Over the years, Black Friday has transformed into a global eCommerce phenomenon. In 2024 however, the scene is more competitive than ever. With technology – especially AI – reshaping how businesses approach this high-stakes shopping day, it will no longer be just about keeping the shelves stocked, it will be more about anticipating customer needs before they even walk into your online store. This is why this year’s Black Friday will be an interesting shopping event to watch and learn from.

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For those running eCommerce platforms like Magento and Adobe Commerce, the way to prepare for Black Friday HAS to take into account the availability of complex AI tools. Where once there was a reliance on instinct, basic stock forecasts, and general promotions, now we have the possibility to employ complex AI tools that help us predict demand and personalize customer experiences. 

AI, which has traditionally been resource-heavy, limited to large enterprises only, is now becoming more and more affordable, and this widespread availability helps businesses stay competitive not just during high-traffic periods like Black Friday, but also year-round.

There are three areas of eCommerce that AI has brought significant changes to: customer personalization, demand forecasting, and automation. First, by analyzing behavioral data, past purchases, and real-time browsing patterns, AI systems are able to create tailored shopping experiences for each visitor. The search function can adapt to each visitor’s habits to show more relevant products, and at the same time, recommending products can be done by knowing what really interests the customer.

Demand can now be predicted more accurately than ever, helping businesses fill stock with popular items that will likely sell, while avoiding overstocking with unwanted items. Also, there are various new technologies that can now help businesses automate operational processes that would otherwise be time-consuming.

Boost Your Black Friday Strategy with Personalized Shopping Experiences

There’s no doubt about it. Black Friday is beneficial for all online retailers.

The hype created around the event will help even the unprepared ones make good sales. But Personalization will definitely make a huge difference between an extremely successful Black Friday and a good one.

If before, store owners had to manually go through their list of products and select recommended and related products often driven by basic product data and their own expertise, nowadays, the whole concept has come a long way. With AI at hand, eCommerce stores can analyze customer behavior, purchase history, and browsing patterns in real-time, this way being able to recommend products that customers have a real interest in.

There’s an amazing feeling knowing that you buy from a store that recognizes your preferences… and it’s exactly this feeling that will not only make you buy but also come back again and again.

Creating highly Personalized Shopping Experiences with Magento and Adobe Commerce

For merchants using Magento and Adobe Commerce, several third-party platforms plus native functions, offer seamless integration to deliver AI-driven personalized shopping journeys.

Adobe Commerce relies on the native Adobe Sensei engine which uses AI to suggest relevant products based on shopper behavior, trends, and product affinities. Merchants can easily deploy this feature directly from the admin panel​. The Live Search function, powered by the same engine, is extremely complex, being able to predict customer intent and show highly relevant results as users type. It adjusts in real time based on customer behavior, improving the overall product discovery experience​.

Magento Open Source relies on third-party platforms. Nosto, Algolia or Aqurate.ai are some of the best reviewed choices. They all use machine learning to analyze customer behavior in real time, ensuring personalized interactions at every stage of the buyer journey. Everything from product recommendations, content or promotions is tailored to each customer’s preferences. The platforms integrate with Magento and all the other major eCommerce systems.

Stay ahead of the competition with dynamic prices

For many retailers, Black Friday is a highly labor-intensive event. This is because they have to respond to sudden changes in the market, like competitor sales or unexpected demand surges and adjust their prices. Usually, pricing decisions are made based on historical sales data, market reports, and intuition and many times, merchants are slow to react. They risk either underpricing items that are in high demand (leading to stockouts) or overpricing slow-moving products, which could result in missed sales opportunities.

This is the old way. The new way means using AI to respond swiftly to factors like customer demand, competitor pricing, and stock levels to adjust prices in real time. Dynamic pricing models enable merchants to automatically optimize prices to boost both sales and profit margins. During high-demand periods like Black Friday, when consumer interest spikes and supply fluctuates rapidly, AI’s ability to adapt prices in real-time is invaluable.

For generating dynamic pricing in Magento, a couple of highly recommended third-party platforms offer seamless API integration and provide advanced AI-driven pricing models. Prisync and DynamicPricing.ai are two of the leading dynamic pricing tools. Their smooth API integration allows Magento merchants to automate price updates based on predefined rules and market conditions. The platforms support frequent price updates ]multiple times a day, helping Magento stores to stay competitive during peak sales periods like Black Friday​.

Shout out about your offers when it matters, where it matters

It’s always a good practice to talk about the old ways versus the new way, because we can easily understand the tremendous advantage that AI is bringing to Marketing efforts.

The old way involved labor-intensive processes like mass email campaigns, static banner ads, and broad segmentation. Merchants would segment their customers based on basic demographic data or purchase history, sending the same promotions or recommendations to large groups of people. Ad spending was often less efficient, as it relied on general consumer behavior trends rather than real-time insights. But the worst of all – content personalization was limited, with marketing messages and product suggestions being the same for most customers.

Nowadays, using AI, marketers can easily analyze customer data, identify key behaviors,  personalizing offers to match each consumer’s unique profile. Segmentation is now based on exact behavioral data, rather than on demographics. Messages are highly personalized ensuring that they reach the right audience when it’s most effective. Ad spend is efficient, boosting engagement and conversion rates. All in all, AI allows for precise targeting, ensuring that campaigns reach high-value customers with personalized content, improving return on investment (ROI)  – and what’s most important – across all digital marketing channels​.

To enhance marketing efforts in Magento and Adobe Commerce, several platforms and tools can be integrated or employed.

Adobe Sensei (native to Adobe Commerce) is also highly effective for deploying personalized marketing tactics, customized to each shopper’s behavior. More than that, Commerce merchants seeking a more comprehensive personalization strategy can integrate various tools from Adobe’s ecosystem, like Adobe Target and Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform which provide advanced audience segmentation, personalized content, and journey optimization across all customer touch-points.

Magento Open Source relies on marketing automation platforms that integrate seamlessly with it through API. Klaviyo, for example, is one of the best reviewed tools, because it leverages AI to provide insights into customer actions, helping businesses to optimize their email and SMS campaigns for higher conversion rates. Its integration with Magento allows for detailed customer data collection, ensuring targeted marketing and personalized promotions​.

Free up your team’s time by using AI-powered chatbots

Black Friday is a hectic event. With sales in their thousands, businesses usually need all decks on board to answer enquiries. The modern answer to this is virtual chatbots. Having AI technologies integrated in your online shop will significantly reduce the time and resources needed for customer service. They can handle customer inquiries 24/7, not only by providing instant responses to common questions, but as they get smarter and smarter, by offering personalized assistance based on customer data. Take ChatGPT4o for example. It has the capacity to remember who he talked to, adjusting its answers to your past behavior. The latest GPT models are pretty advanced when it comes to reasoning and contextual conversations, compared to their predecessors. This steep evolution happened in the course of a few months mainly because they have the capacity to learn from previous conversations to improve their responses over time, making the service smarter and more efficient with each interaction​. 

One platform that received high accolades and integrates swiftly with Magento and many other major eCommerce platforms is Tidio. The platform uses Antrophic’s Claude large language model and the in-house AI mechanism, which controls what the model learns and says, to deploy smart chatbots that offer seamless, round-the-clock support. 

Final thoughts

Over the last year, there has been a massive surge in AI-driven platforms developed specifically for eCommerce stores. This makes AI no longer a luxury reserved for large enterprises only. Of course, we have to factor in development costs – which in time will yield measurable returns – but the widespread availability of AI-driven tools ensures that sales events like Black Friday are a fair battleground for businesses of all sizes. Let the SALES begin!

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