How the Pandemic is Making these Technologies a Must Have in the Business of E-Commerce

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The global pandemic has quite effectively proven our love affair with immersive social commerce wherein users interact with AR (augemented reality) portryal of products and purchase it without leaving the platform.

Even before COVID-19, e-commerce shoppers  wanted AR help visualizing how products would look in their environments, and a the shoots of demand to virtually try on new makeup or clothing had already started to sprout. The onset of the pandemic only hastened the process.

AI Driven Automation is Boosting Rewards in Terms of Profits, Productivity and Relevance

Obviously Amazon was one of the pioneers in shopping recommendations. Since it's early days, it has witnessed changes in its algorithms over the years.

• Amazon uses AI to drive prices dynamically; that is it reduces the costs to elicit more sales when required and simultaneously increase prices when the demands are high. The algorithm enables optimal sales and revenue automatically.  

 

• As a visionary leader in the use of technology, Amazon has now opened checkout-free physical stores in Seattle, Chicago, and San Francisco, which have AI-powered sensors and cameras. This technology can tell exactly which items a customer has picked up and will automatically charge them as they walk out of the store using the Amazon Go app. With 'contactless' being the norm in these pandemic times, Amazon is all set to reap rapid profit.
  

 

• Google is taking a page out of Instagram's influencer book with the new Shoploop app, developed in its experimental workshop Area 120. The experience, according to General Manager Lax Poojary, "is more interactive than just scrolling through images, titles, and descriptions on a traditional e-commerce site."

HOW AUGMENTED REALITY AND MACHINE LEARNING IS BOOSTING THE BUSINESS OF BEAUTY

Coronavirus has come with the blessing of added leisure time. For starters, people arecommuting less, socializing less, and 'sporting less than they used to before the pandemic.

1. L’Oréal product ModiFace allows consumers to have an AR-powered makeup try-on experience.
The uniqueness of the ModiFace technology—which is run on Amazon Web Services—lies in its photo-realistic results and automatic, AI-enabled shade calibration. ModiFace’s proprietary technology allows retailers to seamlessly incorporate virtual try-on experiences for an unlimited amount of products. The AR simulation of each shade is done automatically, based on AI-powered analysis of information provided by makeup brands, but also images and descriptions of the product available on social media. The technology is able to analyze textual and visual information related to a particular makeup shade and to realistically reproduce it via Augmented Reality.

2. Olay, a PnG brand, launched Skin Advisor in 2017 and ushered in the age of 'Selfie Skin Analysis'. All you need a smart phone to take your picture and leave the rest to the algorithms to do their job - dermatologists beware!

Based on deep learning, Skin Advisor recommends products analyzing the user’s skin via a photograph. Olay’s VizID Technology uses labeled pixels of a woman’s selfie as well as what has been gleaned from the skin of the hundreds of thousands of selfies in the database. Of the 6 million people who use this service, 94% report recommendations being appropriate.

“Olay and other leading brands are using (artificial intelligence) to infuse devices and apps with intelligence, bringing new experiences, unprecedented personalization and real benefits to people’s lives,” said Greg Estes, vice president of developer programs at NVIDIA, whose GPU-accelerated deep learning platform was used to train Olay Skin Advisor’s neural network.

3. Maybelline’s “Virtual Try-On” tool allows you to apply and compare four makeup products simultaneously. It also shows a comparison of before and after look.

4. Sephora’s Virtual Artist analyses your skin and facial features to recommend products to try on.
Finding the correct foundation color was one of the largest beauty concerns of Sephora's customers In response, the company partnered with Pantone to develop a shade-matching technology called Color IQ that provides a read of each customer's skin tone. The customer is assigned a Color IQ number, which helps them filter through thousands of lip colors, foundations, and concealer shades to choose the one that's best for their specific coloring.

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS AUGMENTING THE BUSINESS OF PERSONALIZED SKIN CARE

Taking skin swabs to test bacterial analysis and DNA – and therefore receiving customized products aligning to your microbiome and genetic make-up – are just two ways in which brands will be targeting your beauty wellness in the new decade.

HiMirror analyses your skin’s conditions through a photo, storing data to track progress over time and reveal whether your products actually work for you. "Like an at-home skincare consultant, it can assess your skin for lines and wrinkles, dark circles, dark spots, blemishes, roughness and pore size."

Proven Skin Care – a tool based on the Skin Genome Database, winner of MIT’s 2018 Artificial Intelligence Award, is the most comprehensive skincare database ever created. "The database contains data points about the effectiveness of more than 20,238 skincare ingredients, characteristics of over 100,000 individual products, 8 million user testimonials and 4,000 scientific publications."

Procter & Gamble recently launches Opte Precision Wand, a handheld printer that searches for dark spots on your skin and deposits tiny droplets of a facial serum with pigment to treat or cover them. The wand uses prefilled cartridges of makeup, moisturizer and serum, and each will cost around

EWG's Skin Deep cosmetic database is an online tool to search for ingredients in beauty products. It lists hazard ratings for 70,000 products from 2,374 brands and information about 9,000 ingredients.

Function of Beauty produces customized hair care products with ingredients recommended by machine learning algorithms. These custom shampoo/conditioner and skincare formulas are specific to customers’ skin and hair types.

Haut.AI is a SaaS platform collects, store, manage and analyse skincare and skin health-related data using computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

THE HARSH REALITY IS THAT IT IS INCREASINGLY HARD TO EXCITE AND INSPIRE AUDIENCES WHO ARE OVERWHELMED AND OVERSTIMULATED

As data shows, it is getting harder to stand out in established social media.
AR and AI is seeing breakthroughs within product development — moving from a showcase novelty to functionality that the majority of the customers use.

To keep customers inside their brand eco-system, many fashion and cosmetic brands are partnering with gaming companies to entice their customers with perpetual call to action.

Emerging social media networks, including those focused on gaming such as Fortnite or Tencent’s mobile game Honour of Kings, which have fast become integral to youth culture.
In China, brands such as Mac Cosmetics, L’Oréal and Hong Kong jeweller Chow Sang Sang have all partnered with Honour of Kings, which has more than 200 million registered players of whom more than half are female (and women mobile gamers are 79 percent more likely to make an in-app purchase)

Sources:
Deloitte, Google Consumer AR Survey, Retail Customer Experience, MarketingDive, SmarterHQ, Statista, Entrepreneur