
Grady Lakshmono
Co-Founder, Gula (acquired by Runchise)
Indonesia
RaftLabs elevated my ideas and brought them to life when everything seemed impossible.
AI for Ecommerce
Sending the same promotion to every customer, stocking what sold last year rather than what will sell next quarter, and discovering payment fraud after a chargeback arrives: these are the margin and revenue problems that AI addresses in e-commerce.
We build AI systems for e-commerce retailers, marketplace operators, and DTC brands: personalised product recommendations, dynamic pricing, demand forecasting, customer churn prediction, AI search and discovery, review analysis and sentiment monitoring, fraud detection for payments and chargebacks, and AI customer support for order queries. Every system is scoped against your transaction data and a specific revenue or cost outcome.
Recommendation models trained on your transaction history that increase basket size and repeat purchase rate
Demand forecasts at the SKU level that reduce overstock carrying costs and lost sales from stockouts simultaneously
Churn prediction models that score each customer by departure risk and trigger retention actions before they stop buying
Payment fraud detection that flags suspicious orders before fulfilment, not after a chargeback arrives
Bring the problem, the current workflow, or the existing code. We reply with a practical next step within one business day.
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The brief
Good software decisions begin with the constraint, not a list of features or a preferred technology.
Are your promotions going to your entire customer base because you don't have a reliable way to identify which customers actually need an incentive to buy?
Are you finding out about fraudulent orders after you've already shipped the goods, or does your system flag them before fulfilment?
Plain answer
RaftLabs builds AI for e-commerce retailers and DTC brands across the US, UK, Europe, Canada, and the UAE. Systems include recommendation engines, demand forecasting, churn prediction, dynamic pricing, and fraud detection. McKinsey reports effective personalisation can lift revenue 5-15%. Price is fixed before development starts.
What to remember
A retailer sends the same 20% code to its entire list. It discounts the customers who would have paid full price and barely moves the ones who needed a reason to buy. The same week, a fraudulent order clears checkout, gets picked, packed, and shipped, and the chargeback lands three weeks later.
Both problems share one root cause. The signal that would have caught them, the customer's real purchase pattern, the order's fraud risk, was already sitting in the transaction data. Nobody acted on it in time.
The data was there. The decision came too late.
The data most e-commerce businesses need to improve personalisation, reduce inventory waste, and retain customers already exists in their transaction history, customer records, and product catalogue. The gap is between collecting that data and using it in real-time decisions. AI closes that gap.
This page covers AI for digital storefronts, carts, marketplaces, and online orders, the systems that read and act on online customer behaviour. If your problem is physical stores, shelves, footfall, or omnichannel inventory across locations, see AI for retail instead.
McKinsey reports that effective personalisation can lift revenue by 5-15% and reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%. For retailers and DTC brands, that uplift comes almost entirely from making better use of transaction data they already hold. RaftLabs has shipped production software since 2015 for clients across the US, UK, Europe, Canada, and the UAE. Recent commerce work includes a B2B food order platform running with zero order errors since launch and a TikTok-style social commerce app that lifted brand sales for participating creators. We also shipped a referral and viral marketing platform that raised conversion for active campaigns in 14 weeks.
Proof
The team that scopes your build ships it: the same people who assess your data and define the outcome metric in week one deliver it in production, with GDPR and PCI-DSS scoped from the start rather than retrofitted before launch. For automation beyond AI models, order routing, inventory sync, and returns processing, see our e-commerce automation service.
Everything on the left should already be true for your operation. Even one thing on the right, and a discovery conversation is the smarter first step.
Enough transaction history, customer records, and catalogue data for a model to learn from, not a pre-launch store.
A specific revenue or cost metric you want to move: basket size, churn rate, stockout rate, or fraud losses.
An e-commerce platform, marketplace, or OMS to integrate against, from Shopify or WooCommerce to your own system.
A new store with little transaction history for a model to train on.
You want an off-the-shelf plugin, not a system scoped against your own data.
No single outcome metric in mind, so there is nothing to measure the build against.
Off-the-shelf software is usually the right call for standard chat widgets, out-of-the-box recommendation apps, or simple rule-based automation, most Shopify and WooCommerce apps cover this well. Custom development earns its cost when you have proprietary data a generic model can't train on, workflows that don't match a standard app's assumptions, multiple systems that need to share one source of truth, or pricing and eligibility logic specific to your business that a plugin can't express.
Scope
Most retailers cannot fund every model at once, and they should not. Pick the one capability tied to the number you most need to move, prove it, then fund the next from what it earns back. This table maps each capability to the metric it moves and the condition that makes it the right first build.
| Metric it moves | When it is the right first build | |
|---|---|---|
| Recommendations | Basket size, repeat purchase rate | You hold enough transaction history for a model to learn real buying patterns. |
| AI search and discovery | Search conversion, zero-result rate | A large catalogue where keyword search keeps missing intent-based queries. |
| Dynamic pricing | Margin, sell-through | A price-sensitive catalogue with competitor and demand data to learn from. |
| Churn prediction | Repeat revenue, retention | A returning-customer base and early departure signals you can act on. |
| Fraud detection | Chargeback rate, false-decline rate | Chargeback losses are climbing and you have labelled historical fraud data. |
| Voice and chat support | Contact deflection, cost per contact | Order-status and returns calls tie up staff you would rather redeploy. |
We build fraud detection models for e-commerce transactions that score each order by fraud probability using card data, device fingerprint, order characteristics, and velocity signals. High-risk orders are flagged for review before fulfilment. Trained on your historical transaction and chargeback data. Reduces chargeback rates without increasing false declines on legitimate orders. For marketplace operators, the same model architecture also detects seller-side fraud patterns such as fake reviews and listing manipulation. See fraud detection for how we scope this as a standalone build.
E-commerce AI fails in predictable ways. We design against these from the first sprint rather than discovering them in production.
Buyers are starting to shop through AI assistants, not only your own storefront. When a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI results for a product, the retailers that win are the ones whose catalogue data is clean, structured, and machine-readable. The same recommendation and search models that rank products on your site are becoming the feed that answers those external queries. We build with that in mind: structured product data, explainable ranking, and an API surface your team can point at the next channel without a rebuild.
Basket size, churn rate, stockout rate, or fraud losses: tell us the number and we will assess which AI system addresses it and what it costs to build against your data.
How it works
Every engagement follows the same four phases. Scope is locked and price is fixed before development starts.
We map your transaction data, customer records, and the specific revenue or cost outcome you want AI to move. You leave week 1 with a written scope document and a fixed-price quote. No development starts without your sign-off.
We build a working prototype against a sample of your data and validate the model's accuracy before committing to a full build. Design decisions made here cost a fraction of the same decisions made mid-sprint.
Working AI system at a staging URL by the end of sprint one. Bi-weekly demos with your team. QA runs in parallel with every sprint, not as a phase at the end. API integration with your e-commerce platform runs alongside the model build.
Production deployment with monitoring and alerting activated on launch day. Model performance tracked against the outcome metric from week 1. 8 weeks of post-launch support included in every project.
What clients say
Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.

Grady Lakshmono
Co-Founder, Gula (acquired by Runchise)
Indonesia
RaftLabs elevated my ideas and brought them to life when everything seemed impossible.
Proof

We built a branded booking website with RMS Cloud integration and a Bluetooth keyless mobile app for City Break Apartments in Dublin, activating 250 Omnitec locks already installed, cutting 20+ staff hours per week, and growing self check-ins from fewer than 10 to 72+ weekly.
Where you land in that range depends on scope, not negotiation:
What it costs
A working system at a staging URL by the end of sprint one, then a production build with the integrations and monitoring it needs to move your metric.
Start with one capability, see it move your metric, then fund the next one from what it earns back.
Starting investment
Starts at $30,000
Covers a single capability, like search or recommendations, scoped in discovery. Most merchants start there, prove it against a metric, then add the next capability.
No hourly billing
We map your data, define the outcome metric, and lock the cost in writing before any development starts. No hourly billing, no absorbed costs on the final invoice, just a priced change request if the scope grows.
See it early
A working system at a staging URL by the end of sprint one, usually 2 to 3 weeks in, so you can adjust scope before the build is complete. 8 weeks of post-launch support included in every project.
Useful next steps
Work with us
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Read moreA personalised product recommendation engine analyses the patterns in your transaction data to predict what a customer is likely to buy next. The primary technique is collaborative filtering: customers with similar purchase histories tend to buy similar products, so the model uses the behaviour of similar customers to generate recommendations for the current customer. This is combined with content-based filtering, which recommends products similar in attributes to what the customer has previously bought, and popularity signals that ensure new or high-margin products get appropriate visibility. The model is trained on your historical transaction data and updated on a rolling schedule as new purchases come in. Output is a ranked recommendation list for each customer: next purchase prediction, cross-sell candidates, upsell opportunities, and replenishment timing for consumable products. For online retail, this feeds your recommendation widgets, email product selections, and paid retargeting campaigns. For marketplaces, it personalises the search result ranking and homepage product surfaces for each logged-in buyer.
Dynamic pricing for e-commerce uses demand signals, inventory levels, competitor pricing, and margin constraints to recommend an optimal price for each product at each point in time. The model monitors how conversion rate and units sold respond to price changes for each product, learns the price elasticity of demand in your catalogue, and recommends prices that maximise revenue or margin given your inventory position and competitive context. For products where demand is highly elastic, commoditised items with many competitors, the model keeps prices competitive. For products where demand is inelastic and inventory is constrained, exclusive products or limited-run items, the model captures more margin by pricing higher when demand is strong. You define the price floors, brand positioning rules, and margin minimums. The model optimises within those constraints. For marketplace operators, dynamic pricing models also feed the buybox competition logic. We assess your price history and competitor data access in discovery.
E-commerce churn prediction works differently from subscription churn because customers don't formally cancel, they simply stop buying. The model learns to identify the behavioural signals that precede churn in your transaction data: declining purchase frequency, lengthening inter-purchase intervals, falling average basket value, a shift from full-price purchasing to buying only on promotion, and reduction in the number of product categories bought. These signals are weighted by customer value tier and combined into a churn probability score. Customers above a threshold score enter a retention workflow: a targeted offer, a personalised email sequence, or a loyalty programme prompt, calibrated to the customer's predicted lifetime value and the estimated cost of the incentive needed to retain them. The key decision is the intervention threshold: if you discount too many customers, you reduce margin on customers who would have bought at full price. We tune this threshold against your customer value distribution and promotion cost structure during scoping.
AI search in e-commerce uses vector embeddings and semantic similarity to return relevant results even when the customer's search query doesn't exactly match product attribute text in your catalogue. A customer searching for 'summer work outfit' returns clothing items that match the concept rather than only products that contain those exact words in their description. The search model learns the semantic relationships between customer language and product attributes from your query-click-purchase data: which queries led to which products being clicked and bought. This is combined with personalisation signals so that the results ranked highest for a returning customer reflect their past purchase and browse behaviour, not just catalogue-wide popularity. For large catalogues, AI search also powers the autocomplete and query suggestion layer, surfacing popular and high-conversion search terms as the customer types. We assess your product catalogue size, current search infrastructure, and query-click data in discovery to determine the integration approach.
The cost depends on the scope: a single AI capability such as a churn prediction model or demand forecasting layer typically runs between $30,000 and $80,000. A full AI stack covering recommendations, dynamic pricing, search, and fraud detection is a larger engagement. Every project starts with a fixed-price discovery phase where we map your data, define the outcome metric, and produce a written quote before development begins. You know the cost before any code is written.
Yes. A voice agent authenticates the caller by phone number or order ID, queries your order management system in real time, and delivers accurate status or walks the customer through return eligibility, reason collection, and label generation, all within a single call under 60 seconds. Integration is via the Shopify Admin API, WooCommerce REST API, or your OMS, with refunds routed to a human review step for high-value or out-of-policy cases.
Most single-capability AI builds go from kick-off to production in 10 to 14 weeks. Multi-capability engagements covering recommendations, pricing, and fraud detection together typically take 16 to 20 weeks. The timeline depends on the state of your transaction data and the complexity of your e-commerce platform integrations. We deliver a working system at a staging URL by the end of sprint one, usually 2 to 3 weeks into the project, so you can see progress early and adjust scope before the build is complete.
Work with us
Bring the rough workflow, half-built product, or messy brief. We will map the smallest useful first move, then send scope, timeline, and price in plain English.