Michal Král: UX, AI agents and the future of Slovak e-commerce
How to succeed in e-commerce in the era of Asian marketplaces, rising costs, and the advent of AI? Michal Král in Biznislab explains why your own product, quality UX, and data are decisive and how AI agents will change the functioning of e-shops.
Slovak e-commerce is entering a period where having a good product, launching performance campaigns, and waiting for orders is no longer enough. Competition is growing, acquiring customers is more expensive, and the way people search for and purchase products is beginning to change with artificial intelligence.
While the median net profit of Slovak e-shops is approximately 1.3%, the most successful players consistently achieve over 20%. What are they doing differently, and where can growth opportunities be found today?
In the new episode of the podcast Biznislab, we talked with Michal Král, founder of the Association of Slovak E-commerce Companies, about what determines the success of e-shops, why UX and retention will become increasingly important, and how AI and AI agents are changing the rules of e-commerce.
In recent months, Slovaks have reduced their purchases on Asian platforms. New customs fees have contributed to a decline in orders from Temu or AliExpress by tens of percent. At first glance, this could be good news for Slovak e-shops.
However, this is not a reason for comfort. Asian giants are building European warehouses, shortening delivery times, and getting closer to local customers. Therefore, price pressure will not disappear – and Slovak e-shops will have to find a competitive advantage elsewhere.
Commodity e-commerce has a problem. Own product and brand win
If an e-shop sells the same product as dozens of other merchants, its main tool in the competitive fight remains price. And that is a long-term unsustainable position.
According to Michal Král, successful e-commerce companies have several common features: they build their own brand, work with products with higher margins, and can retain customers so that they return to them repeatedly throughout the year.
Growth does not necessarily mean constantly expanding the assortment. Quite the opposite. An overly wide offer can lead to a loss of focus and tie up a large amount of capital in stock.
An alternative is to dominate a specific niche, build a strong position in it, and then seek growth beyond Slovakia's borders. If you have a product and brand that work in the domestic market, the next step could be exporting e-commerce to the world. For Slovak companies, Hungary or Romania traditionally work well, but brands with higher added value have a chance to succeed in Western markets as well.
UX needs regular maintenance
E-shops invest large budgets in PPC, social networks, and other acquisition channels. However, they sometimes pay much less attention to the place where all acquired visitors are sent – the website itself.
Martin Krupa compares it to a car in the podcast. We regularly service the car, change the oil, and check its technical condition. An e-shop should undergo similar regular checks.
UX testing and optimization can reveal problems that may not be visible at first glance but directly affect sales. These can include a complicated checkout, non-functional faceted search, problematic mobile interface, or incorrectly set measurement.
The difference can be significant. If better UX and a stable technological platform, such as a custom e-shop, increase the conversion rate from 2% to 3%, with the same traffic, it means 50% more orders.
And since acquiring new customers through Google or Meta is becoming more expensive, the importance of own channels is growing again. Well-set e-mail marketing is among the effective tools for increasing retention and the value of existing customers.
AI changes the way customers search for products
Until recently, the shopping process looked quite predictable. The customer entered a query into Google, opened several results, compared products, and gradually made a decision.
Today, part of this process is moving to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI tools. The user no longer has to click through dozens of pages. AI can compare options, explain differences, and recommend a specific product before the customer visits the e-shop. A visitor coming from an AI tool may therefore be significantly closer to a purchase decision.
This is why the visibility of brands and products in the responses of large language models is becoming a new discipline in digital marketing. It is not just about organic visibility. New possibilities are also brought by advertising in GPT, which can open another channel for brands to reach customers.
The next phase of AI? Agents that do the work for you
Artificial intelligence in e-commerce is no longer just a tool for generating product texts, banners, or images. It has increasing potential in automating processes that employees perform manually today.
AI agents are coming onto the scene – systems that can not only respond but also perform specific tasks.
Imagine instructing the system:
"Find the five best-selling products from last month, set a 5% discount on them, and create a landing page for them."
An AI agent can extract the necessary data, evaluate it, and then perform individual steps across systems. What today requires communication between an analyst, marketer, e-commerce manager, and developer can thus be significantly accelerated.
However, it has one essential condition.
Without quality data, even the best AI won't work
An AI agent can only be as intelligent as the quality of the data and systems it has access to.
If product data is incomplete, analytics unreliable, and individual company systems do not communicate with each other, even the best language model cannot make reliable decisions.
This is why the importance of data infrastructure, integrations, and structured information is increasing with the advent of AI. This principle is also the foundation of Fluidum AI – an ecosystem that connects company data, systems, and the capabilities of large language models so that AI is not just an experiment but a tool with a real impact on business.
Which e-shops have the best chance of success?
The future of e-commerce will not only be about who can buy cheaper traffic. Companies that can combine a strong product and brand, quality UX, high retention, well-prepared data, and technologies that allow them to quickly respond to changes in shopping behavior will have an advantage.
In the entire episode of Biznislab with Michal Král, we also discuss what the economy of Slovak e-shops looks like, where to find growth opportunities, what risks rapid expansion brings, and what the arrival of AI agents means for the operation of e-commerce companies.
