Speed Up Your Launch with Shopify’s AI‑Generated Product Descriptions
In the first quarter of 2023, Shopify added Shopify Magic, a new entry into the artificial intelligence landscape. It offers AI-generated product descriptions that help merchants expedite the process of launching new stores or products.
Users can take advantage of Shopify Magic’s offering in two ways:
- Write a brand-new description
- Rewrite an existing description
Additional options are available in both scenarios. When writing a new description, you can choose a specific tone for the content. For a description rewrite, you can extend or shorten the description length.
Unlike other popular AI tools such as ChatGPT, Shopify Magic’s learning curve is much shorter. There is no need for special prompts to get better results. In our testing, regardless of the volume of keywords we inputted, it always wrote consistent product descriptions in both length and result. Simply put, this tool was created to make it as easy as possible for merchants by requiring the least amount of work on their part.
Generating Descriptions from Scratch
Let’s start with how Shopify Magic works. When creating a new description from scratch, click the magic icon to the left of the description box, add a few keywords to describe the product, select a tone, and then click “Autowrite.” After a few seconds, you will have a product description that you can “Keep” or modify to your liking. Something to note is that the tool incorporates your product title, so make sure this field is filled out in advance.
Several tone options are available and all are written from a persona that caters to different buyers.
- Expert: Written as a product or industry expert to sound professional using a matter-of-fact tone and scientific terms.
- Supportive: Written as someone who empathizes with the customer and wants to help them by using approachable and straightforward language.
- Persuasive: Written as someone who passionately believes in the value of the product, using language that appeals to strong emotions.
- Daring: Written as someone who challenges the buyer to be bold and adventurous with action words to motivate and inspire.
- Playful: Written as someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously, this uses quirky language, including humor and slang expressions.
Of course, each merchant will need to test these options for themselves to determine which tone best suits the tone and image of their brand.
A recent update now provides a new input option for special instructions. This feature can be used to output descriptions in multiple languages. Languages currently supported at the time of posting are: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Chinese (Simplified).
Creating Our Own Description
We decided to jump in and do some testing of our own to learn more about how Shopify Magic works. We felt the best method was to try and equalize the results by using the same title and keyword prompts amongst multiple different tests to see the differences by tone. A fun tidbit to note: the following product titles and keywords were generated using ChatGPT.
Title: TimeWatch Pro
Keywords: smartwatch, sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, fitness tracking
| Experts | TimeWatch Pro is the perfect smartwatch for active lifestyles. With built-in sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, and fitness tracking, you can monitor your health and stay active anywhere. It even has a three-day battery life, so you can be sure it will keep up with you. |
|---|---|
| Supportive | Stay in shape and monitor your health with TimeWatch Pro. Get accurate and reliable heart rate monitoring and fitness tracking in a sleek smartwatch. Its sleep tracking feature helps you get the rest you need. Stay informed and get fit with TimeWatch Pro. |
| Persuasive | Stay ahead of the game with TimeWatch Pro! This smartwatch features sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, and fitness tracking, so you can maximize your performance and reach your goals. Allowing you to accurately measure and analyze your well-being, TimeWatch Pro ensures you stay fit and healthy! |
| Daring | Stay active and connected with the TimeWatch Pro! This smartwatch is designed for the outdoors, packed with features like sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, and fitness tracking to help you stay one step ahead of your goals. Conquer every challenge, monitor your progress, and stay connected! |
| Playful | Introducing the TimeWatch Pro, the smarter way to track your sleep and fitness goals! Monitor your heart rate and keep an eye on your fitness progress - all while wearing this stylish smartwatch! Say goodbye to tedious tracking and hello to effortless health tracking. Get ready to up your style and your fitness game! |
| Sophisticated | Experience luxury and sophistication with TimeWatch Pro, the perfect smartwatch for health and fitness enthusiasts. With secure sleep tracking and comprehensive heart rate and fitness monitoring, you can track your progress in real time and take your performance to the next level. Upgrade your day with the premium TimeWatch Pro. |
You can see with these examples the differences in tone. One thing you may have noticed with the expert tone is that it contained made-up/inaccurate information. It’s important to review and edit the description generated by Shopify Magic to ensure everything accurately reflects your product. We also tried much longer lists of keyword inputs, including up to 25 of them and the lengths of the descriptions generated came out to be the same.
Rewriting Existing Product Descriptions
If you’re a merchant with products already launched and want to improve the descriptions, you can take advantage of Shopify Magic to handle the rewrite. The process is as simple as creating a new description. First, click on the Shopify Magic button to the left of the description and select your current description (or even a portion of it), this will automatically paste it into the suggestion box, and then click “Rewrite”. Same as before, Shopify will produce a new description within a few seconds for you.
There are also three different ways in which you can rewrite the description that is:
- Rewrite: This will simply rewrite your description to the length which Shopify recommends to be most effective
- Simplify: This will produce an even shorter description than the standard Rewrite option that will be close to the length of a tweet
- Extend: This will write a description that is longer than the standard length, which is helpful when your existing description is short
It’s important to note that from our testing we are not seeing any tone-based options with the Rewrite functionality at this current point in time.
How to Take Advantage of Shopify’s AI Description
The answer to this question really depends on each merchant’s situation. We think this will be most useful for merchants who do not have dedicated copy support and generally struggle to create appropriate descriptions that are appealing to customers and search engines.
This is also geared for merchants with smaller catalogs as it must be administered through the admin. At this point in time, we have yet to see Shopify Magic used through CSV imports or APIs.
Overall, this looks like a great first step into AI from Shopify and we’re excited to see its progression in 2023. Shopify Magic promises additional and improved functionalities and we look forward to future optimizations.
