Move Fast & Optimize: The Future of Ecommerce is AI-Assisted

Adversity is no stranger to ecommerce brands, but the last few years have thrown more than a few more wrenches into the works.

Rising inflation and the looming threat of a recession have tempered consumer spending and encouraged brands to cut costs to stay afloat.

In fact, a whopping 82% of brands say high inflation is forcing them to cut costs, and 83% are concerned about inflation’s impact on growth.

Despite these headwinds, ecommerce is bigger than ever before, with revenues projected to top $1 trillion in 2024 for the US alone.

With this rise, more and more brands are crowding the space (an estimated 12 million or more), all clambering for the limited attention of a growing contingent of shoppers.

Ultimately, with fewer resources, intense price pressure, inflation, and continually rising shopper expectations, merchants are having to do more with less—not only maintaining the shopping experience their customers love but continually improving it to stand out.

So, how can your ecommerce brand—be it a budding DTC operation or a scaling omnichannel enterprise—grow revenue efficiently with shrinking resources and more on your plate?

#cta-visual-pb#<cta-title>Meet the new Shogun Page Builder<cta-title>Join us for our live keynote, where Shogun’s CEO and Senior Director of Product will show how brands can leverage Shogun’s new AI and optimization features.Register now

What brands must do to stay competitive

First, you can’t get left behind.

Ecommerce has come a long way in a short time, and merchants have always had to be agile to maintain an edge.

A decade ago, the design expertise to build and customize a store was enough to put your store on the map. These days, customization alone isn’t going to cut it.

You need to master the art of optimization to differentiate your storefront from all the others.

With advances in ecommerce technology, merchants have been able to more easily build good-looking storefronts without technical know-how or design bonafides.

Platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce have developed themes that bring the baseline for standard design way up. And that’s great.

But as these increasingly beautiful stores fill up the internet, design expectations increase and many stores begin to look the same.

Cookie cutter themes (while nicely designed) create a homogenous shopping experience from store to store. That’s why DTC brands must be on the cutting edge of ecommerce advances.

With advances like artificial intelligence, the time to take advantage is now.

Technological leaps are nothing new, but 2023 has been something entirely different. AI is everywhere you turn. It’s being deployed to just about everything we touch online, and it’s bringing with it huge gains in productivity.

According to a global survey by McKinsey in April, 18% of respondents in the retail and CPG industries already regularly use generative AI for work, with another 12% using it regularly outside work.

In the five months since that time, these numbers have no doubt increased a great deal. For savvy brands, there’s a huge opportunity to get ahead of competitors that haven’t yet adopted this game-changing technology.

The same survey found that these brands are most commonly leveraging AI to perform tasks like:

• Creating first drafts
• Marketing personalization
• Customer support chatbots
• Identifying trending customer needs
• Summarizing documents
• Forecasting future trends

The use cases for AI show up across ecommerce functions, from customer support and merchandising to content creation and store design.

The future of ecommerce is AI-assisted

At Shogun, we believe this all points to an AI-assisted future for successful ecommerce brands.

Where store design is concerned, you need to focus on more than just building great store pages, but instead building fully optimized stores that drive revenue.

AI is essential to developing design and optimization workflows that are efficient and scalable.

The ecommerce brands that don’t take advantage of this technology won’t be able to compete with those that do.

These AI-assisted innovators will be able to:

• Work as conversion rate optimizers, identifying new ways to grow conversions and sales
• Spin up multiple versions of landing pages and ad creatives to test, without relying on developers to make it happen
• Accelerate their content marketing efforts to grow traffic fast

Aided by AI, forward-thinking ecommerce operators will suddenly be freed up to spend more time focusing on the optimizations that’ll grow their conversions and sales.

On its own, AI is a lot of muscle without a lot of dexterity.

It can only support your brand needs with the right guidance. By leveraging the right tools, you can harness the power of AI to simplify the various workflows across your business.

Meet the new and improved Shogun Page Builder

It’s more important than ever that brands adopt generative AI and optimization tools to be agile and efficient as they build and grow their online presence.

We get that, which is why we’ve launched new features that leverage AI to help you move fast.

It isn’t just about being able to build great store pages but being able to scale your efforts with the help of AI and optimize your store for more traffic and conversions.

As the only page builder certified by Shopify to support more established brands, we’ve developed a powerful feature set that’s allowed merchants to scale their stores more efficiently.

Now, we’ve launched the next generation of Shogun Page Builder to help brands do more with less in a time where that sort of efficiency is dearly needed.

Today, we’re super excited to introduce Shogun AI and Shogun Insights, which encompass a whole new set of features that’ll revolutionize how you customize and optimize your store.

With these features, your team will be able to:

• Generate page copy in seconds for headlines, body text, and product descriptions
• Design pages section by section with AI to launch campaigns faster
• Automatically generate meta titles and descriptions for more SEO-friendly pages
• Code with AI to design custom elements that match your brand vision
• Identify and fix page issues right from the editor to improve performance, accessibility, and SEO

Learn all about this next evolution of Shogun and see what you can do with Shogun AI and Shogun Insights right now.

Plus, you can join us for the keynote presentation on September 26th, where our Senior Director of Product will show off how all these new tools can help you grow your brand fast.

#cta-visual-pb#<cta-title>See Shogun AI and Shogun Insights in action<cta-title>Join us for our live keynote, where Shogun’s CEO and Senior Director of Product will show how brands can leverage Shogun’s newest features to scale effectively.Register now