Ecommerce merchants are at an advantage when it comes to personalizing shopping experiences for their website visitors. While there’s a lot of psychology at play in retail stores in terms of display placement, colour theory, and overall layouts, every shopper who enters your business encounters the exact same store. 

Unlike physical retail stores, the inherent functionality of the internet and web development allows for ecommerce stores to be engineered for offering customized, completely personalized experiences to website visitors, even tailored to the specific device they are using. 

While this level of algorithmic, contextual customization has been available for decades, the rise of AI and machine learning has enabled online store owners to better personalize their shopping experiences in much faster, cheaper, and more customized ways than ever before.

One company that is doing a particularly good job of leveraging AI for personalization is Adobe. In this article, we’ll focus on Adobe’s ecommerce platform, Adobe Commerce, and how it uses AI to help its merchants personalize their merchandising efforts to influence shopper behaviour and drive sales.

What Is Adobe Sensei AI?

Adobe Sensei is Adobe’s proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning framework integrated throughout its vast ecosystem of tools and apps, including Photoshop, Adobe Experience Manager, Marketo Engage, and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). 

Currently, Adobe Sensei handles a lot of task-based, decision-making, and personalization work, while a separate tool, Adobe Firefly, handles tasks involving text and image generation. This functionality, however, will eventually be absorbed into Sensei as well. 

In the context of Adobe Commerce, Sensei serves as a personalization engine. It crunches vast amounts of shopper data (clicks, searches, past purchases, etc.) and identifies patterns and affinities.

Today, you can use behavioural data alongside the AI-powered features built into Adobe Commerce to create custom shopping experiences with minimal effort beyond initial setup and configuration.  

Adobe Sensei AI in Adobe Commerce: Personalization Features

While Sensei-based features are scattered throughout the Adobe Commerce platform, two explicit features/extensions harness them to supercharge your merchandising personalization: Adobe Live Search and Adobe Product Recommendations. 

Adobe Commerce Product Recommendations

Product recommendations in Adobe Commerce aren’t just something merchants manually set up based on product similarities and data they may have from previous sales. Instead, the Product Recommendations extension is a SaaS-based service offered by Adobe. It uses machine learning to automatically tag and recommend products via “recommendation units” that users can display across their ecommerce store websites, such as the home page, product pages, and cart pages.  

When customers start interacting with items in your store, product recommendations will begin to surface in the Product Recommendations Module configured in your Adobe Commerce Admin. 

Adobe Commerce uses AI to personalize the ecommerce merchandising experience and increase sales through product recommendations. These recommendations appear in configurable modules within the Adobe Commerce Admin and are based on customer behaviour, product popularity, and similarities to items viewed or purchased.

When a customer interacts with products, the system generates recommendations. Clicking on a product populates a module on the individual product page with real-time suggestions based on the customer's current browsing activity. To optimize engagement, label these modules with phrases like "products you may like" or "related products," suggesting a comprehensive view of available styles, models, or colours.

These recommendation units offer extensive customization options. You can style and brand them, and control the visibility of various data or attribute fields to highlight specific products strategically. This level of customization ensures that the modules align with your website's design and present the most pertinent products to shoppers.

Adobe Commerce Live Search

Just like Adobe Sensei in Product Recommendations, Live Search is AI-powered and aims to improve the search process for customers shopping in Adobe Commerce stores. Live Search uses machine learning to reduce manual input and set-up for merchants while improving the overall customer experience on your storefront.

Adobe Commerce's Live Search personalizes the ecommerce experience by offering dynamic, real-time search functionality. As customers type in the search bar, a customizable popover widget displays instant results, which can be preconfigured to show specific products upon initial click. Unlike a typical search bar that only matches keywords, Live Search uses Adobe Sensei to understand context and shopper intent.

This intelligent search anticipates customer needs by accommodating misspellings and refining queries based on typed product attributes like colour or style. Pressing "enter" or "view all" takes users to a fully customizable results page tailored by your company's settings.

Further enhancing the search experience, intelligent faceting allows merchants to select product and category options that appear as filters on the results page. These facets are automatically ranked, simplifying setup. As customers apply filters, relevant products appear instantly without page reloads, creating a smooth and personalized shopping journey. 

Under the hood, Adobe Sensei analyzes the search query alongside various data points (product catalogue data, synonyms, past shopper behaviour, and the popularity of results) to rank products by relevance for that specific user.

Customers can easily refine their search by removing filters with a single click. They can also sort results by various criteria, including price, relevance, and reviews.

Benefits of AI-Driven Personalization in Adobe Commerce

Using AI for ecommerce merchandising translates into tangible, measurable benefits for your online store. Here are some of the main advantages of deploying Adobe Commerce Sensei-powered personalization features:

• Higher Conversion Rates: Customers who see products and content that align with their interests are far more likely to purchase. AI personalization means your store is showing the right products to the right person at the right time. By re-ranking category pages and search results to match shopper preferences and suggesting relevant add-ons, Adobe Commerce with Sensei helps turn browsers into buyers, which is your ultimate goal. 

• Increased Average Order Value (AOV): Personalized product recommendations encourage customers to add more items to their carts, boosting the average order value. For example, if a shopper is looking at a laptop, a “You might also like” widget might show a laptop bag or accessory for them to consider picking up as well. This intelligent upselling and cross-selling can significantly raise AOV.

• Lower Bounce Rates: AI personalization keeps shoppers engaged by quickly connecting them with products that fit their needs. If someone searches for an item and sees the correct result immediately, they will likely stay and shop rather than bounce to a competitor’s site. Adobe’s Live Search, for instance, is explicitly designed to reduce bounce rates by helping customers find what they want faster. 

• Time and Cost Savings: Beyond customer-facing metrics, AI merchandising also benefits your internal team. Traditionally, achieving personalization required a lot of manual work: curating product collections, adjusting search result ordering, and analyzing data to guess what customers might want. Adobe Sensei helps automate much of this work. It continuously analyzes data and updates product rankings or recommendations in real time, so your team can focus on strategy and creative decisions rather than crunching numbers all day.

• Staying Competitive: Large ecommerce companies invest heavily in AI to personalize their sites (think of Amazon’s recommendations or Netflix-style personalization). With Adobe’s AI capabilities, merchants can offer more sophisticated, polished shopping experiences without needing a huge budget. Now, you can stay competitive with larger businesses without extra cash investment. 

By leveraging these tools, even a small- to mid-sized online store can deliver product discovery experiences comparable to those of retail giants. This ultimately increases conversions, AOV, and customer satisfaction.

How to Make the Most of Adobe Sensei AI Technology 

First, for best results, use both Product Recommendations and Live Search together to cover all touchpoints of the customer journey. Shoppers might discover products through search, browsing categories, or recommendation carousels. By personalizing each of these areas, you create a cohesive, omnichannel-like experience on your site. 

Keep an eye on how these elements interact. For example, a customer might use search and then be drawn to a recommended item on a product page. Ensuring consistency here can reinforce the personalization impact.

Take advantage of A/B testing or Adobe Commerce’s personalization insights if available. You might try two different recommendation strategies (e.g., “Up-Sell” vs. “Related Products” widgets) to see which drives more engagement. Similarly, test tweaks in search settings: does adding a specific synonym improve conversion for a popular query, for example?

Even if AI is largely doing the most work for you automatically, it’s important to check in and test things every now and then to find opportunities for improvement. You also don’t want to remove the human touch from your merchandising, either. 

For example, use Sensei as a baseline that you can then layer seasonal promotions or other manual tweaks over. If you know a particular product is your “hero” item for Spring, you might want to manually feature it on the homepage even if Sensei might have other plans. Adobe Commerce allows manual overrides, like pinning products in a category or curating specific “Editor’s Picks”, which you can use alongside AI for maximum effectiveness. 

Adobe is continually enhancing its Sensei AI capabilities. New algorithms, features, or best practices may be introduced in Adobe Commerce updates. For example, Adobe recently rolled out Intelligent Category Merchandising to auto-sort category pages. Keep an eye on Adobe’s updates and launches (or partner with an agency like Blue Badger, which can parse all these launches for you) to ensure you’re not missing out on any new features or updates. 

Conclusion

With Adobe’s AI-powered tools, ecommerce businesses of all sizes can deliver tailored, dynamic shopping experiences that rival major retailers. Personalization drives higher conversion rates, increases average order value, reduces bounce rates, and saves merchants time and resources. By strategically implementing and continuously refining these features, your store can consistently meet and exceed customer expectations. 

Ready to transform your merchandising using Adobe Sensei? As an Adobe Bronze Partner, Blue Badger has the skills you need to get started with Adobe Commerce/Magento. Contact us today to learn more.