Many people are worried that AI will make their work obsolete, but what if it actually helps you to grow your business exponentially?
Gary Huang, founder of the 7-Figure Seller Summit 8—a free three-day online conference starting today—believes AI and ChatGPT can help e-commerce sellers step up growth, transform workflow in time-saving ways and increase profitability, making them the ideal tools for one-person business owners who need to stretch their available resources.
With the goal of giving very small businesses a competitive advantage, Huang recruited 20 experienced sellers to share what they are doing to use AI, focusing on growth on day 1, productivity on day 2 and profitability on day 3.
“AI is a game changer. It’s almost like an asteroid has just hit planet Earth,” says Huang. “Millions of years ago, many of the animals, like the dinosaur, became extinct because they didn’t adapt, whereas some of the little mammals were able to adapt, survive and even thrive.”
As Huang points out, AI is affecting everything from education to political campaigns to art, like Drake’s AI-generated song, the AI recreation of Harry Potter, and user-generated deep fake Balenciaga videos going viral on YouTube. “It’s almost like a jet pack for entrepreneurs,” says Huang.
Many sellers haven’t started putting AI and ChatGPT to work for them. When Huang surveyed more than 220 e-commerce sellers recently, 58% said they were not familiar with AI technology or were only somewhat familiar. Huang saw a need to bring them together to give them a place to start.
After spending two months doing a deep dive into using AI, he estimates that a seller can save about 1,000 a year using these technologies, once familiar. He followed the guidelines of conference speaker Andrew Erickson, CEO of Andrew Knows Amazon, who recommends spending 10% of the time on an AI project guiding the technology, having AI do 80% of the project, and spending 10% polishing the work. “It still requires a human touch,” Huang says.
Here are three ways Huang shared that non-techies can use AI and ChatGPT in an e-commerce business.
Game changer #1: Bringing your invention to life. Product development used to require you to hire a product designer with the right background, skill set, and design sensibility—a complicated process. “There would be some back-and-forth iterations and drawings, and that would take a lot of time and money, with no guarantee the final design is exactly what you had in mind,” says Huang.
With AI, you can use tools such as ChatGPT and the generative AI tool Midjourney to create product designs, says Huang. The first step is creating a product brief. “You can use AI to look at competitors’ reviews, to find out their strengths or weaknesses, and look at your product to find ways to make your product better compared to their weaknesses,” says Huang.
Midjourney can speed up the creation of product designs significantly, says Huang. “The old way may have taken thousands of dollars and weeks to get that product design, but with Mid-Journey and chat GPT to create prompts for Midjourney, you can create this in a couple of hours,” says Huang. “So it’s significant time savings and growth opportunity because you’re short-cutting the product development cycle from weeks to hours or even days.”
Game-changer #2: Writing product listings. Entrepreneurial visionaries aren’t necessarily natural copywriters, says Huang. As a result, “with a lot of the listings, especially on Amazon, it looks like they’re only about 30% of what they can be,” he says. “Now, with tools like chat GPT, you can optimize your listings with keywords to be Amazon SEO optimized, and you can do that in minutes. That will save you a ton of time and increase your conversion rate and sales.”
Game-changer #3: Improving profitability. Hitting $1 million in revenue is an inspiring goal, but it’s what you keep after covering expenses and taxes that matters in the end. “In terms of profitability, ChatGPT can be a good partner to look at ways that you can improve your profit margins and manage, your pay-per-click, advertising campaigns and supply chain,” says Huang. “With sourcing, you can use chat GPT to write a negotiations letter to your supplier to try to get a better price. That would cut down on your landed cost—and immediately goes to your bottom line.”
Ultimately, says Huang, “the tiny business, the million-dollar, one-person business, can do so much more now. You can do 30% or even 50% more with chat GPT as a co-pilot. You’re going to be able to go much farther, much faster, in the same amount of time.”
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