Buy in the order the pain arrives
Most stores follow the same sequence. Support volume becomes unmanageable first, so that is where a tool pays for itself soonest. Content is second, usually when the catalogue outgrows the time to describe it. Personalisation and forecasting come last, because both need enough traffic and enough history to say anything useful.
Buying in the reverse order is the common and expensive mistake: a personalisation engine on a store with modest traffic optimises noise.
Check platform support before anything else
Several tools here attach to specific commerce platforms rather than all of them, and the platform lists are shorter than they look. Confirm yours is named by the vendor before you evaluate a single feature — it is a two-minute check that saves an afternoon, and it is the most common reason a shortlist collapses at the end rather than the start.
What the AI actually does here
Mostly two things: it writes at volume, and it answers at volume. Both are real. Where claims get thinner is prediction — forecasting and dynamic pricing are genuinely hard, the vendors are confident about them, and the evidence is harder to check than for a support agent whose transcript you can simply read.
Weight your trust accordingly: judge a support tool on its transcripts, and judge a forecasting tool on whether it was right about last quarter, which it can show you.
If you only buy one thing
Support. It is the job where the AI is most mature, the results are the easiest to verify, and the time it returns is the time you need to do everything else on this page.
