FableCraft: An AI-based Personalized Marketplace with Multimodal Storytelling for Local Artisans

Global e-commerce platforms have grown rapidly, yet local artisans and handicraft producers often remain marginalized due to limited visibility, lack of effective narrative tools, and recommendation algorithms tailored to mass-market commodities rather than culturally significant handmade products. This paper introduces FableCraft, an AI-integrated cultural ecommerce platform designed to address these challenges by combining multimedia storytelling, a hybrid recommender system incorporating collaborative filtering, content-based features, and narrative metadata, conversational AI for natural-language cultural exploration, interactive geographic mapping, and mandatory cultural heritage documentation. A pilot with 50 artisans and 500 consumers demonstrated substantial improvements in recommendation precision, user engagement, conversion rates, and average order value. Moreover, most artisans reported heightened visibility and active participation in heritage archiving. FableCraft pioneers the integration of cultural commerce with AI-driven personalization, effectively empowering artisans and bridging notable gaps in current e-commerce research and practice.