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E-commerce has fundamentally changed the nature of retail. The Internet and the world of e-commerce that was created and then mobile has made it such that you can now go from wanting an item to having it in a matter of hours without ever stepping foot outside your home or office and you also have access to a much larger selection of goods.

But this isn’t the end of the evolution of e-commerce. The pervasiveness of chatbots and voice assistants, such as Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and the like are making it so that it’s now possible to simply utter a phrase and have an item delivered to you in a matter of hours.Voice and text assistants and chatbots are impacting the enter purchase and product evaluation cycles. They help customers make better decisions when there are complex choices among products or to have an ongoing engagement with customers before, during, and after their purchase. This can lead to greater satisfaction with an ecommerce company or product vendor and increase sales through upselling and cross-selling. Cognilytica calls this category of AI, bots, and voice ecommerce “Assistant-Enabled Commerce (AEC)”.

Show Notes:

• Yotpo article on the steps of ecommerce
• Interview with 1800Flowers on Bots and Assistants
• Chris Messina (Uber) – “2016 will be the Year of Conversational Commerce”
• The Permanent Future Of Conversational Commerce: eBay’s RJ Pittman On AI And Chatbots (Forbes)
• Chatbots are making online shopping and payments a breeze – see why retailers are jumping on this growing trend (Business Insider)

Episode Sponsors:

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