10 Must-Have AI Tools for E-Commerce to Increase Sales in 2024

Although every e-commerce software states to be “powered by AI”, only a handful move the needle for online merchants.

This guide features the best AI tools for e-commerce, including BigSurAI, Manychat, Braze, Jasper, Algolia, Gorgias, Zendesk, Chatfuel, Emarsys, and Copy.ai.

Below, we broke down each of the 10 best AI products’s features, pricing, strengths, and weaknesses so that you can pick the one best for your brand.

Our list is split into categories, including:

• Site search
• Customer support
• Chatbot automation
• Marketing
• Writing tools

Are you worried about spending too much on these tools or experiencing decision paralysis? Don’t be! This list includes top free and paid e-commerce AI tools, so you can select the relevant options and meet your business goals while staying on budget.

Factors to consider when choosing an AI tool for e-commerce

Before getting into our list, here are a few things to look for when evaluating solutions ⤵️

1. Is the software built for e-commerce?

Some AI platforms empower only e-commerce companies, while others provide online retail solutions and a suite of other products.

Your ideal option will depend on whether you want a custom e-commerce AI platform or an industry-agnostic tool with multiple (sometimes overwhelming) use cases.

Sometimes, the difference between a great product and a smoke show is the company’s sole focus on e-commerce brands as customers.

2. Will pricing come back and haunt you?

Balancing an AI tool’s pricing ranges with the value it brings to your business ensures you get the most bang for your buck. Do this by considering the initial investment needed to adopt the tool and its ongoing expenses.

• Subscription costs: Monthly or yearly subscription fees can vary significantly across tools. Choose versatile tools with pricing plans that fit your technology budget without compromising basic features.
• Scalability: Ensure that the tool can scale up as your business grows. Some platforms have a usage-based billing model, while others charge by the number of seats, so prepare for potential future costs.
• Hidden fees: Check for extra costs like setup fees, training, and technical support. Confirm what’s included in each pricing package to avoid surprises.

3. Can your team easily set up and use it?

Before adopting an AI tool, consider how easy or hard it is to set up and use.

A simple, intuitive user interface will reduce the app’s learning curve and encourage user adoption. Before updating your tech stack, read product reviews on third-party sites and talk to existing users in your network.

Some AI platforms also require technical expertise for setup and customization. Confirm whether your team has the necessary skills or if you will need to hire a software developer.

What are the best AI tools for e-commerce?

We analyzed reviews and comparison posts across the internet to create this list of the best AI tools for e-commerce in 2024.

Product search and discovery tools

#1 - Big Sur AI

Big Sur AI is a powerful AI tool that helps you delight your shoppers and increase sales. It is our top e-commerce AI tool recommendation because it can create a virtual assistant tailored to each store and shopper.

Big Sur AI is fairly priced and easy to configure and use—with or without developer input.

Full disclosure: While BigSur is our product, we aim to provide an unbiased perspective on why BigSur is truly the top AI tool on the market for e-commerce brands.

Big Sur AI’s features

Big Sur AI provides multiple custom-built product search and discovery features to increase customer engagement and conversion rates.

Our AI-powered tool also has customization options to ensure consistent branding across your online store.

1. AI sales agent

Big Sur AI’s sales agent is a conversational virtual assistant that helps you recreate and automate the in-store experience of chatting with a salesperson.

This chatbot lets store visitors easily chat with your brand, ask open-ended questions, and receive relevant, natural-language responses that drive conversions.

You can design the chat bar to fit your brand style. The feature also lets you display conversation starters, the next questions users should ask, and personalized recommendations, effectively engaging shoppers and limiting drop-off rates.

See the AI sales agent in action here 👇

2. AI product recommendations

Big Sur AI’s product recommendations let you expose your full product catalog, driving cross-sells and upsells.

These personalized product recommendations are broken into three modules and are shown to store visitors based on items searched and pages visited:

• Picked just for you: A selection of products a user will likely buy based on their website behavior.

• Frequently bought together: A display of products that other shoppers have previously bought with a product that a customer just added to their shopping cart.

• Top sellers: Bestselling items in the same product category as products recently viewed by a user.

3. Conversion-optimized AI prompts

Conversion-optimized AI prompts (also called AI corner) are one of the most unique Big Sur AI features. It is a module of suggested, user-specific questions you can embed on your product and category pages based on their likelihood of triggering responses and purchases.

The questions each user sees depend on what page they’re on and their shopping journey on your site.

4. Merchant insights

Big Sur AI helps you gain valuable insights that are impossible to gather via traditional user research.

These insights and analytics include:

• Your store’s overall conversion rate vs. your conversion rate for shoppers interacting with the Big Sur AI sales agent.

• User queries, items added to carts, and orders placed by shoppers that interacted with the sales agent.

• Items that are regularly bought along with a given product.
• Top user questions and topics.

Big Sur AI’s pros and cons

✅ Understands natural language questions and gives high-quality answers.

✅ Offers a smart and customizable chat window for your users

✅ All Big Sur AI features are optimized to drive more purchases from shoppers

❌ Hyper-focused on e-commerce brands

❌ Few integrations

#2 - Algolia

Best for: Curating search experiences

Algolia is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses build custom search and product discovery experiences on their websites and apps.

Who is it for?

Unlike Big Sur AI, which is tailored to retail and B2B e-commerce businesses, Algolia is a more generic AI search and discovery platform for different industries and use cases.

Algolia features

• AI search: Gives customers hyper-relevant search results and answers.
• AI browse: Displays your product catalog via category and collection pages.
• AI recommendations: Suggests products or content at different points in the customer journey.
• Merchandising studio: Powers no-code, data-driven online shopping experiences.
• Analytics dashboard: Displays all user insights in one view.
• Pre-built UI components: Enables quick and easy customization of search, recommendation, and browsing experiences.

Algolia pricing

You can start using Algolia for free then switch to any of its yearly or pay-as-you-go plans as your needs increase.

• Build (Free plan): Up to 10,000 search requests/month, includes 1 million records.
• Grow (Free or pay-as-you-go): Free for up to 10,000 search requests/month and 100,000 records, $0.50 per additional 1,000 search requests and $0.40 per additional 1,000 records/month.
• Premium (Annual plan): AI features and keyword search, merchandising studio, and volume discounts.
• Elevate (Annual plan): Everything on premium plus full AI offering (including NeuralSearch).

Algolia pros and cons

✅ Fast and accurate search results

✅ Helpful support team

✅ Easy setup and integrations

❌ Limited metrics on A/B tests

❌ Can get pricey at scale

Customer support tools

#3 - Gorgias

Best for: Customer experience management

Gorgias is a customer experience platform for e-commerce businesses. It provides powerful tools like an all-in-one support inbox and a self-service chatbot. Gorgias also enables marketing automation via an onsite campaign creator.

Who is it for?

Gorgias is best for customer support agents.

Gorgias features

• Gorgias helpdesk: Provides a single tab for managing customer interactions across email, social, chat, and more.
• Gorgias automate: Speeds up response times via an AI agent you can set up in under an hour.
• Gorgias convert: Drives first-time conversions, upsells, and cross-sells with onsite campaigns (smart recommendations, free shipping, timely discount codes, and more).

Gorgias pricing

Gorgias offers a 7-day free trial and usage-based billing that starts at $10/month.

Gorgias pros and cons

✅ Integrates with your favorite apps and e-commerce platforms

✅ Lets you merge customer information if they reach out on multiple platforms

✅ Granular agent performance analytics

❌ Inability to delete customers’ data unless they submit a privacy request

❌ Reporting feature only shows historical data for the past 90 days

#4 - Zendesk

Best for: Customer service and engagement

Zendesk is a complete customer service solution for managing support tickets, tracking issues, and engaging your customer base across multiple channels. It is designed to improve customer satisfaction and sales results.

Who is it for?

Zendesk offers a suite of products for both service agents and salespeople. It also works as an in-house help desk for HR and IT teams who want to “treat employees like customers” and ensure workplace satisfaction.

Zendesk features

Zendesk for service: Messaging tools for personalizing conversations across channels, AI and automation features that enable quick issue resolution, and a help center for seamless self-service.

Zendesk for sales: Email integration functionality for syncing your email address with the tool’s CRM (to get greater pipeline visibility) and sales engagement tools like prospect list and email sequence builders.

Zendesk for HR: Powers great and secure employee experiences via a self-service portal, an omnichannel ticketing system, and enterprise-grade security features.

Zendesk for IT: An IT helpdesk—with a knowledge base, ticketing workflows, and seamless integrations—that helps technical support agents stay organized and fix customer issues quickly.

Zendesk pricing

Zendesk has a 14-day free trial and lets startups apply for a free 6-month package. It also offers all-in-one and small business packages from as low as $55/month and $19/month, respectively.

• Zendesk suite plans (all-in-one): The complete AI customer experience solution, including ticketing, a help center, live chat and messaging, and voice.
  • Suite team: $55/agent/month billed annually
  • Suite growth: $89/agent/month billed annually
  • Suite professional: $115/agent/month billed annually
  • Suite enterprise: Talk to sales

• Build your own plan (great for small businesses): A custom ticketing system for managing emails.
  • Support team: $19/agent/month billed annually
  • Support professional: $55/agent/month billed annually
  • Support enterprise: $115/agent/month billed annually
• Add-ons
  • Advanced AI: $50/agent/month
  • Zendesk workforce management: $25/agent/month
  • Zendesk quality assurance (formerly Klaus): $35/agent/month
  • Advanced data privacy and protection: $50/agent/month

Zendesk pros and cons

✅ Early access programs for testing new features

✅ In-depth analytics and actionable insights

✅ Scalable for both small and large businesses

❌ Its different tools and pricing plans can get confusing

❌ Support is sometimes unresponsive

Chatbot tools

#5 - Manychat

Best for: Chat marketing

Manychat lets you create and automate customer conversations on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and SMS. It makes responding to shopper messages and pushing high-converting re-engagement campaigns seamless.

Who is it for?

Manychat caters to e-commerce brands, creators, agencies, and restaurants.

Manychat features

• Instagram: Answer shopper questions, story replies, and comments 24/7.
• WhatsApp: Drive product discovery, gather order information, and provide customer support on autopilot.
• Messenger: Automate Facebook conversations to generate leads, engage potential customers, drive sales, answer FAQs, and run digital marketing campaigns.
• SMS: Start a conversation on social media platforms and continue it via SMS or re-engage customers on SMS and drive them back to the channel where the conversation started.

Manychat pricing

Manychat has a free basic plan that lets you engage up to 1,000 contacts and provides AI-powered chatbots for Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Its paid packages include:

• Pro: Starts at $15/month and scales with number of contacts. Everything in the free plan plus unlimited growth tools and keywords, SMS text messaging and email, 24/7 email support, and more.
• Premium: Fixed custom pricing (talk to sales). Everything in pro plus 1:1 onboarding, live chat support, unlimited training with a customer success manager, and more.

Manychat pros and cons

✅ Chatbots that support images, video, and external links

✅ Responsive support

✅ In-depth campaign performance insights

❌ High pro subscription fee, especially at scale

❌ Does not integrate with LinkedIn and TikTok

#6 - Chatfuel

Best for: Automated sales

Just like Manychat, Chatfuel helps individuals and businesses looking to build and launch conversational chatbots across social media and messaging platforms.

Who is it for?

Chatfuel is best for e-commerce, education, beauty, healthcare, and real estate organizations.

Chatfuel features

• Integrations: Connects data from your CRM, e-commerce store, or customer data platform (CDP).
• Segmentation: Enables audience grouping by customer preferences and user behavior so you can curate conversion-driven, personalized experiences.
• Analysis: Monitors and assesses your real-time messaging data to identify trends and improve your messaging for better results.
• A/B testing: Helps you test various message variations, including text, media, and CTAs.

Chatfuel pricing

Chatfuel offers various pricing plans for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The brand also has a tailored enterprise plan with priority support and a dedicated bot builder specialist.

• Facebook and Instagram: Starts from $14.99/month
• WhatsApp: Starts from $34.49/month
• Enterprise: Starts from $300

Chatfuel pros and cons

✅ Easy to use (even without prior chatbot development knowledge)

✅ Powers omnichannel conversations seamlessly

✅ Fast customer support

❌ May be challenging to use without a developer

❌ No SMS marketing tools

Omnichannel marketing automation tools

#7 - Braze

Best for: Conversion rate optimization.

Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps you understand user sentiments, actions, and behaviors so you can improve your offerings and messaging accordingly.

Who is it for?

Braze mainly serves e-commerce, financial services, media, entertainment, travel, and hospitality businesses.

Braze features

• Sage AI by Braze: Creates memorable experiences and strong customer relationships via behavior-based automation, A/B testing, and predictive analytics tools.
• Cross-channel messaging: Consolidates your messaging mix and meeting customers wherever they are
• Braze data platform: Unifies and distributes your proprietary data, helping build robust customer profiles so you can send them personalized content that drives conversions.
• Reporting and analytics: Uncovers customer journey insights and helps you hone in on winning strategies.

Braze pricing

Braze pricing is not live on its website—you need to connect with the brand’s sales team for a quote.

Braze pros and cons

✅ Various teams (marketing, product, or engineering) can design campaigns with relevant integrations

✅ Great onboarding experience

✅ Easy to learn and get started

❌ Limited reporting

❌ Inconsistent customer success team quality

#8 - Emarsys

Best for: AI search and generative experiences

Emarsys (an SAP company) leverages AI to enable multichannel customer interactions that drive retention and loyalty.

Who is it for?

Emarsys is designed for retail, e-commerce, consumer, travel, hospitality, sports, entertainment, media, and communication businesses.

Emarsys features

• AI marketing: AI and automation capabilities for building, launching, and scaling omnichannel engagements, effectively driving conversions and lifetime value.
• Customer data platform: Connects your relevant product, sales, and customer data to business intelligence and visualization tools for easy campaign execution.
• Technology integrations: Integrates your tool stack and enhances Emarys’ capabilities.
• Reporting and analytics: Tracks the revenue impact of your marketing messages and predicts campaign results.

Emarsys pricing

Emarsys pricing is not publicly available but you can request it by filling a form on its website.

Emarsys pros and cons

✅ Effectively leverages customer data for well-planned communication

✅ Easy to set up email marketing campaigns and automation flows

✅ Offers valuable integrations

❌ Basic reporting

❌ Inability to separate users by organization

AI copywriting and content generation tools

#9 - Copy.ai

Best for: Go-to-market execution

Copy.ai is a go-to-market AI platform for automating marketing and sales activities like prospecting, content creation, competitor analysis, and more. It is well-known for its generative AI tools for blog articles, cold emails, ad copy, product descriptions, subject lines, and more.

Who is it for?

Copy.ai is for sales and marketing professionals looking to free up time spent on recurring tasks.

Copy.ai features

• AI sales OS: Personalized prospecting, deal management, and competitor analysis tools that drive better sales results.
• AI marketing OS: Generates, localizes, and translated different content types (SEO, thought leadership, advertising, and sales).

Copy.ai pricing

Copy AI has a limited forever free plan and paid packages starting at $49/month.

• Free: 1 seat, 2,000 words in chat, ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude 3, etc.
• Starter: $49/month billed monthly. Includes 1 seat, unlimited words in chat and chat projects, access to all latest large language models, and private community access.
• Advanced: $249/month billed monthly. Includes up to 5 seats, 2,000 workflow credits, 15+ marketing and sales workflows, and workflow builder access.
• Enterprise: Contact accounts team for pricing details. Includes guided implementation, API access, unlimited customizable workflows, designated account and support team, etc.

Copy.ai pros and cons

✅ Pricing plan accommodates beginners

✅ Speeds up the content creation process and frees up time

✅ Easy to use

❌ Some of the content it generates is plagiarized and requires rewriting

❌ Unresponsive customer support

#10 - Jasper

Best for: AI-assisted content

Jasper is an AI platform for creating high-quality, engaging content quickly. While it is one of the more popular copywriting tools available, Jasper also works for AI image generation.

Who is it for?

Jasper works for various industries, including e-commerce businesses, technology companies, insurance providers, and real estate firms.

Jasper features

• Company knowledge: Centralizes and guides your business content with a brand voice, knowledge base, and style guide creator.
• Enterprise-grade permissions: Secures company content and ensures only approved users can access specific information.
• AI-assisted content: AI image and content generator takes you from idea to output quickly. Chrome extension lets you work directly on your document instead of within the app.

Jasper pricing

Jasper offers a 7-day free trial and paid plans from $49/month.

• Creator: Starts at $49/seat/month. Includes 1 brand voice, access to Jasper chat, search engine optimization mode, and browse extension.
• Pro: Starts at $69/seat/month. Includes 1 seat, 3 brand voices, 10 knowledge assets, 3 instant campaigns, access to Jasper art, and more.
• Business: Contact sales for custom pricing. Includes everything in pro, plus unlimited feature usage, team spaces, document collaboration, custom style guides, advanced admin panel with permissions, API access, premium support, etc.

Jasper's pros and cons

✅ Great for long blog posts

✅ 50+ content writing templates across use cases

✅ Easy learning curve

❌ Inconsistent output quality

❌ Occasionally unreliable performance

How far can AI take you?

Quite far, to be honest.

Artificial intelligence technology streamlines business processes across various industries, and e-commerce brands are not left out.

These apps can be ultimate revenue boosters for online businesses (like yours).

However, selecting a tool or multiple solutions that fit your most pressing needs and technology budget can be a chore. This list streamlines your search and gives you a good starting point to build on as your business and needs evolve.

Ready to use AI to increase your e-commerce sales and revenue?

We suggest starting with Big Sur AI (our tool and a top search and discovery platform).
To begin, fill out our contact form or email info@bigsur.ai