Artificial intelligence in your shopping basket: Machine learning for online retailers

Ecommerce is a complex, convoluted thing. What started as a way of putting catalogues online has now become something much more involved. In the past we built ecommerce engines out of databases, with a little shopping cart magic wrapped around them. We generated static content for Google to search, and redirected users to our dynamic sites as soon as they clicked on a link. Manual curation was the watchword, much like the paper catalogues the web had replaced.