How Can Generative AI Enhance Ecommerce Product Descriptions?

January 22, 2025

Ecommerce businesses continuously strive to offer products in methods that attract customers and boost sales. Product descriptions, crucial for this endeavor, often lack the authentic, compelling touch that directly resonates with potential buyers. Reviews inherently provide the most genuine reflections of customer experiences and sentiments about products. Yet, many ecommerce enterprises fail to effectively utilize these reviews to enhance their product descriptions. By leveraging generative AI, businesses can transform the valuable insights contained in customer reviews into powerful, SEO-friendly product descriptions, thereby significantly improving customer engagement and conversion rates.

1. Retrieve Reviews from Your Website

To begin the process of enhancing product descriptions using generative AI, the first step is to retrieve the reviews from your website. Reviews contain rich, detailed insights into the customer’s experience with the product, including features they liked, problems they faced, and suggestions for improvement. To extract these reviews, navigate to the Configuration menu and select Custom, then Custom Extraction, and click Add. Name this extraction “Reviews.” This sets up a field for collecting review information from the website. Next, click the “Globe” icon, which allows you to create a custom extraction using interactive features provided by the tool.

With this feature enabled, insert a sample product page URL into the tool’s interface. Once the product page is loaded, locate the section of the page where reviews are displayed and click on that area. Screaming Frog’s tool will automatically suggest regex or CSS commands to extract the review text. It’s crucial to adjust these settings to ensure you are extracting the exact content needed. Use the Rendered HTML Preview to verify that all review content is captured accurately. After making sure that your Custom Extraction settings precisely extract the desired text, perform test crawls to see if the text extraction works as intended. This verification step is essential to avoid any issues further down the line.

2. Link Screaming Frog to OpenAI

Once you have successfully extracted the reviews from your website, the next step is to link Screaming Frog to OpenAI, enabling you to utilize generative AI for transforming this data into engaging product descriptions. Start by ensuring Screaming Frog is configured to store HTML and rendered HTML content. Navigate to Configuration, then Spider, and select Extraction. Check both “Store HTML” and “Store Rendered HTML” to ensure the tool retains all necessary review data for processing by the AI.

To proceed, you’ll need an OpenAI API key. Acquire this key from OpenAI if you don’t already have one. Once you have the API key, go to Configuration, select API Access, then AI, and finally OpenAI. Here, you can add your OpenAI API key, allowing Screaming Frog to interface with OpenAI’s generative AI tools. This connection will facilitate the process of extracting meaningful descriptions from the review data. By setting up this integration, the reviews you’ve extracted become the raw material for the generative AI to analyze and craft into compelling product descriptions that reflect authentic customer experiences.

3. Set Up Your Prompt

Having linked Screaming Frog with OpenAI, the next step is to configure the prompt that the AI will use to generate the product descriptions. Go to the Prompt Configuration tab and click Add, giving your new prompt a name such as “Product Descriptions.” This prompt will guide the AI in transforming the raw review data into structured descriptions. In the Page Text dropdown, select Custom Extraction, then Reviews, to ensure the prompt uses the correct textual data.

In the Enter Prompt field, input a detailed instruction for the AI. For example, you might write, “Below, I’m giving you all of the reviews of a particular product on my site. Based on these reviews, please write a description of the product.” This clear and concise prompt directs the AI on what it needs to do with the extracted reviews. To ensure everything is set up correctly, test the output by using the OpenAI Prompt Tester. Input a sample page through the tester to see what the AI generates with the reviews provided. These initial tests help refine the prompt and ensure the output meets your expectations.

4. Initiate Your Crawl

With your prompt configured and integrated with OpenAI, you’re ready to initiate the crawl of your website to start generating new product descriptions. Insert your home page URL into Screaming Frog while in “Spider” mode and start the crawl process. This action will scan your entire site, collecting all the reviews across various product pages based on the configuration you set earlier. If your site loads reviews through JavaScript, make sure to enable JavaScript crawling. This ensures that Screaming Frog can render and extract reviews that might otherwise be missed in a standard crawl.

After the crawl is complete, navigate to the AI section in Screaming Frog’s interface and select Product Description on the right-side bar. Here, you will find the new product descriptions generated by OpenAI based on the reviews extracted during the crawl. It’s a straightforward but powerful procedure, transforming customer feedback into SEO-friendly and engaging product descriptions, driving customer trust and enhancing the shopping experience.

5. Evaluate the Output

Evaluate the effectively generated product descriptions to ensure they meet the desired quality and authenticity. Revamping product descriptions using generative AI can bring e-commerce businesses closer to their customers by reflecting genuine user experiences. This leads to higher sales and greater overall customer satisfaction.

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