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E-commerce and AI – A Product Page Is No Longer Enough

The most important question for an e-commerce retailer is no longer simply: “How do I get more visitors to my online store?” It needs to be accompanied by another: “How do I make sure my product becomes part of the conversation where the customer decides what to buy?” Increasingly, purchase decisions are made before customers even reach the online store — on social media and in AI-generated answers. That is why an online store’s visibility can no longer be built on a good product page alone. Your product needs to be discoverable, convincing, and present throughout the customer’s buying journey much earlier.

The E-Commerce Buying Journey Is Changing

E-commerce has long focused on refining the same journey: the customer discovers a product, lands on the product page, becomes convinced, and completes the purchase. This journey is still worth improving, because ease of use on yksi verkko-ostamisen tärkeimmistä syistä.

According to Paytrail, 35% of consumers say they shop online specifically because of the convenience. At the same time, 22% have abandoned a purchase because their preferred payment method was not available. Seemingly small points of friction can therefore still have a direct impact on sales. Conversion still matters, but first, you need to be part of the customer’s buying journey.

Purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by AI recommendations.

Search engines have accustomed us to a model where consumers enter a search term, are presented with a list of links, and open the ones they find most interesting. With AI services, the logic is different. For example, a consumer might ask: “I need waterproof hiking shoes under €200 for a week-long hiking trip in Lapland. I have wide feet. Which three models would be the best fit?”

Tekoäly voi tehdä suuren osan työstä asiakkaan puolesta: selvittää vaihtoehdot, vertailla ominaisuuksia, tiivistää arvosteluja ja rajata tuotteet muutamaan sopivaan vaihtoehtoon. Merchants should be asking a new kind of question: if a customer asks AI for a recommendation in my product category, does the AI have enough reasons to include my product in its answer?

ChatGPT Advertising at the Heart of the Buying Journey

What makes ChatGPT Ads, now also available in Finland, particularly interesting is not simply the addition of a new advertising channel. It is the context in which an ad can be shown. For e-commerce businesses, the advantage is clear: advertising can reach customers while they are exploring their options, comparing products, and moving closer to a purchase decision — rather than only when they happen to type in the right search term.

According to OpenAI, ads in ChatGPT appear alongside the conversation, after the response, when there is a relevant sponsored product or service that matches the user’s query. Ads are clearly separated from ChatGPT’s actual response. In the future, users will also be able to interact directly with the products or services featured in ads through ChatGPT. This could turn advertising from a static placement into an interactive part of the conversation.

*In August 2026, OpenAI announced that it would expand ChatGPT Ads to 31 European countries, including Finland.

AI-generated illustration. The image does not depict ChatGPT’s actual advertising or product comparison interface.

Social media as part of a marketing strategy

Kaikki ostaminen ei kuitenkaan ala tarpeen aktiivisesta etsimisestä. Sosiaalisen median merkitys on juuri tässä. Esimerkiksi TikTok, Instagram ja YouTube ovat verkkokaupalle paitsi mainoskanavia myös tuotedemonstraation, inspiraation ja kysynnän synnyttämisen kanavia.

A short video can demonstrate in just a few seconds what would take several paragraphs to explain in a product description. Authentic customer experiences, meanwhile, add credibility to the product, while the participatory content created on these video-based platforms turns customers from an audience into part of the conversation around the brand.

The role of social media is not simply to drive clicks to an online store. At its best, social media creates demand and builds brand recall even before a customer makes an organic search or asks an AI a question. This phenomenon has also been seen in Finland across many viraalituotteiksi nousseiden tuotteiden kohdalla.

The AI Chatbot No Longer Just Serves — It Sells

When a customer eventually reaches the online store, an AI chatbot can ask a few relevant questions and help them find the right product from a large selection. It can also explain the differences between product models in an easy-to-understand way, suggest a compatible add-on product, or help when the customer doesn’t even know the right search terms for the category — much like a knowledgeable sales assistant in a physical store.

This is where an e-commerce store’s own data becomes especially valuable. If an AI chatbot is fed vague product descriptions and incomplete product information, it will only become a vague customer service assistant. But when it is backed by high-quality product data, real-life use cases, compatibility information, authentic customer questions, and needs revealed through purchase data, the outcome is entirely different.

There is more technology available than anyone has time to implement

For e-commerce retailers, the AI era can easily feel like a race to adopt new tools. New AI services, analytics tools, automation solutions, and marketing channels are emerging constantly. Not all of them are worth adopting.

First, it is worth identifying a few critical questions for your business. How do new customers discover the company? What prevents them from making a purchase? What drives repeat purchases? Which product category generates the most margin? How is the way customers search for products changing?

At the same time, it is worth looking beyond next month’s campaigns when setting goals. In addition to technology, e-commerce is shaped by legislation, developments in payments, changes to platforms, and slower-moving trends such as demographic shifts.

At this point, the value of a digital partner is not in bringing yet another tool to the table. Fuusiomedia helps identify where your e-commerce business should focus its efforts right now — and what can wait. In practice, this might mean deepening customer insights, identifying bottlenecks in the buying journey, training an AI chatbot, improving SEO and GEO visibility, sharpening content and paid advertising, or cutting down metrics to those that genuinely matter to the business.

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