Facebook Pumps Up Appeal Of Marketplace At F8

“News from the social media’s F8 conference on Tuesday (April 30) said Facebook will soon let Marketplace sellers “ship items anywhere in the continental U.S., while (consumers will) be able to pay for purchases directly through the platform.

That is only the latest addition and upgrade to Marketplace as Facebook tries to become a bigger player in eCommerce, with enhancements being powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

WhatsApp is also getting a few feature, according to another report: “Facebook took the wraps off of Product Catalog, which will allow users to see what’s available from businesses participating in WhatsApp Business when the feature rolls out later this year.”

What Is Contextual Commerce and Why It Can Be So Hard

‘Contextual commerce is the idea that consumers should be able to buy whatever they want, wherever they want, with as few hoops to jump through as possible.’

On the back end, there are numerous systems a retail can harness to connect with consumers. “Any multivariate platform like Rich Relevance, Optimizely or Maxymiser can associate content with a shopper’s context,” said Chris Haines, director of consulting at Amplience. But there are challenges with contextual commerce, he continued, namely that none of the leading ecommerce platforms are built to handle content — or any non-product data for that matter.
Artificial intelligence also plays a significant role in the better executions of contextual commerce. “Almost all concepts in contextual commerce require AI to help detect important attributes about the context,” Finkelshtey said.”

Facebook

“Shares of the social media juggernaut are already up 36% so far in 2018 — albeit after plunging 26% last year as it traversed a difficult combination of data-privacy scandals, the spread of misinformation on its platforms, and concerns over decelerating top-line growth as Facebook builds on a larger base. With the help of AI, Facebook is striving to address those concerns.

Visa

“The services that we offer that are extremely high value-added and in many ways have economics that are very similar to our core business and very much leverage of core business or things like risks services, fraud management and all that, authentication services, data analytics where we continue to add to our capabilities with AI,” said CFO Vasant Prabhu, according to a transcript compiled by Seeking Alpha. “We’ve always been doing machine learning, especially on fraud.”

Alphabet

Without AI, Waymo’s vehicles wouldn’t be able to navigate traffic, avoid pedestrians, or learn from past driving experiences. The company stands to benefit from this AI pursuit by licensing some of its tech to other companies and selling its own services, all of which could help Waymo generate nearly $100 billion in sales over the next decade.”

“Amazon, with Alexa, had 67% of the market share in the United States in 2018, while Google had about 30% share, according to eMarketer.

Few people use voice assistants and speakers for shopping.Voice commerce in 2018 will reach $2.10 billion — just 0.4% of U.S. ecommerce sales, per eMarketer.

“We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products,” a Facebook spokesperson acknowledged to Search Marketing Daily”

To check out the latest Oculus products check out this link https://www.oculus.com

“The project will eventually map nearly the whole world’s population,’ Facebook said in a blog post.

Luckily, this sort of task — tedious but simple — is perfect for AI. To automate this process, Facebook’s engineers used data from open-source mapping project Open Street Map to train a computer vision system that can recognize buildings in satellite imagery.”