AI and E-Commerce: Saving €150K While Boosting Sales and SEO
According to a recent BCG survey, 90% of business decision-makers are either waiting for GenAI to move beyond the hype or are experimenting on a micro scale. This suggests that in 2024, 90% of your competitors will not take significant action regarding AI, presenting you with an excellent opportunity to outpace them with a reasonable budget. Today, I will share a story about an AI product comparison tool implementation that saved one of our clients approximately €150,000, while enhancing SEO and sales rates on their e-commerce platform.
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The client and the product
Our client, a Dutch company, owns an e-commerce platform offering a wide range of products, from home appliances and sports goods to electronics. We supported the client in developing one of their products — a product price comparison web app designed to help customers make informed decisions and enhance the company’s sales and SEO performance.
The idea: AI product comparison tool
Each of the 60,000 products listed on their e-commerce platform is presented with the same set of information:
- A photo of the product,
- Its marketing description and technical specifications, both provided by the manufacturer,
- A collection of user-generated content, primarily consisting of ratings and reviews.
All the information compiled on a product page is essential to assist customers in choosing the product that best meets their needs. From our client’s perspective, this type of content enhances the platform’s SEO efforts, making it more discoverable by potential buyers and supporting higher conversion rates.
However, sometimes even such detailed information is not enough when you need to browse through dozens of similar products that vary only in minor details. For example, most customers may not understand the differences between AMOLED, POLED, or OLED screens on the smartphones displayed in an e-commerce store. They can, of course, view the reviews of a particular device, read the product specifications, and the somewhat marketing-oriented product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or distributor. But how can one determine which screen type is better without reading several articles and becoming an expert in Light-Emitting Diode displays?
We wanted to help our client’s customers by providing accurate, unbiased opinions on the products they browse, based on technical specifications.
The solution: AI product description generator
So, one of our team members proposed a solution that would, based on the product specifications, create a simple list of pros and cons for each of the 60,000 products. Each piece of such content would consist of no more than 50 words to keep it brief and easy to read.
Benefits for the proposed solution included:
- The ability to generate a vast amount of original, unique content for each of the 60,000 products, which can be created overnight.
- Becoming a new, unbiased source of information for users that doesn’t originate from the manufacturer’s marketing team but is instead based on technical specifications.
Then, we developed a simple PoC (Proof of Concept) app and presented it to the client. After receiving approval from the decision-makers, one of our GenAI Engineers and our development team began implementing the solution on the price comparison web app.
The goal: increase organic traffic from Google or other search engines, improve conversion rates, and, through this, boost sales.
Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But what about the cost?
AI Consultation
What is the cost of AI-generated product descriptions?
Obviously, the answer is: “it depends.”
Each of the “pros and cons” sections consists of 50 words on average.
The task of creating these descriptions could be outsourced to a specialized content agency, but agency costs are usually higher than those of freelancers. Instead, let’s calculate the costs for collaborating with freelancers. Freelance writers’ rates can vary widely:
- For simpler product descriptions, rates might start from €0.05 to €0.20 per word for less experienced writers.
- More experienced writers or those with specific expertise in a niche might charge from €0.20 to €0.50 per word or more.
This means that hiring a team of freelancers to create descriptions for 60,000 products would cost at least €150,000 (at €0.05 per word), and take several weeks in the most optimistic scenario.
We know how much it could cost, but what was the actual price?
It took just five days for a GenAI Engineer to implement the solution on the AI product price comparison tool we built. Thanks to the feature we developed using the Assistant API from OpenAI, we managed to accomplish this for … €3,030. This total includes the work of our GenAI engineer and an approximate cost of €30 for generating the descriptions.
AI can be easy and cost-effective
By utilizing a relatively simple, custom API, we created content valued at €150,000 at a cost 50 times lower. Our AI solutions will enhance the visibility of the client’s e-commerce platform and its price comparison feature in search engines, boosting sales through improved user experience.
The most interesting fact is that we can replicate that mechanism for almost every e-commerce product, within a similar cost range. So, while 90% of business decision-makers are still waiting and observing the GenAI trend—why not jump into action and become one of the 10% who are actually benefiting from it?
Feel free to contact us, so we can discuss how we can optimize your product!
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