Using AI to Make Shoppers Buy

Matt Hickman
·3 min read

For all the talk of e-commerce and omnichannel driving sales on a business’ owned and operated website, Amazon remains the dominant marketplace in the digital domain.

There’s no better tool with which to machete through this keyword-driven jungle of optimization than artificial intelligence, and an increasing number of providers are getting in line to help.

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In March, Jungle Scout, an e-commerce management system since 2015, launched its AI feature, promising an instant product listing meant to help vendors on Amazon rank higher, allowing customers to find them more easily.

“Most people spend several hours on the Amazon detail page filling it out, tweaking it to get it exactly right to get the best result,” said Stephen Curial, chief technology officer for Jungle Scout. “What we’ve done is created AI assist so you can go and have it actually just generated for you, just based off those keywords.”

The function, now available under Jungle Scout’s Professional Plan at $89 per month, provides Amazon analytics based on search terms, and when crafting a sales post, its window-by-window process shows by percentage the optimization performance of each entry. Beyond that, the AI feature will also compose a title and copywriting for the product.

Given AI’s propensity for factual errors, however, users need to review and edit all of Jungle Scout’s creations before publishing.

“On Amazon’s end, it’s an informational retrieval model. So, it’s an inverse index that’s actually going to try and match and rank keywords to products and Amazon’s model is trying to maximize conversion,” Curial noted.

Where AI excels particularly is translating copy into foreign languages, an increasingly important tool in the global e-commerce marketplace.

“You can now ship your inventory and Amazon manages it. You don’t need to have a warehouse; you don’t need to have employees in another country,” Curial said. “The [AI] models are really good at translating languages, and now we’re to the point where, because Amazon provides customer service, you don’t necessarily need to speak a language to be able to sell in [international] markets.”

Jungle Scout has plenty of competition in the marketplace, including Viral Launch, an e-commerce management source that has been in business since 2017.

This summer, Viral Launch will be unleashing its own AI-assisted selling feature, said the company’s CEO Keith Jarvis.

“You used to be able to give away things on Amazon and that’s how you boosted your rank but they’ve gotten rid of all of that,” Jarvis said. “You’ve got to really work to get your listings where you want them to be now and I think AI is such a such a big piece of that as we move forward.”

No longer is Amazon keeping its keyword secrets close to the vest, since the advent of its Search Query Performance report last year, which has allowed AI to move all in on copywriting.

“You can see sales volume, you can see historical rank; those are things that Amazon would have never provided you two years ago. I think Amazon has gotten smarter in what they give their sellers for data,” Jarvis said. “And then what we do is take that data and we merge that with our internal algorithms and our internal data and make sure that they’re jibing together.”

Jarvis said all AI copywriting services are basically the same, but what he hopes sets Viral Launch apart is the servicing of specific client needs — especially for the sellers just starting out.

“The software we have is pretty unmatched in terms of going out into the Amazon space and saying, ‘Hey, here’s an opportunity. Here’s a niche you can get yourself into, and, by the way, here’s where you could source that product from as well.”

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