solution for strategic sourcing
Online or not, one thing that doesn’t change is the need for a strong supply chain. Companies procure inventory to provide either direct or indirect services to customers. It is clear to many businesses that greater profit comes when they are able to source for cheaper inventory or automate procurement and invoice processes.
To this end, a French company in Singapore has developed a complete digital transformation solution that automates the entire source-to-pay process, from sourcing of inventory to pricing details. The system offers an integrated experience across the entire upstream process of the source-to-contract journey so that clients can successfully define and execute supplier and sourcing strategies. It also allows for a 360-degree view of suppliers’ information and activities, with a unified data model to improve transparency and data visualisation use cases for real-time business management.
This technology has the potential to vastly increase productivity, traceability and cost control across diverse industries like healthcare, e-commerce and oil. By connecting entire supplier networks and managing complex processes, it can also reduce invoicing cycles as well as bring down management and financial risks.
Point, shoot, product
Most retailers and brands exist both online and offline. However, their tangible goods and digital information usually remain siloed. To bridge this gap, a Singapore-based company has developed an AI-powered visual recognition software. This software allows brands, media owners, event organisers and even retailers to transform their physical medium and assets into an interactive platform.
By simply pointing a camera at an image or video that is stored in the system, the user will be taken directly to the online content that the brand would like them to see. With each scan, the technology is able to provide actionable insights and a product overview through its dashboard.
With this technology, every physical image, product and video can be made interactive without the need for QR codes. This could help companies engage with their customers, and enable marketers and content owners to tap on vision-driven searches and interactions to build an omnichannel digital ecosystem.
