Traditional brands and retailers are competing this holiday season with TikTok Shop, an online marketplace where brands and creators can sell directly to consumers in their videos. It “empowers brands and creators to connect with highly engaged customers based on their interests,” the company says.

While it remains to be seen just how much of an impact TikTok Shop will have on the market, what is not up for debate is that TikTok has evolved into an incredibly powerful product discovery engine.

When brands originally flocked to selling on social media, they didn’t understand the competitive nature of the environment. While social media allows brands to leverage a vast number of content creators, they lose control of the messaging, the customer journey and their data—and still have to pay to acquire and reacquire customers. The brands and retailers don’t control the channel, don’t maintain the direct relationship with the consumers and are there on someone else’s terms.

In order to regain this control and bring shoppers back to their owned sites, e-commerce must evolve from its origins as a purely transactional experience. 

For instance, other than the product itself, Prada’s website looks no different structurally than Home Depot’s once you leave the landing page. The concept of “brand” used to be what got shoppers in the door, but many brands online have become virtual warehouses as opposed to exciting destinations that inspire and educate the shopper.

Such transactional commerce, which has primarily been the investment focus for brands, includes infrastructural elements including product listings, checkout, shipping and returns, etc.

Before the advent of AI, retailers had to invest a great deal of money into building an infrastructure to support the creation of thousands of images, from photo studios to photographers to copywriters.

With recent developments in AI, e-commerce retailers are finally in a position to regain their authority by providing exciting online shopping experiences and style advice that more closely mirror a shopper’s visit to their favorite store.

Inspiration isn’t just pretty pictures. Shoppers are looking for the validation and curation that social channels such as TikTok offer, whether that’s with styling advice, what they can wear it with, how it fits—and the confidence that comes with that validation. 

In short, marketers need to inspire consumers with e-commerce that mirrors an excellent in-store experience through visual inspiration, guided discovery and personalized style or product advice. And it uses AI to do it at scale, reengage the customer and bring them back to a brand’s site.

Retailers should think of inspirational commerce as a focus on inspiring customers in a high-scale, hyper-personalized, technology-assisted way. 

Editorializing and personalizing the shopping journey by offering real styling advice and providing shoppers with virtual closets of previously purchased items is not only possible but will be the most cost-effective and engaging way that e-commerce brands will compete with a medium such as TikTok.

The hierarchy of good experiences consumers expect continues to be benchmarked to superb in-store experiences controlled directly by the retailers and brands. Translating that high level of differentiation to online shopping has been nearly impossible for big brands for the past 20 years.

But AI is the key to unlocking personalized e-commerce to help retailers to reclaim their caché in a TikTok world.