The mass retailer is utilizing AI for wish lists and recommended actions on its e-commerce site, Target’s senior vice president of technology told Retail Dive.
Courtesy of Target
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Target’s back-to-school shopping experience is being powered, in part, by AI this year.
The mass retailer found that customers who build wish lists drive about 45% higher demand in the category, the company told Retail Dive. The company’s using AI to help make the wish list process — and back-to-school shopping more broadly — an improved experience.
“We will use AI to make product recommendations as people are starting to create their wish list,” Target Senior Vice President of Technology Brad Thompson told Retail Dive. “So rather than them having to think about all of the things that they need, we will start to nudge them and prompt them based on what we know about other guests that have bought, or things that they’ve bought in the past, or what we might know about that school and the supplies that the teachers might need, and it’s making a big difference.”
Target also has a feature called its “next best action widget,” where part of the site will prompt a customer to take a specific action. The widget is regularly on the site, but it’s contextualized seasonally.
For the back-to-school period, that suggested action may be something like recommending a user create their wish list, Thompson said.
“We use AI to sort through all of the signals in the browse session for that guest to recommend the next best action,” the executive added.
The retailer in Junedebuted a slew ofofferings for the back-to-school shopping season, including a deal on its Target Circle 360 paid membership, school uniforms from one of its private label brands, a limited-edition collab with LoveShackFancy and more.
Back-to-school shopping is an importantseasonal event for retailers,and spending this year could reach record highs.Spending for K-12 students is expected to reach $43.3 billion this year, while spending for college students could reach $103.5 billion, according to an annual survey by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.
“It’s such a great seasonal moment for us because we get a big surge in traffic, and so we try to have new features ready for the site,” Thompson said, adding that personalization through technology is one way Target is working to improve customer experience.
The back-to-school season allows his team to A/B test some new ideas. For example, Target is at the point where different people will get differing homepage experiences based on what the retailer knows about them — a concept that could be scaled with the help of AI
“We’re starting to use AI to do content personalization at scale, and eventually we’ll be in a place where we’ll be able to literally do sort of one-on-one hyper personalized page layout,” he noted. “Depending on whether it’s the home page, whether it’s a product detail page or product listing page, we’ll be able to configure the site dynamically to appeal to you based on AI’s recommendations.”
Filed Under:Technology,E-Commerce
