AI shopping: eCommerce isn’t ready

If you depend on SEO, you‘re about to get swamped by data quality issues, semantic metadata, machine-readable feeds, and content rewrites. That’s just for starters.

Up until now, the most disruptive thing that has happened to the world of eCommerce is the massive growth in online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Temu. This growth wasn’t really that disruptive because it was pretty much just more eCommerce stuff. Brands coped. It mandated changes to their spending, new ways to track inventory, and so on, but it was more moves from the well-established eCommerce playbook.

AI-enhanced search and shopping represent a different level of challenge. Ready to face AI shopping, young Skywalker, you are not…

This is what your eCommerce website will do with AI.

AI is a new kind of problem for commerce because it makes mistakes.

In the past, if computers did commerce wrong, they got fixed. When eCommerce went wrong, it was a reflection of human error somewhere in the production line.

AI, on the other hand, can go wrong without any need for human assistance. It goes wrong all by itself, even if you have done everything right.