What Impact Will AI Have on WooCommerce?

Patrick Rauland

Hello, hello. My name is Patrick Rauland and I am working at eCommerceFuel as the head of research and content. Now, eCommerceFuel is a private community of seven figure plus merchants, and they have been talking nonstop about AI. And mostly what I’ve seen them talk about is repurposing content. So you can take a blog post and easily turn it into a Tweet thread. You can take a video podcast and use AI to find the compelling moments and clip them to share on LinkedIn or YouTube shorts or wherever, and you can repurpose all of that into a newsletter that you send on Fridays automatically.

So AI is incredibly powerful for someone in marketing who needs to repurpose content. I think almost everyone should be using it for that. Now, for those of you who resell products that have a negative prediction, manufacturers in China who relied on native English sellers to write compelling product descriptions to sell those products may decide to go vertical and sell directly to the customer. Now, I’ve always been a fan of manufacturing your own products. If you haven’t thought about that before, now is an excellent time just to start thinking about that and manufacturing your own products so that you have a defensible business.

So to wrap up, definitely use AI to help you repurpose content into different mediums and contexts. Almost everyone should be doing this. And think about your business model. Manufacturers who rely on resellers to move their products have technology that empowers them to sell directly to customers. So I would look into manufacturing my own goods. Overall, new technology just like AI can be scary and I genuinely feel that myself, but I do have hope and optimism for this industry and I think it will streamline a lot of boring work. So I’m excited for that.

Remkus de Vries

Hi, Bob. This is Remkus. AI has a big impact on e-commerce, sure. I think that’s mostly on the content side of things, but what the absolute beautiful thing about AI and the current state of what it is capable of doing, where I think the true magic lies is the… Call it the buddy, from a coding and understanding impact of coding perspective. I think that’s where the most amount of progress is to be made. You can see AI being a threat, sure. You can say it’s taking away part of my job as a developer. I don’t think that’s a fair way to look at it. I see it as a buddy. I see it as a rubber duck. I see it as a inspiration. If you thought of a solution, AI can tell you, “Yes, this is a probable solution to use.”

Or it can tell you, “You know what? There’s also this other solution. Maybe this is a better fit.” So using it to compliment your work is I think where the strength of AI is. I will go as far as saying, that’s not just programming side of things, but that’s also on the content side of things. If you’re using AI solely to generate content, yeah, you’re missing out. You have to be really good at your prompts and find a way to incorporate your own personal writing and stuff in there. So that’s not a smart way to approach it, but using it as a coach, as a guidance, as a friend, as a rubber duck, all of those things, that’s, to me, where the magic is. And with that, the future.

Katie Keith

Hi, I’m Katie and I’m Co-founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins. We specialize in building WooCommerce plug-ins, and while we’re not actively incorporating AI into any of our plug-ins yet, I think that AI will have a big impact on e-commerce in the future. Most of the plug-in companies I know are now using AI to support their work, and this is a real game changer. For example, developers are using AI as a code assistant and marketers are using it to generate ideas, outlines, and so on. However, fewer plug-in builders have started to use AI in ways that directly benefit their customers, particularly in e-commerce. I’m fascinated to see how AI can make the shopping experience better for customers and store owners.

In a non-AI world there were lots of plug-ins to do this, such as filter plug-ins, which help customers to find products based on specific criteria. However, AI could take this a step further by actively matching customers with suitable products based on personal data provided by the customer about their needs and tastes. The customer could even upload images of their style and have the AI recommend items they’d like. I’m certain that AI will have a big impact on customer service for e-commerce sites. While I haven’t tested any chatbots for AI yet, which I feel are good enough to advise customers, the industry is developing so fast that I’m sure this will happen soon and the quality will keep improving.

Once AI chatbots reach the required standard, they’ll be able to listen to customers’ needs and help them to find the products they want as well as dealing with any problems instantly. I’m watching these developments with interest. Plug-in builders can also create products that use AI to help WooCommerce store owners. WooCommerce reporting has never been great, and by hooking this up with AI tools, you could vastly improve this by allowing store owners to type questions and have the data presented in a much more accessible format, telling them the exact information they need.

Kelley Muro

Hi, my name’s Kelly Muro and I am the CEO of North Commerce. I think one of the really interesting things that’ll happen with AI and e-commerce is going to be taking advantage of these GPT language models to help iterate different conversion rate optimization tests more thoroughly and faster. So there’ll be a huge advantage owning your own database and data. So any e-commerce solution on WordPress will have a huge advantage when it comes to AI and e-commerce. What you’d be able to do is, you could give some ChatGPT experience, just a prompt that says something like, “Give me my best customers and show me what they’ve been doing on my website.” And then the AI model would aggregate that data that lives on your site and show you some patterns of what you can do.

And then from there you’d be able to implement different designs, different flows, different upsells or something to convert more customers. And so I think it’ll be super interesting to see how things play out in general with AI, but I do think that especially in the context of WordPress, we can feed these GPT models as much data as we want since we own all the data in our own WordPress database. And we could in just plain English ask what’s working and what’s not, and where should we be looking to convert more customers? Where are they getting hung up, and what products are they purchasing? And then the AI model would just help us work.

Now you can even pair that with other software tools like Elevar and triple these advanced tracking softwares as well that could help, even explain where your customers are coming from. And then you could double down on paid spend or organic traffic or whatever it might be. So I think there’ll be some interesting use cases with AI, but I think one of the big ones will be helping implement more conversion rate optimization tests for your store quicker with data that makes sense for people. The regular user could just type in anything and it would just make sense in plain English what their customers are doing. They don’t have to have these advanced analytics softwares. They could just talk to the chatbot, learn what they need to know, and then just create the designs directly on their website to improve conversions. So that’ll be interesting and I think that’ll be a big part of AI with e-commerce.

Scott Bowler

Hi, I’m Scott Bowler and I’m Founder and Owner of DCS Digital. So AI in my mind is going to have a massive impact on e-commerce and WooCommerce in general. I think we’re going to see a big move to automation of manual processes such as the creation of product descriptions. I think we’re going to see smarter customer support both via onsite chatbots and ticketing systems. And in tandem with this, we’re going to see increased documentation so that the AI tools can better answer support. And depending on how this is exposed, that could benefit the customer on the website, so content on the website, it could benefit SEO and it should improve the general quality of processes and interaction with the customer.

I also think we’re going to see a lot more onsite solutions rather than using third party tools and SaaS solutions to do this because the technology is fairly simple where you can create a plug-in on WordPress and have it interact directly with tools like OpenAI and their API endpoints so there’s no real need for an intermediary to handle the interaction. I also think we’re going to see conversational AI being as prominent in search. People will get used to being able to chat with an AI to get their answers. And just as search is often the first point of call for people when they visit a website, I think they’re going to want to converse with the website, its products, its policies, and so on.

And lastly, I think there’s going to be a lot of new opportunities for traffic generation. If you think about when you don’t need to have a login necessarily to be able to chat with an AI and that AI is going out and performing searches and finding relevant products, I think we’re going to see the chat interface as a new traffic source. So similar to how you’ve got a Facebook page, I think there’s going to be a lot of people visiting an AI interface and that interface will bring back products and pages from your website.

And of course, within ChatGPT itself, we’ve got the opportunity for plug-ins and people will need to enable those plug-ins for them to work. I think we’re going to see a lot of large e-commerce brands encouraging people to install their ChatGPT plug-ins to interact with their shop whilst they’re in that conversational world. This is really just scratching the surface. This is just looking at more of the language based AIs rather than all the image opportunities and video and things like that. So it’s a huge topic to cover in three minutes, but hopefully I’ve given a few insights there for you.