AI for Ecommerce

AI for e-commerce, built to move one number you choose.

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

See our work

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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Perceptional logoMusgrave GroupUrShipper logoBrux Dental SolutionsBella Skin Institute LogoEnergia RewardsDraftly logoTuneClub LogoSekou LMS logoLogo of food order management app gulaSnelwegDealsGrubly logoPSi logoInstantor Rewards logologo of Mobile app for events, membership clubs, and communitiesAldiFest retail campaign logoVidmattic logoEMS Connect logoWorx Squad logologo of Online Web App For Making Intrologo of Referral and Viral Marketing PlatformConcurrences logoBank of America logoNike logoMicrosoft logoCisco logoWells Fargo logoGE logoJimmy Choo logoT-Mobile logoIconmobile logoVodafone logoUniversity of Southern California (USC) logo

The brief

Start with what is not working.

Good software decisions begin with the constraint, not a list of features or a preferred technology.

01

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?

02

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

  • RaftLabs builds AI for e-commerce retailers and DTC brands in the US, UK, Europe, Canada, and the UAE
  • McKinsey reports that effective personalisation can lift revenue by 5-15% and reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%
  • Single AI capability builds such as churn prediction or demand forecasting run between $30,000 and $80,000
  • Single-capability builds go from kick-off to production in 10 to 14 weeks
  • Multi-capability engagements covering recommendations, pricing, and fraud detection take 16 to 20 weeks
  • Price is fixed before development starts following a fixed-price discovery phase

The promotion went to everyone. The fraud alert came after the parcel shipped.

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.

Margin improvements that are already in your transaction data

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

conversion lift from a referral and viral marketing platform, delivered in 14 weeks
2.5x
RaftLabs, GrowViral
order errors on a multi-platform food order system since launch
0
RaftLabs, Gula
average client rating across delivered projects
4.9/5
Clutch, verified reviews

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.

This pays off when the signal is already in your data.

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.

A fit
01

Enough transaction history, customer records, and catalogue data for a model to learn from, not a pre-launch store.

02

A specific revenue or cost metric you want to move: basket size, churn rate, stockout rate, or fraud losses.

03

An e-commerce platform, marketplace, or OMS to integrate against, from Shopify or WooCommerce to your own system.

Not a fit
01

A new store with little transaction history for a model to train on.

02

You want an off-the-shelf plugin, not a system scoped against your own data.

03

No single outcome metric in mind, so there is nothing to measure the build against.

When an existing tool is enough

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

What we build

  • 01

    Personalised product recommendations

    Recommendation models trained on your transaction history that predict next-purchase, cross-sell, upsell, and replenishment for each customer, using collaborative filtering alongside content-based filtering. Output feeds your recommendation widgets, email selections, and retargeting campaigns, updated on a rolling schedule as new transactions come in rather than a static list applied to everyone.
  • 02

    Dynamic pricing models

    Pricing models that respond to demand signals, inventory levels, and competitor pricing within your defined price floors and margin rules. Learns price elasticity per product from your conversion and revenue history and recommends prices that maximise revenue or margin, with full explainability so your team understands each recommendation.
  • 03

    Demand forecasting

    SKU-level demand forecasts trained on your sales history, promotional calendars, and external signals, built with LightGBM, XGBoost, and time-series models. New products cold-start from category-level signals rather than defaulting to zero, and output is a point forecast plus confidence interval per SKU per period that feeds replenishment and purchasing. Reduces both overstock carrying costs and lost sales from stockouts.
  • 04

    Customer churn prediction

    Classification models trained on your customer transaction history that score each customer by churn probability, using RFM features, gradient boosting, and survival analysis over purchase frequency trend, inter-purchase interval, basket value trajectory, and category engagement. High-risk customers enter a retention workflow before they stop buying, with interventions proportionate to predicted lifetime value and promotional spend suppressed for low-risk customers.
  • 05

    AI search and discovery

    Search that returns relevant results even when customer query language doesn't match product attribute text, using vector embeddings and semantic search. Trained on your query-click-purchase data to learn which products customers actually buy per term, with personalised ranking for returning customers and autocomplete powered by high-conversion search patterns.
  • 06

    Review sentiment analysis

    Models that process customer reviews, support tickets, and return reasons into structured sentiment signals using NLP and topic modelling across Bazaarvoice, Yotpo, and Trustpilot: which products generate complaints, which complaints are trending, and which attributes drive dissatisfaction. Alerts fire when a negative theme crosses a volume threshold. A continuous signal, not a quarterly star-rating average.
  • 07

    Voice AI for order status, returns, and cart recovery

    Voice agents built on Deepgram and GPT-4o that authenticate the caller by phone number or order ID, query the order management system in real time, and resolve order status, returns, and availability questions end to end, no human escalation. Outbound cart-recovery calls reference the specific items left behind and route interested customers to checkout by SMS. Retailers deploying voice AI typically resolve a meaningful share of inbound order-status and returns calls without escalating to a person, and outbound cart-recovery calls recover some abandoned purchases without any additional staff time.

Which AI capability to build first

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 movesWhen it is the right first build
RecommendationsBasket size, repeat purchase rateYou hold enough transaction history for a model to learn real buying patterns.
AI search and discoverySearch conversion, zero-result rateA large catalogue where keyword search keeps missing intent-based queries.
Dynamic pricingMargin, sell-throughA price-sensitive catalogue with competitor and demand data to learn from.
Churn predictionRepeat revenue, retentionA returning-customer base and early departure signals you can act on.
Fraud detectionChargeback rate, false-decline rateChargeback losses are climbing and you have labelled historical fraud data.
Voice and chat supportContact deflection, cost per contactOrder-status and returns calls tie up staff you would rather redeploy.

Payment and chargeback fraud detection

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.

Pitfalls we plan around

E-commerce AI fails in predictable ways. We design against these from the first sprint rather than discovering them in production.

Cold-start on new SKUs
New products have no purchase history, so recommenders and forecasts default them to zero. We seed them from category-level signals until real data accrues.
Over-discounting loyal buyers
A churn model that flags too many customers hands promotions to people who would have paid full price. We tune the intervention threshold against your margin, not a default.
False declines on good orders
An aggressive fraud model blocks legitimate revenue. We track false-decline rate alongside chargeback rate so one never improves at the other's expense.
Personalisation that narrows the catalogue
Recommenders can trap a customer inside one category. We blend discovery signals so the model still surfaces range and margin, not just the obvious next buy.

Where AI commerce is heading

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.

Which e-commerce metric do you want AI to move?

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

From scope to shipped

Every engagement follows the same four phases. Scope is locked and price is fixed before development starts.

  1. Week 1
    01

    Discover and scope

    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.

  2. Weeks 2-3
    02

    Prototype and validate

    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.

  3. Weeks 4-12
    03

    Build, integrate, and QA

    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.

  4. Weeks 12+
    04

    Deploy and monitor

    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

What our clients say

Three-year average engagement. Founders and operators describing the work in their own words. No marketing varnish.

Testimonial 1 of 1: Grady Lakshmono

Grady Lakshmono

Co-Founder, Gula (acquired by Runchise)

Indonesia flagIndonesia

RaftLabs elevated my ideas and brought them to life when everything seemed impossible.

Where you land in that range depends on scope, not negotiation:

Single AI capability, $30,000-$80,000
A churn prediction model or demand forecasting layer, scoped, built, and deployed in 10 to 14 weeks.
Multi-capability engagement, 16 to 20 weeks
Recommendations, dynamic pricing, and fraud detection together. A larger engagement, scoped and quoted in the fixed-price discovery phase before development begins.

What it costs

AI for e-commerce, starting at $30,000.

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

More on retail & ecommerce

Common questions

A 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

Tell us where the work is stuck.

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.

  • Scope and cost agreed before work starts. No surprises. No obligation.
  • Working prototype within 3 weeks of kickoff.
  • Pay by milestone. You see progress before each invoice.
  • 60-day post-launch warranty. Bug fixes, UI tweaks, and deployment support. No retainer.
  • All conversations are NDA-protected.