Alibaba International announces AI progress: implemented in more than 40 e-commerce scenarios, serving 500,000 merchants

In the current e-commerce field, cross-border merchants' AI demand is surging. Data from Alibaba International shows that on average, merchants' AI calls double every two months .

On July 16, at an AI-themed sharing session at Alibaba International, Zhang Kaifu, vice president of Alibaba International Digital Business Group and head of AI business, revealed this.

In the past year, Alibaba International has established an AI team, tested AI capabilities in more than 40 scenarios, empowered 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses, and optimized 100 million products. Merchants' demand for AI is also growing. Data from the past six months shows that on average, merchants' calls for AI double every two months.

Zhang Kaifu believes: “Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit more from the application of AI.”

Alibaba International's 500,000 merchants and 100 million products benefit from AI

The first large-scale application of AI in cross-border e-commerce

If a Chinese merchant wants to sell goods overseas, he needs to go through these steps:

Writing product names and product detail pages, taking product photos, creating advertising materials, placing advertisements on overseas websites and social media, arranging customer service staff to answer consumer inquiries, handling returns, refusal to pay and other after-sales issues ... all content needs to be completed in the local language. If you want to sell to markets such as France, Spain, and Brazil, you also need to be able to speak a minority language.

Language and cultural barriers, complex compliance issues, shortage of professional talent, high customer acquisition costs ... these are the "ninety-nine eighty-one difficulties" that small and medium-sized businesses face on the road to going overseas .

How can AI be used to help small and medium-sized businesses cope with these challenges?

Since April last year , Alibaba International's AI team has started to conduct AI testing on more than 40 key scenarios of cross-border e-commerce, covering the entire chain of cross-border e-commerce, including product graphics, marketing, search, advertising, SEO, customer service, refunds, store decoration, etc.

The test results show that in scenarios such as AI customer service and marketing push, AI performs very well and can bring double-digit results. In addition, in most scenarios, AI can bring 1-30% improvement to merchants in terms of conversion rate, click-through rate, consumer satisfaction, etc. For example: AI automatically generated marketing materials led to a 5% increase in advertising ROI.

At present, these AI capabilities have been applied on platforms such as AliExpress , Lazada , and Trendyol, serving 500,000 merchants and 100 million products. As the effects become apparent, merchants' demand for AI is growing rapidly. In the past six months, merchants' calls to Alibaba International's various AI capabilities have doubled every two months, and the recent average daily call volume has exceeded 50 million.

In some scenarios, it can bring double-digit improvements

Small and medium-sized enterprises can benefit more from AI

Facing the challenges in cross-border e-commerce, large enterprises can solve them through professional teams, but small and medium-sized enterprises are in urgent need of using AI capabilities to "fill in the gaps." Alibaba International's AI was created for small and medium-sized enterprises.

After the first wave of generative AI, AI can do much more in the e-commerce field than just basic functions such as translation and image and text generation. It also has "advanced" capabilities for customization and solving complex problems. The most typical representatives are AI customer service, return agents, and chargeback defense agents .

Taking AI customer service as an example, Alibaba International has equipped all fully managed and semi-managed products with AI customer service on its cross-border e-commerce platform AliExpress. Data shows that in June, the conversion rate of pre-sales inquiries for products equipped with AI customer service increased by 29%.

Most of the merchants behind full and semi-hosted services are small and medium-sized enterprises, and they face language and time difference problems in pre-sales consultation. AI customer service can respond promptly 24/7, and accurately answer most inquiries about the product itself based on the information on the product details page, helping consumers make shopping decisions quickly.

Take another scenario, chargeback , for example. This is a post-sales dispute that all cross-border merchants are afraid of encountering - the goods have been shipped, but the consumer refuses to pay. In the past, to conduct a chargeback defense, merchants needed to spend hours preparing information and evidence for each link. Many small and medium-sized enterprises can only "accept their bad luck" when facing chargeback disputes due to lack of relevant experience. Now, Alibaba International's AI chargeback defense agent can organize all the information in a few minutes, automatically generate a defense letter, and send it to overseas credit card institutions.

Test data shows that AI Chargeback Defense Agent can help Chinese cross-border merchants on Alibaba International’s various platforms recover RMB 20 million in losses in a year and protect the rights and interests of merchants.

After experiencing the AI ​​Chargeback Defense Agent, a merchant said with emotion: "I failed to submit evidence before because I missed a return policy. Now AI can automatically help me obtain all the after-sales evidence, which really helps me a lot."

Recently, Alibaba International has also launched a test of the Intelligent Refund Agent, which uses AI to provide merchants and consumers with more flexible refund plans, automatically calculate the refund amount, and satisfy users while minimizing merchants' after-sales costs.

Another change brought by AI in e-commerce is the lowering of the supply threshold. Take "virtual fitting" as an example. After repeated training, AI can automatically identify product attributes and other information by receiving a picture of clothing, and show the effect of the model wearing it in 8 seconds. And the model style can be adjusted according to the styles of different overseas markets. In other words, now merchants don't even need to produce clothes to have model renderings.