Amazon, eBay, and Shopify are scrambling to place bets on AI as it impacts the e-commerce market

According to the latest report from Business Insider, the AI ​​wave is sweeping the e-commerce field. E-commerce giants such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopify are all betting on generative artificial intelligence and launching related tools for buyers and sellers. Today, various platforms have launched a number of AI tools and have formed their own directions in developing AI tools.

At present, the AI ​​tools provided by major e-commerce platforms for sellers are more focused on the writing and creation of listings. With these tools, sellers only need to provide simple product and picture information to automatically generate a relatively complete listing. At the same time, AI tools used to generate customer review analysis, advertising campaigns, financial reports, and sales and profitability are becoming more and more common.

Amazon

Recently, Amazon launched an AI tool that can help sellers write more detailed and complete product descriptions. Sellers only need to enter some information about the product, such as the product name, whether the product has variants, and the brand name, and the tool can generate a high-quality listing, which the seller can also review and modify.

For third-party sellers facing fierce competition, the quality of the listing greatly affects their traffic and conversion rate. It usually takes several hours to create a high-quality listing, but AI tools can shorten it to a few seconds.

Amazon’s model learning is also able to infer product information from a variety of sources, according to an Amazon blog post. For example, if the specifications list the diameter, they can infer that a table is round. These models can also infer the collar style of a shirt from an image.

Therefore, Amazon's ListingAI tool can not only help sellers save time and energy, but also provide more complete product information to help improve the shopping experience.

eBay

In 2021, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov became eBay's first Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. This position evolved from eBay's "Chief Scientist" position, which to some extent shows how much importance eBay attaches to artificial intelligence.

To date, eBay has launched multiple AI tools for buyers and sellers on the platform, including AI tools to help generate listings, 3D imaging tools, natural language search to improve buyer search results, and AI shopping assistants for electronics and auto parts.

Internally, eBay is also developing AI tools designed to increase the productivity and creativity of engineers, analysts and content creators.

eBay's Listing Generation AI tool can automatically generate listings based on pictures. Sellers only need to take or upload photos in the eBay application (currently only available in Apple iOS), and the tool can write titles, descriptions, and add important information such as product release dates, detailed categories and subcategories, etc. In addition, the tool can be combined with other eBay technologies to give the recommended selling price and shipping costs of the product.

eBay’s listing generation AI tool has been upgraded from previous versions based on customer feedback, and the latest version is currently in testing and is expected to be generally available in the coming months.

Shopify

In addition to listing generation, Shopify has also developed AI tools for analyzing data or helping with competitive research. This summer, it released a suite of AI tools called ShopifyMagic, which uses a combination of anonymous Shopify data and OpenAI's ChatGPT application programming interface to generate responses to merchants' business needs.

With ShopifyMagic, merchants can get support for a range of tasks related to store building, marketing, customer support, and backend management.

ShopifyMagic is able to draft custom responses to the more common customer questions a business has, allowing merchants to review and edit the content. These answers are then automatically shared with the customer who asked the question, so merchants don’t have to respond in real time.

Additionally, merchants can create email marketing campaigns using only a few keywords, and AI tools can automatically write persuasive subject lines, engaging content, and recommended sending times to achieve higher click-through rates.

Shopify also recently released Sidekick, an AI tool powered by Shopify Magic, which is an AI assistant that can perform merchant tasks and merchants can interact with the tool using their everyday language.

Shopify has also been working on some consumer-facing AI tools, such as Shop.AI, a shopping assistant designed to help consumers easily find specific products in the Shop app using natural conversational prompts.

In general, the application of generative artificial intelligence in the e-commerce field is still in its early stages, and the AI ​​tools provided by various platforms are still to be improved. For sellers, these tools can improve operational efficiency, but blindly relying on these tools has certain risks.

Editor✎ Ashley/

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