EP 82: Using AI To Grow Your Ecommerce Presence

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life. So we talk about AI and Chat GPT a lot on this show and we say, hey, you can grow your business and, and do all these different things, but what about just making money? What about using Chat GPT and AI for E commerce? We haven't talked about it yet, so we're going to talk about that today on Everyday AI. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're joining from. Very excited for today's show. My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm the host of Everyday AI. We are a daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me not just understand what's going on in the world of AI. Here's 50 tools, here's 50 things that happen. Nope, we tell you how you can actually use it. All right, so I'm excited today to have on a guest that we can talk a little bit about E commerce. But before we get to that, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. It's something we do every single morning. So let's start at the top. So the Associated Press, the AP has banned the use of Gen AI tools in published content. So just this story just kind of broke. So a little bit of a mixed message if you ask me, because the AP is encouraging its staff to use the technology, but just not in published content. So, you know, no images or published content will be from generative AI. So, you know, as a former journalist, you know, we use the ap, the Associated Press, wire all the time. So great to see the AP coming out and kind of making a stance on this, but we'll see how it's actually enforced. All right, so is McKinsey getting replaced? So that's, that's all. You know, if you read threads on Twitter or see things on LinkedIn, everyone says, hey, AI is, is the new McKinsey consultant, right? So you don't need a McKinsey consultant. Well, they said not so fast. So they actually just introduced their own generative AI tool called Lilly. So this is something, you know, I, I talk about this offline with people all the time, especially the consulting industry. So there's actually been some big moves. You know, Deloitte had a great, you know, announced a big partnership with Nvidia yesterday. Here's McKinsey creating and releasing their own tool right now, which is for their own employees. To use, called Lily. So very fascinating. And our last story, but not least, Snapchat AI is glitching, right? If you're a user, you probably saw this, but Snapchat has essentially an AI that you can talk to. And over the last day or so, it started to glitch and show some weird behavior. Mainly it started to take human actions like power, posting stories, posting stories on Snapchat, which is something that an AI should not be able to do, and stopped responding to users. So very weird kind of glitch there. And people are saying, oh, okay, is the Snapchat AI taking on human characteristics? Probably not. But make sure to check out the newsletter for that. So as a reminder, that's not all we have. So go to your everyday AI dot com. Sign up for that free daily newsletter. Every single day we break down. I think the most important thing we do in the newsletter is we break down the podcast. And, you know, because our guests have a lot of great information and we really go on a granular detail step by step on how you can use the information that we talk about in the podcast. But we also have, you know, we have news, we have software, we have a daily tutorial. It's good stuff. Make sure you go check it out. And thank you for joining us. So if you're joining us live, I'm extremely excited to bring on our guest for today. So let's welcome Charles Chicago. He is an entrepreneur and the founding partner of Joey Shopping Dot com. Charles, thank you so much for joining us. Excited to have you on the show.

Good morning. Thanks for having me.

All right, so tell, tell everyone a little bit. So you have an entrepreneur background in the e commerce space right now, but tell everyone a little bit what you are, what you're doing, and a little bit about your e commerce setup.

So rewind. Six, seven years ago, my brothers and I, we were in college and there was an idea of, listen, Dad's been in the family business, something that he established right when he came to this country, and he goes, why not take it online? So on principle, dad says, you could take it online. I'm not giving you a penny. So my brothers and I, we put all our life savings into this while we're in college. And lo and behold, I mean, it grew, thank God, and we are where we are now. So we learned that. We learned to trade and that was our first venture. Thankfully, it's. It's what propelled us to what we are now. Wow. Thankfully, a successful Amazon store and then hopefully every other thing that comes along with a successful brand a little later on.

Yeah, that's amazing. So what was the family business when it was offline? And just talk real quickly about the step to, to bring it all online and to, you know, bring it to the E commerce side.

So it was. So it's. It still is a bunch of brick and mortar stores, primarily in New England, across Connecticut and Massachusetts. And right now the brick and mortar branches are still up and running. It's just an added online element of sort of the same niche, but can't be exactly the same because we're not exactly shipping these big things that you find in a home goods type of store. Sure. So that's it. Those stores are still going. They're going strong.

Love it. So it's really an interesting. And I think your story is probably relevant and hits home for a lot of people. Right. Taking a family business and kind of getting it online. Right. I think it's something that our generation, you know, those of us in our, you know, 20s and 30s have maybe experienced. So what were some of the initial challenges of, of taking everything online and then talk a little bit about how you started to solve some of those challenges maybe with, with technology and AI?

Well, so there was. We really bootstrapped it. It was the type of business we started by. You know, we didn't turn on the heat. We just packed on extra layers of clothing. And those, those challenges were really customer service and getting those packages out. By that I mean logistical things. We began with resale. So let's say we went up and down. We literally went up and down the east coast once or twice a week up to maybe higher than Vermont. And we bought light bulbs from the dollar tree. So we ended up selling them on ebay. What would have made everything so much simpler if we just plugged in an AI and they said, hey, here's what's available in store and here's the profit you can make. We literally had employees at the time. I didn't know enough to think of a VA researching a bunch of different products we had access to and could make a profit on. So in the beginning of the business, that was how we made a big chunk of our change. If I could have done that, it would have been amazing.

Wow. So, yeah, we're, we're going to get a little bit more into that here in a second. Just wanted to highlight some of the people joining us. So, Dr. Rastafa, get us here for the everyday AI hot tea. Thank you for joining us. Henry, tuning in from Zurich. Thank you. Great podcast.

Thanks.

Thank you for joining us. Dr. Harvey Castro, great to be here. So we do have a question from May Brit and I'll let you take this. Charles. So May Brit, very loyal listener, thanks for tuning in. May Brit saying, curious, in what ways can I use AI for my e commerce shop that maybe I haven't considered yet? Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on Gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too. Just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website will help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Gene.

Where do I begin? The best thing you can do Optimize your descriptions for SEO. So given you have an e commerce shop, you should either be using Ahrefs or ubersuggest for SEO Google Traffic analysis. And once you do that, you can, you can go to really any generative AI tool, Claude Chat, GPT or Bard and or if you're on Shopify, they have it built in. And then you can say optimize for this keyword or write an additional paragraph description for this keyword and just throw it right into your description. You'll get free organic traffic. It will take a long time for the SEO to rank, but it's just something you set and forget. So that's, that's one way you can do that. You let me know I could keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean just that right there it sounds like a small thing. So if you're a listener, you know that that advice that Charles gave sounds like a very small thing. But when you're talking e commerce shops, right. I, I helped a client set up e commerce an e commerce shop before generative AI and just that piece can be so taxing and timec consuming if you're starting from scratch, especially if you have hundreds of products or variations. Right. Because it can take Charles. Right. It can take forever just to do that one small step.

I'm in the process of it now. I mean my, I have, thankfully at this point, I'm at the point where I have a VA and we have a, we have a spreadsheet of about 1500 items and the, the worst thing I can do is just copy and paste them so that they match up all the other sites that those products are on. The best thing I could do is tell this va, run this through Chat GPT or run this through the generative AI that Shopify provides me so that at least the descriptions are unique.

Yeah.

So it's not, these products are not just uniform across the entire Internet. Opens you up to price comparison and also tells Google you're copying and pasting things, which is never a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and Charles, do you want to try like. So normally we don't do this, but Charles said, hey, I can show people live, so let's, let's go ahead and do that. And, and as we do, you know, Jackie saying that this is a huge time saver. I, I, I, I agree, Jackie, absolutely. And Brian saying, think of all the people I know that could greatly benefit from this. Hoping they're on here. So yeah, tag them, share it because yeah, Charles, trust me, Charles is going to show us, show us some things here live. Just even what you can do just in chat GPT to grow your e commerce shop.

You got it. Just give me one second and I'll get the share.

I'm excited. Yeah. And as a reminder, if you're listening later on the podcast, you obviously can't see this, but don't worry, in the show notes we always leave links so you can come back here and watch the video as well. You can know you can connect with the show on LinkedIn, send us an email, all that good stuff. So if you want to see a live demonstration of how you can use Chat GPT to grow your e commerce shop, which we're about to show on the screen here, don't worry, you can just go click that and, and bring it on.

I'm going to interrupt not just chatgpt AI.

Yes.

Because I'm gonna, I'm about to show you a text to image. Text to image. Standard operating procedure. I use wild.

Love it. This is great, this is great to see the behind the scenes of how successful e commerce brands can be built because I actually get questions of this all the time someone says like okay, how does this actually work? And sometimes we do, you know, we've done this for mid journey before. We've jumped in and we've kind of shown, you know, live shows. But this is actually how you can apply it to a real business and how, you know you can actually do it. So let's, let's take a look.

All right, Sharing now.

All right, and we'll, and we'll do our, we'll do our best here everyone to describe what's going on on the stream because I know sometimes, you know, people are kind of listening in or watching from the other room. So let's go ahead and take a look here. So now Charles, go ahead and walk us through what you're doing here on Amazon.

All right, this is our cliffhands. What most brands like to do or should be doing is actually posting this to their brand store. So if you were to look at any brand on Amazon has a storefront. There it is, here's our storefront. There's a little section here called posts. And these are not my real product images. What I have, what I have my va do is daily is go into a product like let's say this dish rack. Copy these along with the title.

Yep. So we're copying. Sorry, I'm going to describe it a little more. So we're copying. That was the product description. Right. So copying the product description and the product name. Right, that's what that was perfect.

Right here straight into Canva text to image app which is free and included with your description. Create my image. While that's running, they go over into chat GPT saying give me a 300 character description of whatever you're generating. Wow, here we go. This one looks pretty good. It's not an exact image but it speaks to the lifestyle of my product. Will give me a description. Lo and behold, if you go into my store, posts, post on post, all AI generated. I don't have to spend money in creative. I don't have to spend money sending it to a photographer, shipping the product etc. Yeah, the best part about it so you see it's made both relatable. He I purposely put in his prompts to put in some emojis. Amazon goes ahead and applies their tags to it via AI. They, they feature these posts all throughout the app. On the Amazon app they feature these posts sometimes even on competitors listings. And look at the bottom. You can actually put in your products. You'll get free clicks to your products.

Yeah, free.

The way the way it's supposed to work is you pay advertising money for even features and clicks to your product. This is for free. Wow.

Wow. So like literally what I just said, Brown Win just said as well, saying, wow, absolutely amazing. So I have a couple follow up questions, Charles, and hopefully something, you know, that our podcast audience can, can visualize this a little bit. So you took a product title and product description. Obviously you have the product first, right? You have the product. You, you then use AI to help you write those product descriptions.

Yep, correct.

And then you take the descriptions that AI helped you write, you bring it into Canvas AI image generator and go from there. Right. So that's, that's our process so far.

That's right, that's right. If you want to go even further on it, when you said, I use AI to write my descriptions. So there, there are Two, there are two research tools out there, Jungle Scout and Helium 10. I find that Jungle Scout is actually the much better tool out there. Let's see how I want to see or show you how really works for us. Just give me a second. I don't want any sensitive info to get out there.

No, no, that's. That, that makes sense. I do, I do have one question as you're bringing that up, Charles. So what. I guess one thing. If anyone's used Image AI image generators before, and as we kind of saw in your example, you know, maybe one or two of those were accurate. Out of the four that Canva AI gave you, what steps can you recommend to those, those people listening and watching out there that try this and maybe it's not the most accurate. Right. So maybe if someone does have an E commerce shop and it's, you know, the wrong shape or the wrong size of the actual product. So how do you ensure, you know that you can get these AI image gener, these AI images generator that accurately reflect the product? Is it just a lot of tinkering and back and forth and updating the prompts to make sure that it actually reflects, you know, the product that people would be receiving.

So yeah, so the, it's actually, it's funny, if you're having a problem with that AI, the answer is more AI. You can actually ask Chat GPT to write you a prompt text to image for the track, run it through canva, see the problems that Canva has, go back to Chat GPT and say, hey, my results came out with a blurred background. It's in the middle of a grassyard and I need it to be in the middle of a kitchen rewrite. The prompt to fix these errors, Chat GPT will, will redo the prompt to fix those errors.

I love it.

After that, you can always add in another, another sentence or two to do it yourself. But using more AI is just more fun.

Yeah, I love it. And if you're listening on the podcast, I'm smiling because I get this right, like what Charles said, I've done this so many times as well. You know, we teach kind of a, a prompting course and I tell people this as well. You know, have split, split screens, you know, so you can go back and forth and use one AI to help improve the other. So a couple, a couple questions here, Charles. So Monica's asking, when did you start using AI for your E commerce shop?

Oh, the second it came out. Sort of like, yeah, sort of like, yeah, November. When was the whole craze, I guess, right, right in November was the whole craze with chat GPT. And I mean, from a little boy, I was very, I was very into technology. I was installing Jumpstart on my computers at like the age of three and four. So I jumped on this like crazy immediately educated myself, youtubed it like as much as I could once I saw business, business ways I could implement it. And I follow a lot of influencers in the field or a lot of, I guess industry leaders, they put out, they, they didn't hold back by putting out content for, for you putting it into E commerce. The feature I'm about to show, I'm hoping it's going to work. Here it is. So, yeah, the features I'm about to show, people have been aiming to implement this for a long, long time. Here it is. All right, go ahead.

Oh, no, I was saying as, as we bring this up, just, yeah, yeah, every. Hey, you have a fan here. Someone says number your number one, Charles. Jackie saying she's loving this stuff. A question, a question here as you share your next screen mark asking, do you get many refunds if, if the image is, is not, you know, 100 accurate, are you getting a lot of refunds there?

No. So that's if you're using it for product images. If you're using it for product images, I don't recommend you do that. But if it's for posts saying, hey, look at, look at the home goods we carry. I mean, what could be wrong with that? It's just, it's just a post on Amazon and it, and it quote, unquote, features your product. If you go ahead and look at my store's Amazon posts, it's, you could see the real product featured right below the post itself. The post is just to engage the customer.

Yeah.

So the answer to that is no, that.

Okay, so just, just to clarify the images that you're using, that's just for what you were showing on your screen earlier. That's the Amazon post feature. And that's not necessarily, you know, Right. As someone's zooming in on an image before they add it to the cart. That's an actual image that you guys have taken, correct? Yeah. Okay, good. Thank you for clarifying that because, yeah, I think a lot of people were wondering that.

Yeah. So if you look at. So we're ready to roll on operation number two here. So, yeah, again, this is one of our products. These were used, these were generated using AI, But a lot, A lot more work went into these pictures though. And, and this is actually the product they're getting. But if you were to go into one of our posts, you could, you could definitely with a, with a trained AI. And I don't mean that as, you know, skill or a qualification. See that this is not. This, this is very clearly an AI image. And this is clearly a lot shallower, doesn't have the cup holders than this does. So that's, that's on that end. The other feature I wanted to show you as far as what, what the thought leaders wanted to implement as soon as possible. Here's the back end of Jungle Scout and here's a listing builder they have. These are wiffle balls we sell. Here are all the highest volume keywords for the product and all you need to do for the product title to optimize it. For the highest traffic keyword, hit that AI Assist. It will write that for you. This is the, this is the most optimized title. You also want to hit on the features, the bullet points that go into this part of the description. And all of this I'm doing in terms of Amazon, you could do it all in terms of Shopify too.

Yeah, yeah. And just, and just quick to, to remind people out there, Jungle Scout that, you know, Charles is showing. That's in. It's an Amazon platform. Well, just an E commerce platform. Right. That helps you better research product, come up with keywords, all of that. Right?

Yep.

So we have, you know, this is. We've covered a lot in about 22 minutes, but I want to extend just a little. Normally we'd be wrapping up, but a couple, we have a couple other questions here that I want to get to, Charles, because you just showed us a ton of great information for those trying to use AI in E commerce. So Fabian asking, kind of like where is this going on? Is this, he's asking if this is in Latin America. Do you know our E commerce kind of shoppers or sorry, E commerce store owners doing this worldwide? Charles or do you think this is.

Just more in the U.S. i mean I'm, I'm of the belief that you have to, you always have to educate yourself in all walks of life and you never know enough. So you have to continue learning. So they should be. Because this is not anything novel. This is something that anyone that's been around in the E commerce world is implementing specifically in Latin America with Chad GPT releasing their multilingual features about two weeks ago. People are translating their sites into different languages. People are translating their product packaging to the, to the language of that country, which is in most cases a requirement. So that expands the reach of their products. People are, are even, are even look, looking to, they're going onto marketplaces making another product page entirely in Spanish and listing it on an English website. If I told you the traffic they were getting just because of Spanish speakers.

In English countries, yeah, that's such a great use too because I even remember being an old school web designer web developer myself, having to manually do that and manually install other languages into a website. So the fact that you can do it all now in ChatGPT is pretty amazing. Michael, thanks for joining us. Has a question here for Charles asking so the question would be moot, but can you do this without having your own product? Like can I just blog about products on Amazon and use AI generated photos? What's, what's your take on that Charles?

So definitely if you want to put a hero image on top of your article or, or feature it to, on your thumbnail to get more exposure on your, on your blog. Absolutely. And then you can use AI to optimize your blog content for higher SEO traffic and higher relevance.

Yeah. And I think, okay, one more from Jackie here. I think you answered this inadvertently but asking can AI help generate the real store image?

Definitely. I mean just as it did if you, if you go to my clip fans, it did and I frequently do use it. It just requires a lot more human involvement and a lot more, a lot more touch ups from the human end.

Right.

Just as really any AI generation does. It's just that let's say for the posts we don't really need that human touch as much, but all AI does need that human touch at the end just to make it a little more genuine and relatable to the end consumer.

Yeah, 100%. Because if you are using it as the real store image. Charles. Right. You have to make sure every single aspect of it is reflective of how it is in real life because then otherwise. Correct. You would run the risk of a lot of people saying like oh, this is bigger, this is smaller, this piece isn't the right color. Right. You'd run into a lot of that.

Right? Yeah, go ahead.

Oh no. Yeah. So here I think we have our last question here. So Dr. Sarang asking which AI tools you have used and could you rank them based on benefits and limitations? Great question. Yeah. Because there's a lot of AI. Even just in this short conversation you've already mentioned four or five of them. So what's your take?

Listen doc, a bunch of AI is all around. So I think what you mean AI specific tools, something like generative AI is what I really found it on chat GPT Canva are really generative AI things. AI as a bigger picture could be the YouTube recommendations, Google search results, even the predictive text in your Google Docs or Gmail. So my favorite generative AI would be I think Claude. If you guys look into it. It's called yeah, Claude AI because I can upload a document a PDF and have it go through it, say Summarize this into 10, summarize this into 10 points and it will do that. I can upload a contract saying find a loophole. That's my favorite generative AI thing that I can actually interact with. ChatGPT also has these features, but that's my favorite generative one. For the sake of time, I think I'll pause.

Oh, I love it. We went over a lot. Yeah, throwing cloud up on the screen here too. Charles, thank you so much for joining the show. He just dropped a lot of great information for E commerce shop owners or if you're just curious about getting into it. So if you didn't catch everything, don't worry, you can always just go to our website. Go to your everyday AI.com Sign up for the free newsletter. We're going to share some resources to Charles's store so you can go check everything out yourself. Go click all his posts. Maybe go, maybe go buy something if you need something from the store. But Charles, Charles, thank you so much for joining us and really just dishing out such great information on E commerce and AI.

My pleasure. And as a sign off comment.

Yes.

I just want to shout out one more question. My cousin's on here. Would I work for all industries. The answer is a yes. This is the general concept of AI. How you can implement it. The possibilities are endless. What I just showed you is things that I knew AI could do and show a real world product, a real world profit. So just think of different ways it can work. Very little of this was my own idea generation so it's it works great.

It's such, such a great point that yes, this isn't just for, you know, selling products via e commerce. You things Charles shared. You can use it across so many different industries. So one actually one quick reminder forgot to share about this. I will be speaking actually here in a couple of hours at an AI Summit, so make sure to check out the link in the newsletter if you wanted to join us. So again, thank you Charles and I hope to see everyone back again for some more Everyday AI. Thanks all.

Thanks guys.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.