There’s an interesting story in The Guardian this week, saying that UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of artificial intelligence and is being hit harder than rival large economies. The reason, British businesses are seeing an average 11.5% increase in productivity by using AI and coupled with higher taxes and wages for employers they’re naturally making the most of technology at the same time as being reluctant to invest in more employees.
We spoke to Simon, a long time marketplace seller and he shared some of his own experiences of using AI. As a small business, it’s always been critical for him to keep costs down, but AI is enabling him to bring more processes in-house than ever before and more importantly enabling him to automate routine tasks that would otherwise take hours or even days of his time.
Working with AI to simplify ecommerce
With his Prestashop becoming outdated, Simon moved to Base.com for managing his business, with a BigCommerce plaform for his website. Base.com is now used to handle eBay, Amazon, Fruugo, Etsy and Tiktok. Simon says that this move was ‘A hell of a learning curve’, but used AI to has write the scripts to be able to make everything work better.
- A really simply example is discovering that ALT Text was missing from 5,000 product images. ALT Text is crucial both for SEO and for accessibility to offer descriptive text as an alternative to the image itself. Instead of spending days adding ALT Text, Simon asked AI to write a python script that added all the text to the website.
- Again, the 5000+ products on the website all have product options / modifiers that were created using a PowerShell script written by AI.
- And Simon has had AI build Bad customer blocker, a bit like your eBay blocked buyers list. Simon doesn’t want repeat offenders so asked AI to create a Python script that alerts him when a “BAD ACTOR” returns!
AI vs Human coders
Simon has in the past used outsourced workers to create code for him, but the experience has been mixed at best. One tried to take him off the outsourcing platform and pay more money, another wrecked a Prestashop module in an attempt to fix an issue.
Is Simon taking work away from coders? Absolutely yes he says, but for a paltry £15 a month for Claude he says it’s absolutely worthwhile. Should you experiment with AI for your business? Well here’s what Simon had to say:
You tell it how you want to be spoken to. I tell it BE BLUNT and it swears and responds with NO BS!
It’s not always right and I have spent many hours arguing with it, but this a fraction of the time I have used it and with its modelling getting better and better, it won’t be long before those “Hallucinations” will be a thing of the past.
As long as you can understand logic and explain, even in the worst English possible, what you want from it, giving as much detail as possible, it will astound you.
– Simon, Marketplace seller
As a final note, if you’re an eBay seller and want expert training from eBay and OpenAI, eBay AI Activate has partnered with OpenAI to offer fully-funded access to ChatGPT Enterprise and there are still places available.
One Response
Dealing with an Amazon return request today, I messaged the buyer to ask why they had selected the return reason of “description on website was not accurate”. They responded and told me that they had asked Amazon’s AI assistant Rufus if the product had a particular feature which they needed, and were told by Rufus that the product did have this feature. It does not. £££s wasted shipping the product out and £££s paying to get it back, though the return cost might be recovered from Amazon.
I tried asking questions about the product features, but was unable to get Rufus to mislead me into saying it had a feature that it did not have. I don’t doubt the buyer though. I’ve seen AI provide wrong answers, then a day later, give the correct answer to the same question. Still a long way to go.