Alexa can help you create to do lists.
She can play music, set an alarm, look up the weather and the news.
She can even turn down the lights for you.
1,500 engineers at Amazon worked for four years to build Alexa.
Alexa is Amazon’s artificial intelligent, voice-enabled device that is meant to be a growing part of your life, one day becoming your AI assistant.
But Amazon is not alone. We all know about Siri. Google has Google Voice, Microsoft has Cortana and Samsung has S voice.
The internet is moving to a new world, a world powered by an AI assistant like Alexa and Siri.
This brave new world has already begun to march forward, although today’s AI assistants are still clunky.
But soon these assistants will improve to the point that they become as indispensable as our phones.
So what could this mean for your e-commerce business?
Here are my predictions:
- Consumers will gravitate towards the convenience of an AI assistant for ordering routine items like vitamins, milk, toilet paper, etc. A new kind of SEO will develop that makes a business more easily found by the AI assistant.
- The company that makes the dominant AI device, will have significant influence on who processes all those buying orders received by the AI assistant.
- The AI assistant will make it even more easier to find the best prices. Ergo price competition will continue to increase.
- The convenience of ordering via an AI coupled with free shipping will attract even more shoppers to Amazon. This will be major bad news for Walmart, Target and pretty much every other retailer.
- Excellent customer service, high quality products, branding and buying assistance will continue to be an advantage for small businesses.
- Free shipping may no longer be optional in a world of same day, free delivery. Uber and other transportation companies could possibly come to the rescue by providing free and close to free shipping services to e-commerce retailers.
- In such a world of fierce competition and convenience, customer loyalty will become a business necessity.
Essentially it’s going to be a great world for consumers but e-commerce companies will have to continually raise their game.
Want to be better prepared for this kind of future? Get started on building your base of loyal customers today! Don’t delay, check out a demo of RewardCamp.