Crae Murdock

Using product descriptions that come straight from the manufacturer makes your catalog full of the same words over and over. Search engines do not like that so they ignore many of those pages. We saw our category pages stop growing until we checked our inventory. We found hundreds of pages with, than fifty words that were all the same. By adding a list of practical use cases and common compatibility questions to the product description template our organic traffic jumped in just one month. Writing custom product descriptions for an inventory can feel like a chore.. If you start with the top twenty products that bring in the most money you see the fastest improvement. How do you create product descriptions when you have a large product inventory?

For a lot of products, the first real conversation a customer has might soon be with your agent inside someone else's app. I'm not sure how I feel about that, and I'd like to hear how other makers are thinking about it.

This week OpenAI opened a beta it calls Businesses in ChatGPT. From OpenAI's announcement as summarised by Techstrong.ai and Dynamic Business (OpenAI's own page wouldn't load for me, so this is secondhand), it has two parts.

Business Hub lets a verified business claim its ChatGPT profile, fix outdated information and connect a product feed with prices and availability. It's open in markets where ChatGPT is available, and verification is required before you can publish changes, connect a feed, see analytics or build an agent. Shopify stores can connect through the Shopify admin.

Business Agents are the more interesting part. Eligible US ecommerce and online-service businesses can build an agent that answers questions about their products and policies, inside limits and a knowledge base the business sets. A shopper comparing options in ChatGPT can step into a brand's agent, which opens as a separate, labelled conversation, so the independent answer and the company's own representative aren't mixed together. OpenAI says it doesn't share individual conversations with businesses, including agent chats; the Hub shows aggregate numbers like mentions, profile views and referral clicks once activity passes a privacy threshold. Businesses can also sponsor their agent as a destination for ChatGPT Ads, with labelled placements, and the reporting says claiming a profile doesn't buy better treatment in ChatGPT's normal answers. Reports describe it as free during the beta, with paid tiers not ruled out.