E-commerce AI

E-commerce AI that moves the metrics you actually care about.

average revenue uplift from personalisation

< 200ms

visual search latency target

88%

demand forecast accuracy at 14-day horizon

Discuss your e-commerce AI project

AI features that drive revenue

Personalisation Engine

Real-time personalisation of homepage, category pages, and search results based on user behaviour, session context, and similar user patterns. Drives AOV and session depth.

Real-timeUser embeddingsA/B tested

Visual Search

Search by image across your entire catalogue. Users upload or camera-capture a product; results ranked by visual similarity. Critical for fashion, home, and beauty verticals.

CNN embeddingsVector search< 200ms

Recommendation Engine

You-may-also-like, frequently-bought-together, and post-purchase recommendations - collaborative filtering combined with content-based signals for cold-start handling.

Hybrid modelCold-start readyStreaming updates

Demand Forecasting

SKU-level demand forecasting with 88% accuracy at 14-day horizon. Inputs: historical sales, price elasticity, seasonality, promotions, and external signals (weather, events).

Time-series88% accuracyInventory integrated

Review Analysis & Insights

Sentiment analysis, topic extraction, and product insight generation from customer reviews at scale. Surfaces product issues, feature requests, and competitive mentions automatically.

NLPTopic modellingLLM summaries

The personalisation stack

User Embeddings

Dense vector representations of user preferences, updated in real-time from session events. Captures intent, style preference, and price sensitivity.

Item Embeddings

Product vectors trained on visual features, textual attributes, and co-purchase signals. Enables semantic product similarity across catalogue.

Ranking Model

Learns-to-rank model combining user-item relevance score with business rules (margin, stock, promotions). Outputs final ranked list per user.

A/B Testing Layer

Every personalisation change runs through controlled experiments. Statistical significance gates, guardrail metrics on revenue per session, and automatic rollback.

Visual search architecture

How we go from image input to ranked results in under 200ms - at catalogue scale.

1Image InputUser uploads photo or takes in-app camera shot. Supports PNG, JPEG, WEBP. Max 4MB. Pre-processed client-side to 512×512.
2Embedding GenerationFine-tuned vision model generates 512-dimensional embedding. Fashion model trained on 50M product images. < 80ms inference.
3Vector SearchApproximate nearest-neighbour search (HNSW index) across full catalogue embeddings. Returns top-100 candidates in < 50ms.
4Re-rankingBusiness rules applied: stock filter, price range, category affinity. Final 20 results returned with confidence scores.

Recommendation systems

Collaborative Filtering

Use when

Users with sufficient purchase history

Leverages collective wisdom - users who bought X also bought Y. Strong for popular SKUs, known user preferences.

Content-Based Filtering

Use when

New users, new products (cold start)

Relies on item attributes (category, colour, material) rather than interaction history. Works from day one.

Hybrid

Use when

Production systems at scale

Combines both signals with a learned weighting model. Better accuracy than either approach alone. Our default recommendation.

Forecasting for inventory

Inputs

Historical sales (24+ months)

Price & promotion history

Seasonality indices

Weather signals

Event calendar

Competitor pricing (where available)

Outputs

14-day SKU-level forecast

Confidence intervals (P10/P50/P90)

Reorder point recommendations

Overstock risk flags

Markdown trigger alerts

Case Study - E-commerce AI

"Visual search across 4M SKUs at 180ms - 3× add-to-cart rate for a fashion retailer."

Fine-tuned vision model on 12M fashion product images. HNSW vector index across full 4M SKU catalogue. Real-time re-ranking with stock and margin signals. Deployed to iOS and Android in 8 weeks.

Under the hood

How personalisation fires for every shopper in under 100ms.

01

Session start

User arrives. Anonymous or recognised. Session context initialised: device, referrer, time.

02

Event stream

Click, scroll, add-to-cart events piped in real-time to user embedding update layer.

03

Embedding match

User vector matched against item embeddings. Top-N candidates retrieved from vector index.

04

Ranking pass

Business rules applied: margin, stock, promotions. Final ranked list generated per user.

05

Response served

Personalised page rendered. Results A/B tested continuously against control cohort.

The difference

Generic storefront vs. AI-powered retail.

Area
Without AI
With StartxLabs AI

Homepage

Same products shown to every visitor regardless of behaviour

Dynamically ranked by user embedding - returning vs new visitors see different content

Search

Keyword match only - 'blue dress' returns all blue dresses by catalogue order

Semantic + visual search - returns by intent, style affinity, and past purchase context

Inventory

Weekly manual review; overstock discovered after markdown needed

14-day SKU-level forecast with P10/P90 confidence; reorder alerts automated

Post-purchase

Generic 'you might also like' based on category

Collaborative filtering + session signals; frequently-bought-together updated daily

Review signals

Star ratings visible; teams read reviews manually for product issues

NLP topic extraction and sentiment scoring; product issues surface to merchandising automatically

Revenue impact

The metrics that move when AI is built and deployed correctly.

Based on client deployments across fashion, home, beauty, and marketplace verticals.

Average Order Value uplift

From personalisation engine - returning users shown curated sets based on embedding similarity to past purchases.

+47%

Session depth increase

Users who engage with AI search browse 47% more pages per session vs. keyword search users.

88%

Demand forecast accuracy

At 14-day SKU-level horizon across seasonal and promotional periods. Reduces markdown exposure by 31%.

Add-to-cart rate on visual search

Fashion retailer: users who searched by image converted at 3× the rate of text search users.

−19%

Cart abandonment reduction

Post-add recommendation engine surfaces urgency signals and social proof to users with items in cart.

< 200ms

Visual search latency at 4M SKU scale

HNSW vector index over full catalogue. iOS and Android apps. P99 latency across peak traffic periods.

Technical stack

The e-commerce AI stack we deploy in production.

Data Layer
KafkadbtSnowflakeBigQueryS3
AI / ML Layer
PyTorchCLIPFaissLightGBMProphet
Vector Search
PineconeWeaviateHNSWpgvectorQdrant
Serving Infra
FastAPIKubernetesRedisCloudFrontTerraform

Ready to build your
next digital product?

Whether you have a detailed specification or just an early idea - we'll help you scope it, challenge the assumptions, and deliver it on time. No pitch decks. Straight to the point.

What happens next

1

Send us a message

Tell us what you're building or what's broken.

2

Discovery call (30 min)

We ask hard questions. You get honest answers.

3

Scoped proposal

Clear deliverables, timeline, and team in 48 hours.

Contact Us

Tell us about
your project

Whether you have a detailed brief or just an early idea, we will help you scope it, challenge it, and ship it.

  • Agentic AI development and multi-agent systems
  • Generative AI consulting and LLM integration
  • RAG development and custom model deployment
  • Data engineering, MLOps and custom software
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