Chat GPT for Ecommerce Tasks: Writing, Coding, SEO & Admin

You’ve probably heard about Chat GPT - the AI tool that has gone viral since its release on November 30, 2022.

If you run an eCommerce store and you haven’t heard of Chat GPT, then this is your wake up call, because Chat GPT has a lot of practical uses for eCommerce and online business. You can already start using it to make a better store and save you a lot of time, and it’s free!

Over these past two months since I’ve been using it heavily in my daily work (with a lot of variety) - writing code, doing admin tasks like migrating or duplicating eCommerce stores, doing SEO, and copywriting. And I’ve been testing chat GPT and other AI tools for all these tasks.

This post will focus on these real-life uses of Chat GPT and how it can help store owners and developers be more efficient and create a better eCommerce store.

Also I will be talking mostly about Chat GPT, but I have also been using the original GPT-3, Notion AI for writing, and Github Copilot for coding. I will try to keep my instructions very general because Chat GPT might not be public for long, but these tools all work a similar way.

Here are the tasks I’ll be covering: 

1. Writing short social media posts for promotions
2. Creating spreadsheet formulas (e.g. for CSV product import)
3. Explaining some code
4. Writing SEO-friendly product descriptions
5. Bulk editing & Automation
6. Writing simple HTML & CSS layouts such as grids of images

For each task, I will also give it a score out of 10. This is basically how much of a human touch was needed to fix up the result. So 10/10 would be where the AI did the entire job for me, and I don’t have to edit the final output at all.

Write Social Media Posts

Score: 9/10. GPT is great for writing, and the shorter the better. With very minimal effort you can make a great sounding social media post.

Let’s start with a simple example - social media posts. This is a very trivial use of Chat GPT but it’s good introduction for anyone that hasn’t used it yet.

Let’s ask Chat GPT to write us a Christmas promo.

Prompt:

Write a festive instagram caption for a Christmas sale

This works ok but is kind of too generic.

Prompt: 

Write a festive instagram caption for a Christmas sale at a fitness clothing brand. Add some humour and use an informal tone that would appeal to millenials or Gen Z.

This is much better. Here are some tips:

• Name the event or reason for the post
• Mention the target audience
• Specify the tone
• Specify how many words you want
• Work with the result, ask it to make it more informal or add humour, or talk like [celebrity]…

Creating Spreadsheet Formulas (e.g. for CSV product import)

Score: 10/10. Fast, easy, and saved me a lot of time. I didn’t need to correct it at all.

Chat GPT truly excels in this straightforward type of task.

I was creating a product import spreadsheet for Shopify. I had a list of around 300 product titles, and I needed to create the handle (aka URL) for each one of them.

I needed a formula to take titles in col B and make URLs from them in col A

In Shopify, the handle is usually the product title but lowercased, hyphenated, and with any special characters like apostrophes or quotes stripped from the text.

I had all my product titles in column B, and I wanted a formula to copy those titles, apply those rules, and create the product handles in Column A.

So I asked Chat GPT how I could do that:

Can you write a google sheets formula to copy from another column, replacing spaces with dashes, and changing to lower case?

Can the formula also remove all special characters like quotation marks from the output?

I pasted this formula into Column A and it worked perfectly. Column A was instantly filled with product handles.

The formula worked perfectly

Could I have done this without Chat GPT? Yes, at first I actually tried to. I googled the formula for lowercasing, and then I was trying to figure out how to do the dashes instead of spaces, and how to chain these things together.

I would have figured it out eventually, but it might have taken me an hour of trial and error. With Chat GPT it took me less than a minute.

Explain Code

Score: 9/10. It accurately explains most code I threw at it, and makes good assumptions about how this code is used in the bigger picture.

It’s a common situation that you found some code online, and you’re trying to adjust it to your needs, but for this you have to understand it.

Well, Chat GPT can take some code you paste in, and explain it in layman’s terms, complete with a breakdown of each line and its purpose.

You can then ask it to further clarify certain parts, or to advise how you could change the code for your needs.

This is incredibly useful both for pro developers and amateur coders.

The prompt is very simple:

Explain what this code does:

[code]

You can then adjust the output:

Can you explain this using more simple language?

Or:

Can you elaborate on [part of the answer]?

Finally you can start coding with Chat GPT by asking:

How would I change this code so that … ?

Here I used some code from my tutorial on adding a stock indicator

Write SEO-Friendly Product Descriptions

Score: 8/10. Huge time saver but it does need some tweaks at the end.

Many stores have this huge SEO problem - their product page is practically empty. Sure it has lots of images, but the total amount of text on the product page is like 100 words.

How is Google meant to understand what the page is about with such limited information?

For good SEO, you need at least 300 highly descriptive words on your page. But writing is hard right? Well, not anymore.

All you need to do is list some bullet points about your product and tell Chat GPT to write a product description.

Here is how to create a good prompt.

Add a list of product characteristics

A product specs sheet works perfectly here. And the more info you can provide the better the result. If all you provide is “It’s a tripod”, well you’re going to get a bad result.

Add target audience

Is it meant to appeal to boomers or Gen Z or mums or gym-goers?

Add a tone of voice

Formal or informal, you can also say things like “add humour” or “make it sound threatening” or “talk like snoop dogg”.

Add a list of SEO best-practices for it to use

Here is mine:

• Focus on benefits rather than features.
• Write approximately 300 words.
• Avoid sentences over 20 words.
• Avoid using passive voice.
• Include a call to action at the end

Prompt example: 

I won’t add a screenshot because it’s rather long, but try this out yourself in Chat GPT: 

Write an SEO-friendly 300 word product description based on the product details below. The text should use informal language and appeal to young creative people. Also follow these guidelines:

• Focus on benefits rather than features
• Avoid sentences over 20 words
• Avoid using passive voice
• Include a call to action at the end

Product Details:

• Title      JOBY GripTight ONE GP, Universal Phone Holder, Magnetic GorillaPod Flexible Small Tripod for Smartphone, Foldable and Portable , Black
• Brand Joby
• Color Black
• Compatible Devices Smartphones
• Compatible Phone Models Samsung Galaxy S8,Iphone Se,Google Pixel,Iphone 8
• Mounting Type Tripod Mount
• Compact design; patented; compact and foldable design
• Universal fit; fits most smartphones with or without a case
• Stainless steel spring loaded design for quick grip and release of smartphone
• Flexible base; flexible gorilla pod legs with rotating ball head provide endless platforms and creative angles
• 1 x Grip tight ONE GP stand (Black)

Bulk Editing & Automation

Score: 8/10. Very useful and a huge time-saver, but it can be hard to get the prompt right, and Chat GPT often has a limit on length due to the network being so overburdened.

Chat GPT can be used for bulk editing tasks. Other tools may already exist, such as Spreadsheets, but the strength of Chat GPT is that you can use natural language to control it. You don’t need to learn an entire new software interface or programming language.

Examples of bulk editing tasks:

• Change product title text capitalization e.g. lowercase, uppercase or sentence case.
• Append text to the end of a title or description or prepend to start
• Replace parts of text (e.g. replace all mentions of a word in description to another word)
• Simple mathematics for multiple products (e.g. discount list of prices by 20%, output as a table)
• Convert product titles to URLs for product import

You can also use a chrome extension called AIPRM to save prompts so you can easily re-use them with the perfect output already defined. And even if it isn’t you can refine it with some further prompts.

Here is an example of a prompt for generating URL’s from product titles. This is the same thing that I demonstrated above by using an Excel formula, but done directly inside of Chat GPT. It’s good for smaller lists. If you have over 100 titles, I would still recommend using Excel.

Prompt: 

Here is a list of product titles:

Light Blue Wild Butterfly Leather Headband
White Wild Butterfly Leather Headband
Pink Wild Butterfly Leather Headband
Platinum Flying Butterfly Leather Headband
Sparkling Pink Flying Butterfly Leather Headband
Platinum Double Flying Butterfly Leather Headband
Sparkling Pink Double Flying Butterfly Leather Headband

Perform the following modifications to each product title:

• lower case
• convert spaces into dashes
• remove special characters

Replace & rephrase

Let’s say you have a description written for one product. The product name is mentioned several times throughout the text. You can easily replace all mentions of this product with a different product name.

Prompt:

Replace all mentions of “JOBY GripTight ONE GP” with “Joby GorillaPod 3K”

It’s smart enough to know when only a part of the name was written e.g. “the Griptight is blah blah…”  and will replace these too.

Now you have a product description written up for product B, but it’s too similar, isn’t this bad for SEO? It’s ok, just rephrase it.

Can you rephrase this text with different wording?

The output will be a completely re-written product description.

Generating Simple HTML & CSS Layouts

Score: 6/10. Saves you some work and gets you through blockers, but you still have to do some troubleshooting.

This one is great for store owners that understand some code, and often re-use or tweak code found online, but aren’t confident writing it from scratch.

Instead of Googling, you can use Chat GPT and other AI tools to generate that starting code for you. The only thing you need to do is clearly explain what you want.

Let’s talk about a common request: adding a block with trust badges or icons under the Add to Cart button.

That’s really quite easy to do by writing your own code in the Custom Liquid block that is available in most Shopify themes. So you don’t even need to edit your theme code.

We want 4 images in a row, side by side. Each image should have a small caption.

Let’s ask ChatGPT to generate the HTML & CSS for this:

Can you write the HTML & CSS code for a grid of 4 items in a row, each item should have a small image and caption.

Chat GPT has generated some code for us and even explained how it works. Making it easy for us to make edits.

Now you can use Shopify’s Custom Liquid block to test this code, or you can use an online code playground called Codepen. Codepen makes it a lot easier to read and edit before pasting into Shopify, so this is what I recommend. You don’t even need an account.

Copy the HTML part into Codepens HTML window, and the CSS into the CSS window. You should see the layout of 4 items in a row.

I want margins between the items, so I ask:

Can you add margins between each grid item?

It gives me a solution: add margin: 10px to the .grid-item css. However this breaks my layout, the 4th item no longer fits and goes down to the next row. I ask:

Adding margins made the last item go to the next row. How can I fix this?

It explains why this happened, and it gives me two pretty good solutions.

After this adjustment, it looks pretty good in Codepen, so go ahead and try it in your Custom Liquid block.

Overall Chat GPT is quite useful for generating simple layouts and I’ve used it multiple times in this way. As a developer it sped up my work, and it was really easy for me to spot issues when they ocurred.

If you’re not a developer, it will obviously be more difficult, but as long as you can accurately describe your problem, and combine it with some google research, it should still be a huge efficiency booster for you. Chat GPT totally handles the syntax (language, typing) aspects of coding, which is a big blocker for many. You just need to think of how it ties together.

For example, for the above layout you should upload your images to Settings > Files and then copy their URL and add them to the HTML. Chat GPT will tell you this if you ask. But some things you still have to know.

Is that all? 

Hell no. This blog post was shortened from 13 tasks to only 6, because it was getting way too long. There is definitely more coming soon. And not just about Chat GPT, but other AI tools also.

Subscribe to my newsletter in the footer, and keep an eye out for more AI tips for eCommerce stores.

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