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Shopify App ConvertMate combines AI and Data Analytics to help merchants boost their conversions. Their CEO, Marc Régimbeau, opens up on the hurdles stopping generative AI from wide adoption amongst SMB merchants.

Key takeaways

• Generative AI will make SMB merchants’ lives easier. From product description to images and SEO optimization. It will boost their businesses.
• We are far from wide adoption. Learning curve, access to AI tools, and prompt complexity are all hurdles keeping SMB merchants away from AI.
• Promoting a “hands-off” approach combining Data Analytics, Automation and AI to improve sales and conversions is one tested approach to ease adoption.

ConvertMate offers a fully managed e-commerce AI solution for SMB merchants to increase conversions. The company recently surveyed merchants to understand how they viewed the recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence. While a large majority see the value it could bring in increased sales and time savings, many do not know where to start. Some even stated that they were scared to be left behind.

The noise around Generative AI has not made merchant’s research easy. They have many competing priorities and struggle to find the time to start their AI journey. In this article we will outline the hurdles keeping small merchants away from the value of AI and our take on how to bring those hurdles down.

Generative AI will streamline manual tasks for retailers.

“Content is King” said Bill Gates in 1996. As retailers and marketers, we’ve all heard this phrase many times. It suggested online growth would come from content and it did. Large retailers invest heavily in resources to create compelling content that stands out continuously from the crowded e-commerce landscape.

And now at the reach of a prompt, content can be created by Large Language Models. This is revolutionary for smaller retailers that could not afford content teams. ChatGPT and other services work tirelessly to provide blog posts, emails, product descriptions, titles, images and so on. Used correctly, AI will give an incredible edge to merchants. They will be able to streamline their marketing processes.

Image generation

Tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E are making image creation easy. This can help in the creation of images for blog posts or for landing pages.

Text generation

ChatGPT makes text creation for merchants easier than ever. Be it product titles, product descriptions, emails, blog posts, a quality wording is just a prompt away.

ConvertMate ran a survey across SMB retailers. Merchants are running into hurdles keeping them away from AI adoption.

ConvertMate ran a survey across 234 SMB merchants to understand what kept them away from AI adoption.

To the answer “Do you think AI will have an impact on your business?” a majority are optimistic on the value generative AI will bring to their businesses.

*Survey ran on 234 merchants

To the answer “What is stopping you from adopting AI?”, SMB retailers expose the complexities keeping them away from AI adoption.

*Survey ran on 234 merchants

ConvertMate CEO sees an opportunity to package AI to cater to the needs of SMB retailers.

How ConvertMate advocates for “Hands-off” AI to increase SMB adoption.

The perceived value of AI for merchants is overall positive. Yet merchants explain that they struggle to use it. Some use cases have already proven valuable around text creation mostly (product descriptions and SEO tags).

A non-tech-knowledgeable entrepreneur will find it hard to understand which tool to use and then to prompt those tools correctly. If the prompt isn’t well written, the output might not be relevant enough to use for an e-commerce website. That means, merchants need to spend time learning new tools without being sure of the quality of the result.

“At ConvertMate, we think providing Managed AI Services is the key to adoption. Pre-packaged AI specific to one line of business is the way to go.” Says CEO Marc Régimbeau. “Combining AI with automation gets rid of the manual prompting. In our case we use Advanced Analytics to track conversion rates, when they go down, our tool automatically prompts Generative AI APIs to adapt product pages. It’s a hands-off approach in which merchants do not have to manually intervene.”

“AI with automation and Analytics is how businesses will streamline their operations.” He states.