AI is exciting for ecommerce brands, but it can feel daunting, too. Trusting something that’s never met your sales team, stepped inside your warehouse, or spoken with a customer can feel like a big leap. It’s natural to worry about losing the human touch that keeps customers coming back.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be a trade-off. Machine learning algorithms let you use AI for growth without losing control. You can still set and change your goals anytime you want, and you have the power to optimize the AI tools to meet customer needs and provide a personalized shopping experience.
Keep reading to learn how this technology works and why solutions like Bloomreach are becoming a real asset for online retailers. With the right tools, AI can complement your ecommerce store’s direction instead of competing with it.
Why AI Customization Matters in Ecommerce
AI has the potential to be a significant advantage for your ecommerce business, but its effectiveness hinges on understanding your specific goals. The best ecommerce AI platforms go beyond looking at datasets. They use machine learning (ML), which often includes deep learning, to learn from trends and understand how your specific business operates and changes. Let’s explore why this flexibility is so important and what can happen without it.
Retail Is Too Complex for One-Size-Fits-All AI
No two online stores run the same way. What you sell, what your customers expect, how you price things — it’s all different, which is why standard AI-powered models don’t cut it. What’s a top-selling item for one ecommerce website might be something another is trying to get rid of, and your most profitable items could be overlooked simply because inexpensive items sell faster.
Misaligned AI leads to search results and brand experiences that aren’t what shoppers are looking for. To prevent this and protect customer retention, ecommerce brands need AI that can adapt to vast amounts of data in real time while paying attention to specific business goals.
Business Rules Don’t Go Away With Automation
Automation isn’t something you can set and forget. You still have certain business rules to follow. For example, you might need to ensure that your most profitable items get seen first or that your customer experience is on point. You might also have legal or regulatory rules to follow. In all of these cases, AI algorithms may suggest something that doesn’t line up with your business rules.
The right AI-driven platform lets you add your own rules and fine-tune how the machine learning models work. You can tweak how products are ranked, hide certain categories, streamline inventory management, or give different product features more importance. Best of all, you can do all of this yourself, making AI feel like a helpful member of your team instead of a black box making all the decisions.
Customization Builds Trust in the System
AI’s immense power can make it intimidating, especially when most people don’t fully understand how it works. Only one-third of Americans say they know a lot about AI, which leaves plenty of room for confusion and skepticism. When teams can’t understand how AI is making decisions, they’re more likely to resist using it.
Customization builds trust. When decision-makers see that the AI can be tailored to support their immediate and long-term goals, they gain confidence that the system will work in the business’s best interest. That trust makes implementation smoother and increases adoption rates because when people see the value in a new tool, they’re more likely to use it.
Key Areas of Machine Learning Customization in Ecommerce
Curious about where you can customize ML algorithms? While every ecommerce platform is different, Bloomreach tailors AI to your needs in several key ways.
Product Ranking and Merchandising Logic
AI is valuable for ranking products based on relevance, popularity, and conversion rates. However, real-world business plans are more nuanced. Customizing your AI tool’s product ranking and merchandising logic helps ensure that the technology isn’t overlooking key marketing strategies.
Bloomreach lets you tap into your customer data engine to make ranking and filtering even more intelligent. Use standard filters like size and color or subtle options like style preferences. You can also control how visible specific items are, determine how products are ordered during marketing campaigns, or permanently hide items based on your brand guidelines.
Personalization and Affinity Modeling
Not all shoppers behave the same, and AI shouldn’t treat them as such. Instead of using one-size-fits-all AI, the right solution offers affinity modeling, which personalizes the products shown to each customer based on their past activities.
With Bloomreach, you’re in control of which customer actions matter most. Do you want to prioritize their past purchases or the products in their browsing history? Maybe you’d prefer to downplay certain categories that aren’t as relevant. You can adjust these factors and others to keep pace with your business goals.
Your team can also establish default logic for new visitors or unique situations. This gives casual browsers a user experience that feels relevant to them, even if they haven’t interacted with you before. For instance, you might show a first-time visitor your most popular products or highly rated items since new customers gravitate toward trendy items and things others are buying.
Search Tuning and Rules
A shopper actively searching for your product indicates strong user intent, presenting a prime opportunity for AI-powered customization. Platforms like Bloomreach combine self-learning algorithms with your defined business rules, giving you control over how results are shown. Many companies already recognize this benefit — 60% of ecommerce companies report that AI has had a substantial impact on site search effectiveness.
The more customer data you have, the more effectively you can refine search rules. Let’s say that your brand has an international customer base. You can create search rules based on location, suggesting hiking gear for customers in the mountains or beachwear for those along the coast. This adds another layer of customization that brings shoppers one step closer to what they want. With Bloomreach, you can also take advantage of multi-language semantic search to personalize search results around the world.
It doesn’t stop there. You can fine-tune results with:
- Search ranking: Highlight high-priority products in search results
- Synonym handling: Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), searches for terms like “laptop” and “notebook” can both yield similar results based on customer intent
- Query rewriting: Guide someone looking for “running shoes” toward “sports footwear”
Conversational Shopping
Conversational AI isn’t a passing trend — it’s how consumers expect to shop moving forward. In a recent survey, 93% of respondents consider conversational search capabilities to be important.
To stay on top of changing user behavior and drive ecommerce sales, you’ll need to bring conversational shopping to your site. But don’t think that these experiences are the same thing as chatbots. With Bloomreach Clarity, our conversational shopping agent, you can embed conversation starters directly within your product, category, and checkout pages, as well as within the search bar.
One key function of a conversational shopping agent is to customize when it engages a customer. Incessantly popping up a window isn’t a good retail strategy and will lead to a site exit instead of a conversion. Instead, you can use customer data to determine the best time to reach out to a customer and see if they need further assistance.
Audience Segmentation and Targeting Logic
Customer segmentation is key to good personalization. While it used to be just in-store interactions, AI now allows for much smarter and wider personalization. Still, sticking to the same customer groups can limit who you reach.
Bloomreach allows marketers to create dynamic segments based on demographics and factors like purchase history, customer behavior, historical data, or any custom criteria. You can even see how shoppers compare — do they spend less or use your app more frequently? Once set, these segments drive personalized product recommendations, email campaigns, and more.
For example, you could use social media to promote premium products to recent, high-value customers, while those who’ve abandoned carts could receive an email with related items to encourage checkout. You might also experiment with upselling and other pricing strategies based on customers’ spending habits. All of these tactics can help you increase customer satisfaction and average order value.
How Bloomreach Empowers Business Users To Customize AI
It’s a delicate balance: You need powerful AI to fully capitalize on your ecommerce opportunities, but you shouldn’t choose a platform so complex that it offers no customization. When you do customize, it should be intuitive enough for non-coders to manage without needing tech support.
Bloomreach makes AI customization accessible for everyone on your team, regardless of technical ability. Here’s what you can look forward to as a Bloomreach user:
Visual Tools, Not Just Developer APIs
Strong tech tools are great, but many can be too complex for the average team member or merchandiser to understand easily. Because teams can’t directly manage the AI tool, bottlenecks can occur. While sales and marketing teams wait for engineering to fix the issue, customer experience suffers and businesses lose revenue.
Bloomreach provides user-friendly dashboards and visual tools that allow your team to fine-tune everything from boosting relevant products to adjusting how customer preferences are weighed. This puts decision-making power in your business users’ hands, so when it’s time to update your homepage or add a temporary rule, you have the control you need — no coding knowledge required.
AI + Human Collaboration
Contrary to popular belief, artificial intelligence isn’t the end of personal connection. Savvy ecommerce brands understand the power of guided AI: keeping humans in the loop while automation does the heavy lifting.
Think of Bloomreach’s platform as your ecommerce partner. It offers product recommendations, tracks outliers, forecasts customer behavior, and respects overrides when your human team knows best. This isn’t about choosing between control and automation. It’s about enjoying the best of both worlds.
Use Cases: From Quick Wins to Strategic Tuning
You don’t need a major technology overhaul to see the benefits of AI customization. Many ecommerce brands start small by achieving quick wins. This could involve boosting new products during a limited campaign or promoting clearance items at the end of the season.
Over time, these wins can pave the way for long-term implementation. You might establish permanent rules that place your brand higher than others in search results or use the tech for product demand forecasting. Whether you need a burst of sales activity or long-term results, ecommerce AI is ready to address your current and future needs.
Take Control of Your Ecommerce AI Strategy
For too long, the ecommerce industry has assumed it needed to adapt its brand to AI, when in reality, you can shape AI to fit your brand.
When AI aligns with your strategy, it becomes a powerful asset, understanding what to provide customers in the moment while supporting your overarching marketing goals. It can even offer predictive analytics to help you stay competitive, with a clarity that humans can’t deliver.
With Bloomreach, retail teams can personalize experiences, promote products strategically, and prioritize business goals. Whether you’re fine-tuning your site search engine or launching a larger strategy, Bloomreach allows you to maintain control.
Want AI that works for you and not the other way around? Learn how Bloomreach’s agentic AI platform can take your ecommerce strategies to the next level.
