Eliminate Abandonment with Project-Based Shopping Carts Using Generative AI on Oracle Cloud
Emerging technologies, such as generative AI, promise to reverse this trend, giving online shoppers a more convenient way to find the products they need, the guidance to build the projects they want, and a checkout experience that makes completing a purchase fast, easy, and rewarding.
With generative AI’s powerful project-based search, product recommendation, and personalized pricing capabilities, online shoppers are significantly more likely to make purchase decisions faster, increase the number of products they purchase, and become long-term, loyal customers.
But today’s online shopping cart platforms are often rife with complexity, confusion, and missed opportunity. Many online shoppers looking to build outdoor decks or redecorate rooms in their homes are forced to scour the internet for stylish furnishings, building materials, and instructional videos from various vendors and content creators. While researching their projects, shoppers are encouraged to pick specific items, tools, and materials from a wide range of online sellers, limiting the share of revenue that any single seller might receive.
Combining Oracle Generative AI services with Oracle Autonomous Database 23ai with Vector Search can help online sellers give their customers everything they need to build their projects, from searching project types and generating bills of material, to populating their shopping carts with recommended products and providing step-by-step instructions for how to start building. All customers need to do is select the products in the bill of materials, add them to their shopping cart, and check out. Based on the customer’s chosen project type, Oracle generative AI services can instantly identify all the necessary tools within a seller’s inventory, generate a set of instructions to show how those tools should be used to build the project, and then send the necessary tools and materials to the customer’s shopping cart to purchase.
Architecture
To deploy an AI-powered, project-based shopping cart while generating product recommendations, a project bill of material, and instructions, you’ll need an embedding model, Oracle Database 23ai , large language models (LLMs), and a central compute instance.
You can integrate these products and services with existing web-based shopping carts by using API calls or by using a front-end web app built using Oracle APEX Application Development.
This architecture features the primary components listed below (an architecture diagram is included with each of the deployment options provided in the Plan Your Deployment section):
- AI vector search on Oracle 23ai
Oracle Database 23ai provides AI vector search to query data based on semantics (meaning and intent) rather than keywords. Vectors, also called embeddings, are multidimensional representations of documents, images, videos, sound and more. By encoding these objects as vectors, you gain the ability to look for similarities between them by using mathematical calculations. The real power of Oracle Database 23ai is that you can combine these similarity searches with searches on your business data using simple SQL statements that combine similarity and other search criteria. These types of queries provide large language models (LLMs) with additional context, augmenting their knowledge and making their responses more accurate and relevant to your questions.
- Generative AI and Large Language Models
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI is a fully managed OCI service that provides a set of state-of-the-art, customizable large language models (LLMs) that cover a wide range of use cases for text generation, summarization, semantic search, and more. Use the playground to try out the ready-to-use pretrained models, or create and host your own fine-tuned custom models based on your own data on dedicated AI clusters.
In this architecture, large language models are used to generate user manuals for the selected project type and the products sent to the shopping cart. OCI Generative AI also includes dedicated AI clusters, which are compute resources that you can use for fine-tuning custom models or for hosting endpoints for custom models. The clusters are dedicated to your models and not shared with users in other tenancies. Custom model OCI Generative AI lets you refine the models using your own data.
- OCI GoldenGate
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GoldenGate is a managed service providing a real-time data mesh platform, which uses replication to keep data highly available, and enables real-time analysis. You can design, execute, and monitor your data replication and stream data processing solutions without allocating or managing compute environments.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure GoldenGate helps integrate ecommerce shopping carts created with Oracle ATG Web Commerce with OCI Generative AI services in a seamless process that unlocks a host of benefits for online sellers.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides a robust and flexible environment to host and manage Oracle ATG and other ecommerce applications with easy access to a range of advanced AI services.
To begin, load Oracle ATG and its related table into Oracle Autonomous Database. You can easily achieved rthis by using OCI GoldenGate or other Oracle data integration tools and APIs to enable a secure and efficient data transfer process.
After the data is ingested, online sellers can use the GenAI Shopping Cart solution to build a shopping cart which can then be returned to ATG as a GenAI-powered shopping cart.
You can also use OCI Generative AI service to analyze customer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns. You can use these insights to generate personalized product recommendations, optimize pricing strategies, and create targeted marketing campaigns resulting in higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.
OCI's scalable and flexible infrastructure ensures that retailers and other online sellers can handle any volume of data and traffic, providing a seamless and responsive shopping experience for their customers.
- Functions
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Functions is a fully managed, multitenant, highly scalable, on-demand, Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform. It is powered by the Fn Project open source engine. Functions enable you to deploy your code, and either call it directly or trigger it in response to events. Oracle Functions uses Docker containers hosted in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry.
- Oracle APEX Application
Development
Oracle APEX is a low-code development platform that enables you to build scalable, feature-rich, secure, enterprise apps that can be deployed anywhere that Oracle Database is installed. You don't need to be an expert in a vast array of technologies to deliver sophisticated solutions. Oracle APEX includes built-in features such as user interface themes, navigational controls, form handlers, and flexible reports that accelerate the application development process.