According to the literature, Product reviews are an important source of information for customers to support their buying decision. Product reviews improve customer trust and loyalty. Reviews help customers in understanding what other customers think about a particular product and helps in driving purchase decisions. Therefore, for an e-commerce platform it is important to understand the sentiments in customer reviews to understand their products and services, and it also allows them to potentially create positive consumer interaction as well as long lasting relationships. Reviews also provide innovative ways to market the products for an ecommerce company. One such approach is Nudge Marketing. Nudge marketing is a subtle way for an ecommerce company to help their customers make better decisions without hesitation.

New Delhi: E-commerce companies are focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality with a view to cut logistics costs and identify fraudulent orders, said a report by global auditing and consulting firm PwC. With an emerging middle-class population of more than 500 million and approximately 65% of the population aged 35 or below, India represents a highly aspirational consumer market for retailers across the globe, said the PwC TechWorld report. "E-commerce players are revamping their technology strategies to maintain their competitive edge. Most e-commerce platforms are upping their investments in areas such as conversational commerce, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) and analytics technologies," it said. It observed that to identify fraudulent orders, reduce return rate and also cut down on logistics cost, e-commerce companies are investing in robotics and AI heavily.

Bengaluru: India's largest online retailer Flipkart is making an ambitious push in the area of artificial intelligence by carving out an internal unit called AIforIndia, which will be overseen by its senior-most business and technology leaders, as it attempts to put machine learning and AI at the core of its business. In an interview, Flipkart co-founder and chairman Sachin Bansal said the e-commerce firm will invest "hundreds of millions of dollars" in the AI initiative over the next few years. Bansal said Flipkart has begun recruiting dozens of AI experts, building infrastructure, striking hardware partnerships and working with top educational institutions, including IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), to make its AI push successful. He also said Flipkart is looking for AI-related acquisitions in India and in the US. In 2015, Flipkart had acquired the F7 Labs in the Silicon Valley to focus on areas such as AI and machine learning.

In recent times, adaptive machine learning has grown in demand among the marketing fraternity. Also, the availability of vast amounts of data when churned through a machine learning algorithm creates meaningful and proactive marketing decisions and communications relevant to the customer's wants. Our 4th part of Marketing Week Series speaks on the ability of Machine learning in solving problems of marketing. Machine learning is a discipline combining science, statistics and computer coding that aims to make predictions based on patterns discovered in data. It is a great way to automate marketing activities to make them less time consuming and to provide better experiences for your customers.

The 2017 landscape for retail e-commerce is the ability to understand the customer experiences. The advances in robotics and AI are more relevant in the e-commerce space more than anywhere else. This holds not only true for marketers but also informed decisions that technology has to predict the next customer move. It's no wonder that world economic forum has dubbed 2016 as starting point for fourth industrial revolution The attention span of buyers is very small and incorrect results can lead to potential loss of customers. Machine learning (M/L) algorithms discover complex patterns or data sets that need not have to be preprogrammed.