5 Things to Know About Amazon’s Automatic AI Listings
Amazon wants to make it as easy as possible for sellers to list products in its marketplace, so it’s taking the grunt work out of the equation. This week, the e-commerce giant debuted automatic listings using generative AI.
The goal, it explained in a blog post, is to make the process simpler. “Previously, creating product pages required significant effort from sellers to develop and input accurate and comprehensive product details across numerous attributes to build compelling product descriptions that attract the right customers,” wrote Mary Beth Westmoreland, vice president of the Worldwide Selling Partner Experience division.
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“We’re now making it even easier for sellers to accomplish this with the ability to transform their existing product pages on other websites into rich product listings tailored to Amazon’s store, with far less effort.” Sellers point the tech to their own online product page for an item, and the system automatically creates an Amazon product page.
The change may be a boon to merchants looking to blow up their marketplace sales. The trick, at least for Amazon, is pulling it off without opening the floodgates for scam artists and fraudsters to do the same thing. Because a bot-driven deluge of listings sounds like a recipe for chaos. Amazon apparently thought that through, setting some rules for the feature. It also showcased a few other facets of its AI tech.
Here are five things to know about Amazon’s AI listings.
1. Not just anyone can post AI listings.
Obviously, the tech was created for Amazon sellers, but not just any merchants. Because AI listings require a URL to an online product page, this update is geared for e-commerce shops that do direct-to-consumer business. Sorry wholesalers and brick-and-mortars.
2. Sellers can’t use links or content that belong to others.
Think of this as one way the company guards against fakes, since scammers frequently knock off more than just the item itself. Often, they copy the original brand’s product description as well. Links submitted as the basis for AI listings, however, must point to content that the merchant owns, has the rights to or has legally licensed.
3. Amazon is serious about number 2.
Link to plagiarized product content or even directly to someone else’s site, and you could find yourself hauled into court. Amazon clearly stated that it may take offending sellers to court over any violations. It seems that the mere thought of its tech helping scammers galls the company so much, it didn’t bury this detail in the fine print or terms of service, but put that right in its announcement.
4. Amazon’s AI looks pretty good at creating listings.
The company has been injecting AI into product-page creation since the fall. It started with text, giving sellers the ability “to provide us with only a few words that described their product,” and the tech churned out titles, descriptions and other item details, according to the company. Soon image uploads replaced text prompts, which yielded even more product attributes. “These features can also suggest attributes such as color and keywords to help effectively index the product in customer search experiences,” it wrote.
Amazon urges sellers — more than 100,000 of which have already used a generative AI tool — to doublecheck the system’s work. So far, the company said, suggested attributes are accepted with minimal edits roughly 80 percent of the time, and in its comparisons to manual listings, the AI-generated product pages improve on clarity, accuracy and detail.
5. This is just the beginning.
Amazon is continuing to launch new features to enhance the selling and shopping experience in the platform, the company said. Meanwhile, it also gave a shout-out to Amazon Web Services, which built and hosts its generative AI tools, and its Amazon Bedrock outfit, presumably hoping to attract brands and retailers to its cloud business and machine-learning platform.
Altogether, that means Amazon is ready to take its AI to every corner of its marketplace — and beyond.
The AI listings feature has started rolling out and will continue in the weeks ahead for U.S. sellers. It may arrive too late for most sellers to take advantage of it for Amazon’s first “Big Spring Sale” kickoff, on Wednesday. But there’s always Prime Day.
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