Digital shelf development is supported by Product Information Management (PIM) systems . And they are evolving to meet the growing demands for efficient and effective online content generation across channels. Integrating Generative AI into your digital shelf is a significant advancement. This innovation transforms how retailers can transform the customer’s online experience, including subsequent reviews, ratings, and shopping behavior, with product descriptions and related content on PDPs. Let’s delve into how generative AI is reshaping PIM and your digital shelf across channels with a closer look at the offerings from leading platforms. One is designed for high customization and another designed for rapid streamlining of your enrichment and review process through configuration.
The Benefits of Generative AI for Your Digital Shelf
Faster Updates to the Digital Shelf
Creating digital content manually can be time-consuming. Generative AI saves publishers valuable time by automating the creation process. This allows retailers to focus on other critical tasks and content, improving overall productivity. Consider a case where you need to quickly fix issues with a customer’s ability to search your products or review them on PDPs; you’ll have high velocity on those product changes. That’s important because it impact customer reviews and ratings which will influence online shopper behavior for months and years to come.
Creative Springboard for Publishers
Generative AI provides a fresh perspective on digital information, offering descriptions and insights that publishers might not have considered to improve the online experience. This can serve as a creative springboard, enhancing the overall quality and appeal of your digital shelf.
Enhanced Digital Shelf Accuracy
Generative AI is less likely to have grammar or spelling issues, ensuring high-quality, error-free product descriptions on your digital shelf. This enhances professionalism and reliability. Many website search engines and customer ratings and reviews can be sensitive to issues here.
Expanded Publisher Pool
With generative AI, the pool of potential publishers expands beyond those with exceptional marketing writing skills. Some excel in product knowledge, data quality, search, customer experience, channels marketing, and efficient enrichment workflows, thus democratizing enrichment.
Multilingual Capabilities
Generative AI can translate into multiple languages, reducing the effort required to expand a retailer’s PDPs reach into new online markets. This opens up more channels and customers who search online for products in your digital shelf with minimal additional workload.
Digital Shelf Stewardship
Generative AI is robust and efficient, but retailers can still have the final reviews, allowing a human touch where appropriate. They can review how a customer would search for that product and create a final revision.
Generative AI Platform Features for Your Digital Shelf
Highly Customizable PIM
We provide strategic implementations on a platform that specializes in extensive customization (customizable PIM). To learn more about this specific platform please reach out to us. It’s generative AI feature introduces several capabilities to manage your digital shelf and improve the presentation on PDPs and category landing pages:
Content Generation Tab: This tab is available on any data element (products, categories, etc) page, including custom-created record types, allowing for versatile application across various entities. For example, it could be used for a category description as well as for products. This will enable you to apply generative AI to more facets of your digital shelf.
Tone Selection: Retailers can tailor the tone for the generative AI to match the brand’s voice to the customer on PDPs.
AI Engine Selection: It currently offers two generative AI engines and gives them the flexibility to integrate additional generative AI platforms in the future.
Digital Shelf Relevance: It generates based on existing product content, ensuring relevance and accuracy on your digital shelf.
Custom Terms: Users can include specific terms for the generative AI engine, enhancing the results in a targeted way. This improves the specificity of your digital shelf improving the relevance to the customer.
Batch Generation: Users can create work areas for products, apply generative AI to those products, and then review them systematically before approval.
Choices: You can control how many versions of the descriptions you want. It will create many variations to choose for PDPs.
Images as Input: You can ask it to look at an image and generate a product description.
Configurable PIM
We also provide strategic implementations on a platform that is designed to be a turnkey solution where it’s functionality is driven by adjusting natively available settings (configurable PIM). To learn more about this specific platform please reach out to us. The configurable PIM also brings a robust set of features for managing your digital shelf:
AI-Generated Attributes: Users can define specific product data attributes to be generated by AI. A new tab for attributes, “Generative AI,” is available to configure this feature.
Verbosity Levels: The platform allows users to select verbosity levels for descriptions, providing control over detail and length to show on PDPs.
Mass Digital Shelf Updates: It supports rules that apply en masse to all products, streamlining large-scale generative AI. The impact is compounded by the PIM’s ability to push updates out across channels automatically.
Extensive Product Library: Trained on a library of 50 million products, It can generate content even with minimal initial data, such as a manufacturer number. Of course, a robust digital shelf needs products with much more than minimal information to create engaging PDPs.
Suppliers Can Use It: If you use the supplier portal feature, your suppliers can use the generative AI to enrich their product content and empower them to contribute effectively to your digital shelf.
Control Over AI Instructions: Since it responds to instructions (prompts), it allows you to select from a list of prompt templates to request a short description that is SEO-friendly or even targeted for Amazon if that’s one of your online marketing channels. You are creating an adaptive digital shelf.
Comparative Analysis
Both platforms have powerful support for marketing rich content across channels. When comparing the customizable PIM and configurable PIM for your digital shelf, several key differences and similarities emerge:
Data Utilization: Both platforms build on your existing product data, but the configurable PIM also uses extensive product training data to enrich product content.
Entity Support: The customizable PIM supports AI generation for any entity type, whereas configurable PIM is limited to product information. Some retailers have a high volume of categories on their digital shelf, which could be crucial.
Shelf Optimization: Both support applying rules to products en masse, which can be more efficient for a digital shelf with many products.
Feature Scope: The configurable allows your suppliers to leverage its generative AI using the supplier portal.
Image Input: The configurable PIM can leverage your existing assets to help create descriptions.
Client Use Case: Real-World Application
Consider a client that pulls product content from multiple sources to create comprehensive product descriptions. Their customers search shortened descriptions from the ERP, leading to search issues (e.g., “BLK” for “Black”). This client faces challenges balancing the ERP with other sources to create robust descriptions. Generative AI content could be part of the solution here. It can merge ERP descriptions with other product data to be complete and accurate, seamlessly incorporating terms like “BLK” and “Black.”
In cases like this, AI content generation could reduce the infrastructure and development costs of pulling and merging from multiple sources. It can also significantly reduce the time to market for your product content in all of your channels.
Conclusion
Integrating generative AI into PIM systems represents a significant leap forward in product enrichment. By leveraging AI, businesses can save time, enhance creativity, ensure accuracy, improve customer search, and expand their reach into new markets. Platforms like these lead the way, offering unique features to meet diverse business needs. As AI technology continues to evolve, the potential for innovative applications in PIM will only grow, driving efficiency and effectiveness in product information management.
It is vital to ensure that humans review the content created since they apply experience from search. It’s also essential to include as much product information as possible as part of the source for AI. AI generation will create compelling product descriptions but cannot add attributes, specifications, or images.
If you don’t have a PIM yet, I don’t recommend using generative AI as a specific selection criterion. Instead, the foundations of a PIM and how it meets your needs regarding data governance, source of truth, quality of product content, syndicating across channels, measuring success, and integrability are paramount. There are commonly understood best practices you probably need to adopt before diving deeper into these features.
You may need professional consulting to ensure your move solves the right problem. We have subject matter expertise in PIM strategy, solution architecture, best practices, and feature guidance, as well as the deep technical experience to make your vision a reality. Contact our experts today for other inquiries and information.
