Generative AI in e-commerce isn’t about flashy demos — it’s about three boring features that move conversion: better search, smarter recommendations, and faster support. Here’s how to ship each one this quarter on a Shopify store or a custom Next.js storefront.
1. Semantic search
Stop indexing only product titles. Embed every product’s title + description + reviews + category, store in pgvector or Algolia’s NeuralSearch, and serve as a search-as-you-type API. Conversion lift: typically 8–15% on long-tail queries.
2. Personalized recommendations
Move beyond “customers also bought”. Use an LLM to generate recommendation rationale (“Because you bought waterproof boots, you’ll want…”) which doubles click-through vs unexplained recommendations.
3. Tier-1 support deflection
A grounded RAG chatbot trained on your help docs, returns policy and order data deflects 30–50% of tier-1 tickets. Always escalate to human on low confidence and after 2 turns of back-and-forth.
Production gotchas
Cache embeddings aggressively, version your prompts, log every interaction, and run weekly evals on a fixed test set. AI features that aren’t monitored degrade silently.
Want help shipping AI for your store? Talk to a Codewyse engineer.