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Product descriptions are a crucial part of a successful e-commerce business, no matter what it’s selling. Their purpose isn’t just to outline a product’s features, but to also persuade potential customers to buy it.
They should grab the prospect’s attention, remove any objections they may have and – in an ideal scenario – turn them into a customer. But, as any e-commerce owner will tell you, creating informative and persuasive product descriptions is a daunting undertaking when your catalogue contains hundreds of items.
But to the rescue comes ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence platform that our very own Sarah Cantavalle wrote about in this piece, which explains how it works and how to use it in e-commerce.
This powerful tool can not only save time, but also simplify the process of writing pages for long lists of products by helping you avoid creating product pages with information that is redundant or too similar.
The key ingredients of an effective product page
A good product description is just one part of an effective product page. And an effective product page will help an online store increase its conversion rate, improve its ranking on search engines like Google and drive more organic traffic to the site.
Here are the key ingredients for an effective product page:
- Compelling and SEO-optimised title: the title should clearly describe the product and include relevant key words, i.e. the words that people will use to search for it online.
- Product description: this should give an outline of the product, how it’s used and how it works.
- Technical specifications: whatever the item, a product page should provide essential information such as dimensions, materials, capacity and compatibility.
- Key benefits: it’s vital to explain how the product will solve a specific problem or improve the customer’s life. Benefits can be included in the description or listed in a separate section below.
- Call to action (CTA): a must-have for every product page, this is a button telling the customer what you want them to do next. For example, “Add to basket” or “Buy now”.
- High-quality images and video: if a product isn’t professionally presented, people simply won’t buy it.
- Reviews: social proof increases sales because people trust the opinions of others and copy their purchasing behaviour.
So we’ve covered the copy and visuals for a product page. Also make sure that the price, shipping times, customisation options and any other key details are clearly visible, just as they are on the Hardback book product page on pixartprinting.co.uk.
As we’ve seen, a quality product page needs to be clear, persuasive and SEO friendly. With ChatGPT, you can optimise all three while creating titles and descriptions for hundreds of product pages in short order.
A six-step method for writing product descriptions with ChatGPT
Before the actual writing stage, we need to carry out a series of preparatory steps to guide ChatGPT and ensure that results meet expectations. Let’s run through each one.
1. Research relevant key words: before writing any online content that you want to rank highly in search engine results, you need to find out which key words or phrases are used most when people search for that topic or product. Search intent plays a crucial role in making your e-commerce business easier to find online.
ChatGPT is not the best tool for keyword research, but it can be used to generate initial ideas.
Let’s look at an example: an online store selling pots and pans needs to write a product description for a wok. Here’s how they could find the right keywords:
- Brainstorm keywords with ChatGPT:
- Take the ideas ChatGPT generates, then use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEOZoom (paid tool) to check the search volume for certain keywords (i.e. how many times a month people look for those keywords on search engines). As you can see from the image, 2,400 people a month search for “wok”, 390 people search for “professional wok” and 40 people search for “non-stick wok”. This will help you decide which keywords to include in the title and description. Don’t forget to do this for long tail keywords too. Of course, this is just one example – the same procedure can be repeated for every product sold by an e-commerce business: start with what people are searching for online, then build the product description around this to ensure better organic search ranking.
2. Prepare the product data: once you’ve made a list of all the relevant keywords, it’s time to put together all the useful information about your products, such as:
- Nome prodotto
- Type of product
- TECHNICAL DATA
- Benefits
- Materials and dimensions
- Any sources (with links) that could provide inspiration
Next, you need to work out which key features you want ChatGPT to highlight in the product descriptions. (Keep in mind that the more information you provide in a conversation with artificial intelligence, the better the output will be.) This data should be organised in a clearly structured document, like a Google Sheet or an Excel sheet, and should also contain the keywords previously identified.
For example, the data for our wok might be:
- Colour: stone grey
- Thickness: 3 cm
- Width: 43 cm
- Height: 7 cm
- Depth: 24.5 cm
- Weight 740 g
- Material: aluminium body with steel plate
- Handle: Bakelite with steel insert
- Flame guard: 99.5 aluminium alloy
- Screws: galvanised iron
- Dishwasher use: wash at low temperature
- Oven use: do not use in the oven
In the example, we’ve only used one item, but you can add dozens of products to the table. Which is what you’ll need to do if you have lots products in your catalogue.
You can also create smaller tables with information for about 10-20 products that can then be fed into artificial intelligence to create product descriptions.
3. Set the tone of voice: once you’ve made a table with your inventory, or a simple list of products and their features, you need to decide whether the description will be formal, technical or emotional. Technical language may be most appropriate for a high-tech product, for example, while an evocative and sophisticated tone of voice may be better for a luxury item.
4. Create a specific prompt: you’re now ready to write prompts to create product descriptions with ChatGPT. There are two approaches you can take:
- If you have an Excel sheet containing all your products, you can drag and drop it directly into the ChatGPT conversation, along with a specific prompt. This solution allows you to create product descriptions en masse. Here’s an example of a prompt that can be used for this table. You can also ask ChatGPT to refer to one or more rows, if you want it to create more than one description.
- If, on the other hand, you’d rather work with just a few products at a time, you can feed in smaller tables, or just copy and paste certain product features and ask the AI to use these to generate descriptions. Here’s an example: we gave ChatGPT just the technical specifications of our wok, without anything else to go on, and this is what we got.
6. Customise the content: the output from ChatGPT is rarely perfect and will need to be edited and customised. You will need to check for and correct mistakes, and tailor your descriptions to your brand and target audience. Never use AI-generated product descriptions as they are: always have a human review and edit them before publication.
ChatGPT tools and prompts for generating product descriptions
We can’t tell you what the perfect prompt is for creating product descriptions with ChatGPT: there’s no such thing, and it’s more a case of trial and error. But what we can give you is some suggestions for customisable prompts to generate different types of product descriptions and give you an idea of the of AI’s potential:
1. Informative product description
“Write a title and full description for a [product name and details] aimed at [audience target]”
2. Persuasive product description
“Create an appealing description for a [product] that highlights its main benefits. Use persuasive language that conveys urgency and enthusiasm to fully engage [target]. Here are some details about the product: [Add product details].”
3. SEO-optimised product description
“Write a detailed description of a [product name] optimised for SEO, including long-tail keywords [specify keywords] relevant for searches by potential customers who are looking for [product type].”
4. Product description using storytelling
“Write a 300-word product description telling the story of how our product [product name and type] was created, from the initial inspiration through to the meticulous design and production process. Highlight the passion, commitment and attention to detail that went into this. Here’s some background information: [add details about the product].”
To speed things up further and get even better results when writing product descriptions with ChatGPT, consider using one of the specific GPTs (generative pre-trained transformers) available on the platform. GPTs are vertical models that are trained and customised to perform more specialised tasks.
We recommend “Ecommerce SEO Product Description Writer AI GPT”. It’s perfect for creating product descriptions and multilingual content for platforms like Shopify, Airbnb, Etsy and eBay.
That brings us to the end of our (by no means exhaustive) guide to writing great product descriptions with ChatGPT. Remember: artificial intelligence keeps evolving, so to get the most out of it you need to keep experimenting and tweaking your approach.
We hope this guide will help you harness the power of AI to quickly create effective product descriptions for your e-commerce business.