Boost Your Shopify Sales: How To Use AI For More Conversions — Nikolay Gushchin | Why Personalization Boosts Online Sales, How AI Lifts Conversions On Shopify, Why Most Tools Get Recommendations Wrong, Why “Shop The Look” Helps Fashion Stores (#401)

In this episode, we discuss how artificial intelligence can boost your online store sales through smart product recommendations. 

Nikolay Gushchin, a software engineer and founder of an AI-powered Shopify extension, shares insights from his eight years in tech working with major brands.

He explains how AI analyzes customer behavior to suggest the right products at the right time and offers practical tips for balancing automated recommendations with human input in your e-commerce business. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why basic “people also bought” tools fall short in eCommerce. 
• How AI boosts conversions with smarter Shopify recommendations. 
• Why most recommendation engines miss the mark. 
• What a quick, plug-and-play AI setup looks like. 
• Why smaller brands move faster with AI tools. 
• How AI and manual tweaks make better product bundles. 
• Why “below the fold” can kill your sales. 
• What AI “Shop the Look” features mean for fashion stores. 
• How AI knows what to recommend based on user behavior. 
• Why personalization drives sales for any store size. 
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://apps.shopify.com/aetherwave-recommendations
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/aetherwave-recommendations 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/bdfzdatp

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Transcript

[00:00:00] This episode is sponsored by Ahrefs — the all-in-one marketing intelligence platform trusted by SEO professionals, content creators, and digital marketers around the world. Whether you’re doing keyword research, checking backlinks, or analyzing competitors, Ahrefs gives you the tools to make smarter marketing decisions. Explore what Ahrefs can do at ahrefs.com.

[00:00:20] Hello. Welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we wanna find out how you can use AI to increase your conversions. Now, AI is on everyone's list right now, and obviously there is a lot of ways to increase your conversions, and we want to dive a little bit deeper into this.

Joining me on the show today is Nico. He's a [00:00:40] software engineer and founder of an AI power Shopify extension. He has more than eight years in tech and he's built solutions for major brands like M&S and Colgate. Nikolay, I specialize in personalization technology that helps online stores increase sales.

So we wanna find out more about this and I'd like to welcome him to the show. Hi Nico, how are you today? Hello, Claus. I'm doing great. And how [00:01:00] about you? I'm very well, and I'm excited to dive right into it. Now, first question, and a lot of people might know or might think they know what personalized CHOP is, but I want to hear it from you.

What do you understand as personalized chopping when we talk about e-commerce? Personalized shopping from my experience, and again, I'm talking more from, uh, [00:01:20] engineer kind of exp like way is, is a way how start adapts to you. So how it predicts your essentially next move and to what you are planning essentially to buy or to go through and predicts your behavior and analyzes you.

Mm-hmm. Now, if we talk about online stores, personalization matters, um, tell me what you see in the market. [00:01:40] What actually doesn't work well. Yeah, there's quite a lot of things because going on in the market that does not work well. And primarily I would say that, uh, some of them are how people do recommendations because people are just constantly just going through Amazon list, like recommendations, like similar or bought like that and stuff like that.

And it is just, you [00:02:00] know, I see them everywhere and they just, uh, not a tail at least. Just stuff that's pretty much is the top of the list inside of our like, chain of, yeah. Sales Now AI help store owners. With recommend recommending products and I think that's a very big topic where AI can really work and that's something you were busy with developing something to, to [00:02:20] solve this problem and to make it better.

So tell me how you came on the idea and what is the outcome at the end of the day. Yes. So I come to this idea from, again, my experience being a software engineer with, like, again, as you said, more than eight years of experience. And I've been working with quite big companies and I've [00:02:40] seen how, um, the process of actually like implementing new things works.

And my idea was to, uh, coming into it was not only about ai, but also about making the workflow for ze store owners. So essentially like Shopify from. So large to small scale better. And how it does is that essentially it would be a plug and play for, for you. You go into it, you [00:03:00] go, go to recommendations, you create them, and then over, it's where it takes part, it, uh, tailors it based on the orders you start already has it, uh, checks the bot items work best for which each other and not just, you know, as a setup of the list.

And so maybe that's basically it. Talk, talk me through the user journey. So if somebody, you [00:03:20] said you worked with huge brands, obviously there's a, uh, huge development process in, in Shopify. There's a lot of out of the box solutions out there. So talk me about the, the user experience from A to Z on, on using or basically experience AI with recommendations.

Yes, so experience from using ai from a to setting [00:03:40] recommendations is essentially, yeah, you go to, uh, for an application, you install it, and so you just go through creating recommendations. You add the pages to the patient to homepage, and at that point our AI takes part and create list of recommended projects for each one.

You can then go and make your retailer if you do not want to see that product with another specific [00:04:00] one and stuff like that. You can customize how they would look and feel. And as I said, it should work pretty much out of the box because, uh, as I mentioned, I was working with major stakeholders and I know from experience that small bumps can majorly impact actual decision making process and actually getting things done.

So I focus quite a lot on making the journey [00:04:20] as smooth and possible and as fast as possible. Talk to me about these bumps. What can it be, what can basically wreck the, the user experience? Yeah. So, uh, I recall there was a point where I was, again, working with the company. I would not, uh, their names because, you know, and this and stuff, but, so there was a process where we [00:04:40] have been trying to do an a task, uh, test on the first page of the store.

And while we have pretty much already done this, creating, you know, the code, the huge widget that would bring millions of, uh, dollars, pounds, whatever in revenue. It had to one major problem that it was below the fault, and because of it people were [00:05:00] not seeing it as much and it's like such a small change to move it up.

But such a major political debate on actually getting there. And again, it took us probably months and months to actually resolve it. That's an interesting insight. I mean, is there a below the fold sort of best practice to have it above the fold and you see Yes. Bigger the [00:05:20] companies, the more complicated become this kind of decision making.

Yeah. Because there so many teams working on different types of, you know, uh, content they're trying to show, they have vision from designer teams, they have their workflows, and just getting it all together is Yeah. Is a complicated part. And that's where, uh, why will I. Like myself, like more to [00:05:40] work with small scale businesses because they operate quite a lot faster.

They do not need to like, like make those huge decisions and they like operate in like billions of hours, you know? Mm-hmm. Tell me about the experience working with smaller brands. So something I, I think we never have really spoken on the, on the show so far. What's your approach there? What's the communication like?

[00:06:00] What's the, the, the feeling working with smaller brands that might not be as experienced in working with a software developer? Yes. I guess there can be an issue for me working as a software develop because, uh, when I'm trying to communicate with people, and usually it does not come to it because we already have a system that to, you know, goes through the whole process.

And if I needed, [00:06:20] probably we did something wrong. But if it comes to that, or I'm trying to, uh, yeah, make an exp uh, experience from the engineering side of things, like how it works and how you may integrate it, how it may help you. I wanna go back to the AI recommendation. A lot of people might have a bit of concern that [00:06:40] the a ai is taking over completely.

Is there a, a balance between having still manual input into a system and, um, so to balance it out. Yes, definitely. There should be always a balance because AI cannot be like a magic wand. It solves your problems just [00:07:00] out of the goal. You, it can get you a baseline of like what you can do. It can get you, like, get you a baseline of the list.

So like if we're talking again, recommendations. You, you can get probably like a hundred projects done with some good recommendations for them. But there would be ones that just do not work. And you need a manual to that point, you need a manual knowhow of a [00:07:20] person who like operated the store, who knows the, you know, stock and who knows what goes with what, just from their experience as well.

Because as I said, I cannot be a magic wand. But there is also major points that people do tend to make mistakes as well. Uh, again, from my engineering experience, I. We have been doing a [00:07:40] project for us, like 31 on the store, and so that was a case where we introduced a tool that allowed people to essentially blacklist or white list like you know, products based on anything.

And there was a case where people whitelist it or one brand for a brand launch, and it was a major campaign. But in [00:08:00] that same time, they blacklisted everything else and site was not working for a day or two because of it properly. There was no Bo like no buys, just just for that brand. Let's take a moment to thank HRES for the free web analytics tool, a free privacy first analytics platform.

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Head over to hres.com/awt to sign up. You will find the link also in the show notes. Tell me about the, the process. [00:08:40] How does the AI or your software know what to recommend? Yes. So it is a process of I creating a model and looking through orders essentially, and user experience throughout the site. So once they go, or like how much time they spent on our product pages and how much time they spent like on going [00:09:00] from one to another.

And how many, like how many times items are bundled together in a, in order, essentially. So if, uh, usually it happens that we users buy, buy one item and to a couple of them, like, uh, another items. Usually we try to recommend those, those items together. Or if they buy and then they try find assumption else, we are [00:09:20] all trying to mount it up.

So, as I said, it is a model that tries to, takes quite a lot of things into account. Mm-hmm. What kind of tools do you have to basically motivate the, um, potential buyer? Is, is there discounts there or is, is there any other kind of actions in there to, to motivate them? Yes. [00:09:40] Obviously it is discounts, it is ui and I guess I can also do a small sneak peek into a major feature we have also working on, which would be a, which would be ma mostly like through, like through use the UI of the.

How it's presented to the user, where, where we would allow store owners to, again, we go through recommendations and [00:10:00] look which products goes best with which products, and recommends quite like good closing options and again, using ai, but they can still use their manual, know how to go through it. And so using again, new AI tools to will create a photo realistic images for the main image.

Very interesting. Um, shop the look. I think that's [00:10:20] something that, that might really, really work well on, on that. Are there specific shops or, um, niche industries where this works very well? I mean, shop the look sounds for me. Like apparel, fashion industry might be something. Uh, there are other experiences that you have or other examples.

I would say that right now we are [00:10:40] working mainly on that because I have seen it as a major kind of missing spot on a Shopify market right now. So if you go to Shopify app stores and to app store and you will try to search for shop. Applications are not so many of them or focusing on that specific, uh, one and definitely there won't be any one that is creating [00:11:00] images.

So like if you give them top and so some kind of short or whatever, uh, it would definitely not create an image that is showing both of them together. You will need to hire a model. You will need to get the products and you'll need to do an actual photo set to get the main image. And what we are trying to do right now is to automate that process for, for you as a store owner so that it would be as seamless and as [00:11:20] good looking at the end as possible.

Who, who's, who's your perfect customer, what kind of brand would work with you? I would say that it is not such like a big issue for us because we can work with any, any customers of, I am aiming to work with, uh, Shopify stores from small to big because [00:11:40] again, in my experience, personalization is such a major topic and such a major driver of revenue that, uh, no matter the scale, you should have a similar experience of getting your store, uh, seen to people and getting people a detention on, on your store because.

Again, there was a fourth article that they show that 80% of people would [00:12:00] recommend or would choose to buy on stores that, or have personalized experience. So I would not, I would say that we are definitely, are not, uh, discriminating based on the store size and, uh, would work with any customer from small to big.

Mm-hmm. You touched already a little bit on it, but I wanna dive a little bit deeper into what's the typical onboarding [00:12:20] process, what steps are involved and how long does it take to get up and running? I. Usually it should not take more than couple hours. I would say a couple hours is a worst case scenario because it should be, you are installing it, you are going through your process of our agency to your team and tailor tailoring it or to your like, you know, styles and then you go [00:12:40] through the process actually creating lists and it automatically should create least best your past.

Then you can tailor it. Uh, and again, use your, uh, knowhow and your experience as a store owner to see if, uh, also also good and if they go together well. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Is there any kind of homework that emergent needs to do before they can get [00:13:00] started? No. I would say probably no. Okay. How does your pricing structure work?

Yes, so we definitely, we have a price structure for right now. We are working basically on a subscription model, and it is, I believe, 10, uh, USD per per month. We have a 14 day free trial, and we are, [00:13:20] uh, selling it only at, uh, you know, only at, uh, premium. So there is no free based, uh, subscription. Okay, that sounds good.

I wanna dive a little bit deeper because you are so close to what's happening in ai. What, what's your outlook for the next 12 months? How much a will AI impact Shopify? The [00:13:40] Shopify apps, um, system, the user experience, I. It is a very interesting topic, and the answer to it is that everything will change and nothing will change because essentially new tools are being introduced pretty much on a daily basis.

As, as you can see, uh, new tools for, for developers, new tools [00:14:00] for store owners, but at the same time, the core of e-commerce. It's not really going to, going to change it because of it, because at the end of the day there's still process of people or opening the store people, uh, seeing the personalized experience and so people buying items they need.

Mm-hmm. I wanna touch a little bit of inter [00:14:20] internationalization. So is your app only available in English or do you support other languages? Uh, right now we also support Spanish and we are planning to introduce other languages as well. Okay, cool. Perfect. Cool. Nico, before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you wanna share with our listeners that we haven't touched on?

I would say probably no [00:14:40] from my side. Is there anything that you are interested in? No, I think you gave a really good overview of, um, what AI recommendation can do now, how it can help in getting more conversions there. And, uh, we people go and find out more about you guys. Or is a Shopify store listing and I would say that this probably is the best place [00:15:00] right now.

Okay. I will put the link in the show notes and you just one click away. Nico, thanks so much for your time today to give us an overview about your app. A lot of people hopefully will go to your website, to your to the app store and try it out. I think it's a good app to really enforce force AI and take the best out of AI and to [00:15:20] increase your conversions.

Thanks so much for your time today. Thank you for having me here. Thanks again to hres and hres Web Analytics for supporting the show. If you're looking for a clean, fast, and privacy focused analytics tool, try it for free at hres.com/awt. That's A HRE [00:15:40] s.com/awt. You will also find the link in the show notes.

Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It'll also make it easier for others to discover the podcast.

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