Amazon & Shopify SEO: Does Using OpenAI's ChatGPT Matter for Optimizing Product Listings

OpenAI has taken the internet by storm. It's revolutionary, scary, and effective. You've probably heard the news: it broke the record for being the fastest adopted product of all time, accumulating 100 million users within two months. If you're in the SEO field you may be wondering, like many other tech workers, whether OpenAI will take your job. ChatGPT can write elaborate articles, essays, and product listings when tasked with just a short prompt. It is designed to appear like human-written content, using sentence variety and accurate syntax. However, if you've played around with it enough, you may have realized that it has certain patterns; we can call it a distinct literary style. It is of course being used to write product descriptions across the internet. It makes the laborious task a lot easier, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. While ChatGPT is an amazing tool, it still isn't perfect. So don't worry your job is safe... for now.

Can ChatGPT write optimized product listings? The short answer is yes. You may be concerned. As we know in the SEO world, unoriginal content is punished. Plagiarism is bad. It may seem counterintuitive, or feel wrong in your gut, but ChatGPT is not plagiarism. Every unique prompt yields a unique response. Think of it as a tool that elaborates on your thoughts.

Shopify AI-Generated Product Listings

When it comes to writing product descriptions, AI broadly performs extremely well. Perhaps the simplicity and directness of the task comes into play. AI seems to excel at the task. In fact, Shopify has already launched its own product description writing tool, Shopify Magic, which writes AI-generated product descriptions. Having used this tool myself, I found it to be incredibly accurate. You can select a tone of voice, jot down some notes about your product, and let the bot do its thing.

Unlike ChatGPT, Shopify's AI product description writer is designed specifically for product listings. Whether you are writing product descriptions for Amazon or Shopify product listings, I do suggest using this tool. Shopify's developers have already made the tweaks and conducted the testing to ensure that this AI tool performs extremely well at one task. You can think of ChatGPT as more of a generalist. It performs a lot of writing tasks decently, but it does not particularly excel at any one task.

Do AI-Generated Product Listings Matter for SEO?

From an SEO or product listing optimization standpoint, what matters most is that your content is helpful, reliable, and "people-first." As Google states in its Search Central documentation, what matters in automated ranking is that content is designed to benefit people and not manipulate search engine rankings. In short, even if your content is AI-generated, as long as it's good, you can rest assured your rankings won't tank—unless your product is sh*t.

Good and useful content are key to a successful product listing. Your product listing should describe your product's benefits, attributes, and uses. A potential customer should read your listing and know exactly what it's used for, what it's made of, and why they need it.

Using ChatGPT to Create Optimized Amazon Product Listings

Shopify may have a built-in tool for generating magical product listings, but Amazon (the sleepy tech giant that they are) has not quite reached that point. While I do suggest using Shopify's AI product description to create your listing descriptions, even for Amazon, with some simple prompts and polishing up, ChatGPT can handle the task. Let's put it to the test:

Following Shopify Magic's structure, I started by asking ChatGPT to use an "informative tone." After experimenting with expert tone, persuasive tone, and other tones, I found informative to give the most cohesive responses. I included the words "optimized" and "Amazon" to guide the AI. To my surprise, ChatGPT already separated the description from the key features. It wasn't perfect, as a couple paragraphs were added below the key features, but with some re-arranging, you can create an intelligible product description.

As the brand behind the product, you will most likely want to tweak some wording or highlight features that ChatGPT may have skipped. In this example the tone was a bit off-center. For example, in feature 3, it wrote "With every step, you'll feel like you're walking on a bed of marshmallows." I wouldn't exactly call that informative, but you can be the judge of your own content. At times the AI will inaccurately elaborate on something that it doesn't have complete information on or go on weird tangents. Keep in mind, that unlike Shopify Magic, this tool is not geared towards e-commerce. It's much broader than that and knowing that, you should expect to have to either give more guidance or, more likely, tweak the content meaninfully.

Interestingly, the AI added a note to spot clean the slippers. A nice extra that I wouldn't have come up with myself. Perhaps its predicted the user feedback before the product is even listed—mind blowing. As a cherry on top I asked OpenAI's Dall-E to generate some images for the product listing to go along with this description. Here's what it came up with:

Conclusion

Overall AI writing tools are great at helping you come up with ideas and generate content for your optimized Amazon and Shopify listings. Shopify's Shopify Magic AI-generated content tool is more geared towards the task, but ChatGPT does perform well too. With either tool, you should expect to tweak the content to your liking. Product descriptions should be informative, people-centered, and on-brand. With these tools and this knowledge and you can start generating optimized product listings more quickly.