Mastercard launches Shopping Muse, an AI to help consumers find the perfect gift

With the holiday season quickly approaching, many consumers are looking for the best gifts for their loved ones. But finding the right gift can be a daunting and time-consuming task, especially when faced with endless choices and limited information.

That’s perhaps why Mastercard has decided to launch Shopping Muse, a new service that uses artificial intelligence to supply personalized and curated gift recommendations based on the recipient’s preferences, personality, and interests.

Shopping Muse is powered by Dynamic Yield, a personalization platform and decision engine that Mastercard acquired from McDonald’s in April 2022.

Dynamic Yield helps more than 400 brands across various industries deliver individualized product recommendations, offers, and content based on a range of factors, such as past purchases, page views, customer affinity profile information, and AI algorithms.

Shopping Muse is the first consumer-facing application of Dynamic Yield by Mastercard, and it aims to change the online shopping encounter by offering a more engaging and convenient way to ascertain and buy gifts.

Shopping Muse is currently available as a web app that can be accessed through any browser or device. Users can start by entering the name and email address of the recipient they want to buy a gift for, and then answer a few questions about their relationship, occasion, budget, and preferred delivery method.

Based on the answers, Shopping Muse will produce a unique profile for the recipient, and use AI to scrutinize millions of products from thousands of online retailers to find the most suitable gift options. Users can also supply additional information, such as the recipient’s hobbies, favorite brands, style and personality traits, to advocate refine the results.

The AI chatbot will then present a curated list of gift ideas, along with the reasons why they were selected, the price, the rating, the availability and the link to the retailer’s website. Users can browse through the suggestions, contrast them, save them for later or purchase them directly from the app.

Shopping Muse also allows users to share their gift lists with friends and family, and get feedback and suggestions from them. Users can also invite others to unite the service and create their own profiles, so that they can acquire personalized gift recommendations from the app as well.

The shopping service is designed to be a smart and intuitive chat assistant that learns from the user’s behavior and feedback, and continuously improves its recommendations over time. It also adapts to the changing preferences and needs of the recipients, and updates the gift suggestions accordingly.

According to Mastercard, Shopping Muse offers several benefits for both consumers and retailers, such as:

• Saving time and effort: Shopping Muse eliminates the need to browse through multiple websites, seek engines and social media platforms to find the perfect gift. It also reduces the risk of buying the wrong or unwanted gift, and the hassle of returning or exchanging it.
• Enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty: Shopping Muse provides a more personalized and engaging shopping encounter, and helps consumers find the most relevant and meaningful gifts for their recipients. It also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases and referrals, and strengthens the relationship between the consumers and the retailers.
• Boosting sales and revenue: Shopping Muse drives more traffic and conversions to the retailers’ websites, and increases the average order value and basket size. It also helps retailers showcase their products and services, and differentiate themselves from the competition.

Mastercard plans to eventually enlarge the service to more markets, languages and categories, and to blend it with its other products and services, such as its loyalty platform SessionM and its experimentation software assess & Learn.

The product is part of Mastercard’s broader strategy to leverage its data and services capabilities to supply more value beyond the transaction, and to help its customers and partners grow their businesses, engage their consumers and make smarter decisions with better outcomes across the enterprise.

Shopping Muse is also an example of how AI is transforming the retail industry, and how it can create new opportunities and challenges for both consumers and retailers. According to a Gartner report, by 2025, 80% of customer interactions will be managed by AI. A recent McKinsey report similarly predicts that AI will create $400-660 billion in value for the retail industry.

However, AI also poses some ethical and social issues, such as privacy, security, transparency, accountability and bias, that need to be addressed and regulated. For instance, how can consumers trust that the AI recommendations are not influenced by the retailers’ interests or incentives? How can consumers control and protect their personal data and preferences? These are some of the questions that Mastercard and other AI players in the retail space will have to answer and resolve in the coming years.

An increasingly crowded marketplace

Shopping Muse is not the only AI-powered gift recommendation service on the market. There are other competitors, such as Shop.app AI, the AI shopping assistant by Shopify; Claros, the Amazon shopping assistant; and Buysmart.ai, the AI shopping assistant that offers category-based seek and detailed product recommendations.

However, Shopping Muse claims to have some unique advantages, such as:

• Its integration with Dynamic Yield, which gives it access to a large and diverse data set, a powerful and flexible AI engine, and a proven track record of delivering personalization at scale for various industries and use cases.
• Its partnership with Mastercard, which gives it access to a global network of customers, partners and retailers, as well as a strong brand reputation and trust.
• Its focus on the recipient’s profile, rather than the user’s, which gives it a more accurate and relevant way to match the gift with the recipient’s preferences, personality and interests.

In short, Shopping Muse is an ambitious and innovative project that aims to redefine the online gift shopping encounter, and to create a new standard for personalization and customer engagement in the retail industry. Whether it will succeed or not remains to be seen, but it is certainly a service worth watching and trying out.