How can AI power up your custom marketplace app?

In today’s fast-paced world, every major company is jumping on the AI bandwagon. From ChatGPT to Midjorney along with Google’s own Bard AI, the market is being flooded with AI-driven products and services. It’s not just limited to tech giants either, smaller companies launch their AI products for everything from email generation to picture creation. AI is also the buzzword of the moment. Many companies are using AI as a marketing ploy.

With such success around, do you feel like you need to develop your own AI? No, you don’t need to invent the wheel. Just harness the power of existing AI by integrating it into your own marketplace. It can give you an advantage of this exciting new technology and drive your business forward. So, let’s keep an eye on AI and explore how you can use it to supercharge your marketplace and stay ahead of the competition.

AI adoption in business

Major tech firms have been investing heavily in AI-driven initiatives. A lot of smaller companies are actively embedding AI-powered solutions into their projects. You might be surprised to know that 50% of commercial companies adopted AI according to McKinsey. So, we could have said ‘future-proof your business’ but it would have had to be 2017. AI is our present, and it is thriving.

The more interesting fact is that:

“Companies who utilize AI consistently outperform their competition and achieve highest financial gains”

Isn’t it a reason enough to consider adding AI bits to your business portfolio?

AI has found use in every industry and department. Marketplaces are not an exception. Though, many business owners might be reluctant for several reasons.

#1 New features always mean investment and AI sounds expensive.

#2 AI is a sophisticated technology. Business owners might be afraid that their teams won’t be able to handle it.

However, fear not. AI solutions can be affordable for even the smallest businesses and startups. The solutions are scalable and flexible. In addition, they often come with support for tech implementation and operational issues.

You may also want to check out this article to learn how to avoid these top 10 marketplace mistakes when building and running your online marketplace.

Overview of AI-powered Marketplaces

The sky’s the limit when it comes to the use of AI in custom marketplaces. Whether you want to generate or customize product descriptions or engage your customers with an AI bot, you have the power to do it with AI. AI can be immensely valuable for all kinds of marketplaces. You can focus on enhancing the user experience. Or, you can boost the trustworthiness of your marketplace. AI can be put to use to improve the quality of the content. You can get rid of all those spaces left blank because people were too tired to write or didn’t have a creative idea of what to put in. Usually, empty rows on product pages are not a point of attraction for your customers. You can also get into data monitoring or security with AI, and level up those. Alternatively, you can enable AI-powered recommendations as a way to increase the revenue-generating potential of your marketplace. These are just the major uses.

Largely, AI can be used to help with several key functions. You surely will want to maximize your marketplace’s growth potential during the startup scaling stage. For this, you can scale your marketplace with AI. If you are just thinking about creating a marketplace, AI can fast-track you to the market. If your marketplace is costly to run, some functionalities can be outsourced to AI for a fraction of the cost.

Read this article to discover the benefits of Custom MVP App Development for your marketplace.

AI for Writing Product Descriptions

Why?

It’s been estimated that the ideal length of product description is between 305 and 400 words. On average, it will take around 20 minutes for a seller to write a product description manually. In a small to medium-sized marketplace, there can be between 300 products to 3,000 (rough estimates). And in some marketplaces, it has been a common practice to outsource writing a share of product descriptions. The average rate is around $4–5 per product description. If you add things up, it is either between 100–1,000 hours in time or $1,200–15,000 in money. In addition, it is not a one-and-done task. Product descriptions need to be updated, and SEO-optimized. So, it is a pretty big chunk of work for a marketplace.

How can AI help?

AI can either do it for free completely or for a very small fraction of the cost. For example, let’s look at these two product descriptions:

100% Cotton Imported Pull On closure Machine Wash Rib-knit crew neck Side-seam construction minimizes twisting Left-chest pocket with sewn-on Carhartt label Tagless neck label Prev. Name: Workwear Pocket Short-Sleeve T-Shirt100% cotton The timeless design A must-have essential Minimalistic Appeal Easy Care Perfect Gift

One is an actual product description from Amazon, and the other one is generated in seconds by open-source AI — chatGPT. If you read closely, sure, you see that the one on the left provides more product-specific details, but the one on the right is nicely SEO-optimized. Of course, your seller will need to provide a detailed prompt for an AI to get a detailed description. But still, you get a catchier description by adding the AI-generated text. And it is always much easier to edit than to write from scratch.

There is an analog to chatGPT from Google — Bard AI. In general, the more detailed the prompt is, the higher the quality output you get.

Business Benefits

Basically, you can give your sellers the option to use suggested product descriptions. Enable them to modify them or use one as it is. It will result in faster and higher-quality product listings. Plus, they can experiment with different descriptions to see which ones sell best. Overall, these are 6 benefits for your AI-powered marketplace:

1. Creating well-crafted and engaging descriptions. Nobody arrives at an ideal product description from the first go. It may take a few iterations to write the right one.
2. SEO-optimization. Once the product description matches the item, it is a good idea to insert matching keywords. It will drive targeted traffic and improve the ranking.
3. Providing detailed information. If a seller is faced with the tiring task of writing a ton of product descriptions, they may do it halfway omitting some details and other information. If they have help, they can put in the effort to insert essential details carefully.
4. Customer-oriented. If you read through the AI-generated product description, you might notice its focus is on ‘selling’ words. It is more about what customer’s problems the product can solve.
5. Keeping up-to-date. Styles of writing product descriptions change. One day it should be a catchy one-liner. Next day, it is best to include a bulleted list of 2–5 words statements about the product. Trends change. There is a need to empower your sellers in addressing the change.
6. A/B testing. Sometimes, you just have to try and see what works best. A/B testing is a powerful tool to increase sales. For this, you need to have different product descriptions to check which one works best.

AI Image Enhancer for Product Images

Why?

Sellers are not always capable of producing high-quality images. High-quality means high-resolution images with a high concentration of pixels for clear images on big screens. In addition, images sometimes can be dark or include smudgy areas or other imperfections. For a regular marketplace, visuals play an even higher role than product descriptions. There is even a saying your marketplace is as good as product photos. When customers see the catalog, they see images, not descriptions. When they go to a product page, they see even more photos and zoom in to see the details. Then, they read the descriptions. (But remember, that product description is also what is ranked on search engines, so it is still important).

So the problem is that sometimes sellers will do a bunch of photo shooting in a rush. Or they will do it in an unprofessional way with bad lighting. Or they can send images over some apps that will resize and shrink them.

How can AI help?

There is a wide range of AI tools already such as HitPaw Photo Enhancer, Upscaler, or Deep Image AI to name a few. For example, here is a comparison collage from Deep Image AI.

On the left, you can see smudgy lines, and on the right, you can see the improved version. AI can also improve detalization. For example, if you want to include a close-up of something from the photo, you can again utilize AI. In the example below, the close-up would have normally been of bad quality if it was just an enlarged cutout from the original photo.

Business Benefits

Your marketplace powered by AI image enhancer will bring the following benefits:

1. Boost the visual appeal. The product images will be of high quality when it is needed, and all close-ups can be created to have just the right brightness, contrast, and clarity. Great visuals will easily grab shoppers’ attention. Consequently, you will see increased conversion rates.
2. Enhance product presentation. Imperfect images turn your shoppers away. When a viewer’s eye catches an imperfection — that’s very distracting. The user also will not feel as trustworthy towards the product. AI-enhanced images can provide clearer product presentation with higher accuracy and focus.
3. Strengthen your competitiveness. With the increasing competition among marketplaces, better images can help you stand out in a positive way. There is also another factor: the tools available won’t be missed by your competition. Keeping on top of things with the quality of the visuals contributes to both short-term gains and long-term goals.
4. Branding. If you enable your sellers in terms of image creation, it is only right that those images come out in a branded fashion. It can be a watermark of your marketplace or other branding tools. In the end, it will add to how recognized the brand of your marketplace is.
5. Cost reductions. Photo enhancement can be done without AI. One can outsource it to the professionals, or touch up the images by themselves using special apps. The first option involves spending money. The second option means time costs and a bit of a learning curve. Plus, you will have to control the content quality less, if your sellers are enabled to create good-quality visuals.

AI Image Generation

Why?

If done manually, image generation is quite a costly/time-consuming issue for marketplaces. Depending on the nature and size of the marketplace, there are different requirements for visuals. For example:

• Product images: one product image is never enough. You need pictures of this product from different angles and close-ups. In addition, the product might be presented in different colors. If you have a product in different sizes, you might want to have an image where you show the difference.
• Lifestyle images. These are the images of the product in daily settings to show shoppers how the product fits into real-world scenarios. If it is furniture, you would find room designs and modify them to include your product. If it is a piece of clothing, you would style it with other products. It can be expensive to do it manually by renting a flat and moving furniture. Or, in the case of accessories or clothes, it is not cheap to hire a model and a stylist.
• Infographics. If your marketplace sells services and you want to support the benefits of using this service with infographics, you also need to generate these visuals. These infographics allow for better and easy-to-perceive information.
• Promotional images. Promotion is a constant and regular process. You will need to generate different banners, visuals for SM posts, or graphics for newsletters.

Even a small marketplace will require somewhere between 100 to 500 product images per month. A ballpark for lifestyle images is around 20 to 100 a month. Promotional visuals and infographics can range between 10 to 50 per month. These are average numbers, and they can vary depending on the needs of your marketplaces and chosen strategies. For launching an MVP, needs in visuals might be low as it often starts as a narrow selection of a few dozen products. But it is a very short time when the need for visuals can be low.

How can AI help?

You can use open-source AI image generation, or opt for specialized AI solutions such as Midjourney. The latter has also quite a few alternatives such as Stable Diffusion, Fotor AI Image Generator, DALL-E 2, Adobe Firefly, Bing Image Creator, Hotpot.ai, and others. They are mainly text-to-image generators which are ideal for when your seller doesn’t have an image at all. Usually, you enter a prompt for an image. AI will take a minute and offer a few versions. Then, you can select a version and modify it to fit particular needs better.

Business Benefits

In addition to obvious cost and time efficiency benefits, there are the following business benefits of using AI for image generation on your marketplace:

• Creating personalized visuals. Since AI works off the given parameters, the capabilities for personalization and customization of the visuals are vast. Each of your sellers can use AI-powered options to create exact and unique image selections to best reflect their product range.
• Consistency. You can make sure that all of your product pages have approximately the same number of photos. It doesn’t play well when a customer opens one product page and sees 15 images. Then, the customer opens another one and sees only 1. You can also set the standard for the background, scaling, and angles. Of course, these depend on what your marketplace requires.
• Streamlining product image creation. Your marketplace will have a particular set of requirements that can be automated. For instance, the image size and cropping. Your web app will serve small images to mobile users. Desktop users will be served big images. The image will be cropped to create a card for the catalog, and it will display full-size on the product page.
• Scalability. This is essential for an MVP as it allows you to scale your marketplace with AI. One moment you need to verify 100 images, and in a month, it can easily be a thousand. To keep the quality of the content high, you need to be sure of the quality of production. When it is manual labor, it is excruciatingly hard or expensive. When you deal with automated processes, it is easier to be flexible and forecast the change.

AI for the Security of Your Marketplace

Why?

When a marketplace is just created, you naturally try to minimize barriers to joining. Therefore, you don’t put up much guard when the account is created or when a payment is made. Then, you would also offer some benefits or promotional bonuses for newcomers. Sadly, It always inspires fraudulent behavior. The number of issues range from fake accounts, referral abuse, and identity fraud to money laundering and return abuse. To monitor all the suspicious activity in a bustling marketplace takes either a smart system or prohibitive rules. It is virtually impossible to do with just human labor.

Also, remember the times when we moved from the ‘123456/qwerty’ password to ‘password must contain at least 1 special character and the uppercase letter’? These are long gone, and the security issue has escalated to a much higher level. To monitor those threats and potential frauds, you need to carefully monitor the activity.

How can AI help?

At its core, AI is a system that thrives on data analysis. It can take in large data sets and spot patterns and detect outliers. There are already AI-based solutions that can protect your marketplace from the majority of fraudulent activity. For example, Unit21 can protect your marketplace from all three issues:

• Account attacks
• Payment fraud
• Platform abuse

There are also other alternatives to Unit21 such as Hawk.ai or Onfido.

Business Benefits

The damage that comes solely from fake accounts is multifaceted. It ranges from devaluing your user base to losing money on the leads. Therefore, the careful handling of security and trust issues brings a lot of benefits. Only a few will be mentioned here:

1. Enhanced Trust and Reputation. Marketplaces are based on the effective collaboration of all those who are involved. Sellers need to trust their customers, customers need to trust their sellers. Similar levels of trust must be established between sellers-to-the-marketplace and shoppers-to-the-marketplace. There are also other stakeholders involved. If you allow ad publishers onto your platform and you claim to have a 100,000-user base when 20,000 of them are fakes, then it is a problem. Similarly, when you set the price for sellers to advertise on your platform and they get fake views, trust is going to be an issue.
2. Reduced Financial Losses. Scammers are often creative in their ways. For instance, a customer may send a fake receipt to a seller. The seller might not catch the fake. The customer ends up with a product and money. Or sellers might ask for prepayment for an item, and then disappear. These are just some common ones. Your revenue stream must be protected as well as your sellers and shoppers’ wallets.
3. Cost Savings. Yet again, monitoring all the activity on the marketplace becomes impossible manually quite quickly. You need an automated algorithm to help your team spot the activity and deal with it.

AI for Chatbots

Why?

The changing technological landscape not only provided new capabilities but also set sky-high new expectations. New technologies brought about a myriad of new touchpoints and factors that can potentially generate revenues.

Practically speaking, let’s imagine a scenario: you are a customer and you are considering a purchase. There are several questions on your mind: delivery, costs, assembling, warranty, etc.

Will you be browsing the website’s pages to find each of the answers? Or would you better call up a support number or chat with a person to find out answers in one go?

There is also a notion of conversational commerce. It involves an array of options, but the most relevant to our topic is that if you appear on the chat with a representative of a marketplace, will you receive any other useful product recommendation? Or maybe something you might like out of your preferences? Maybe there is a sale from your favorite seller coming up soon, would you be notified?

All these points require a fast answer on the chat or helpline, effective access to the required information for the customer, and swift responses. Humans can do that, but it is costly and not very flexible as you can imagine. If you today have 1,000 customers, and tomorrow this number grows 5-fold, do you hire 5 times more staff? And what if the next month, there is a problem and you get only 2,500 customers? Do you fire half of your staff?

How can AI help?

AI chatbots have been around for a good while to solve these issues and they have been improving. You can use one of the ready-made AI solutions for this, or build one of your own. After all, human-like touch is what makes your marketplace unique.

Business Benefits

Among the benefits are all of the usual ones: cost savings and scalability. In addition, you get:

• improved customer satisfaction rates,
• higher revenues, and
• save time for your sellers.
• personalized support for customers.

This gives you your customers’ loyalty and higher financial results.

AI in custom marketplaces for spelling, style, and grammar

Why?

Though this point isn’t one of the fundamental marketplace needs, correct grammar and spelling can be beneficial. Anywhere where your marketplace involves user-generated content, having good grammar is a sign of professionalism. For example, when you read a product description or go through a Q&A section, or whether it is a user review. If you read a positive user review and it is poorly worded, it will not seem trustworthy. If a seller answers a user question with a ton of mistakes, it will be a suspicious seller. Overall, the readability, credibility, and professionalism of your marketplace do depend on good grammar and spelling. As it is said, the devil lies in the details.

How can AI help?

There is, for instance, Grammarly AI that can help correct spelling and grammar. More so, it also indicates the tone. For example, if your seller writes a response to the customer, you want a polite and positive emoji to appear. Or at least, a ‘professional’ emoji. For example, let’s take this product and the customer question:

“Can we change rgb light color?”

The seller’s response might be:

#1 “I think no…its automated”

#2 “No. its in the description”

#3 “Thank you for your interest in our LED-light gaming earbuds. Unfortunately, the RGB light color on our product is not customizable. The color is pre-determined and cannot be changed. If you have any other questions, please let us know.”

The third response is the best. It is, by the way, AI-generated. Comparatively, the first answer is unprofessional. “Aren’t the seller supposed to be certain about what they sell?”. The second is simply rude and off-putting. And what about the ‘its’ in both of them? Clearly, a mistake. And quite a common one.

Business Benefits

The two top benefits of AI in custom marketplaces are:

• brand voice consistency,
• marketplace credibility.

Many marketplaces now require sellers to display a certain code of conduct in their communication with customers. They set certain norms of behavior. For shoppers too. With AI, you have a way of indicating key issues to sellers. You enable them to follow the standards of your marketplace. With that, you can make sure your customers see your marketplace as a place with polite and professional sellers.

As for credibility, error-free content exudes credibility. And also one might say that if the writer takes time to correct errors, it is a sign of respect for the reader. In this case, respect from the sellers for the customer. In addition, the sellers show appreciation for the customer’s time and effort to engage with their words.

Both of these benefits ultimately convert to more sales, more revenues, and happier customers.

Final thoughts on the future of AI in custom marketplaces

In conclusion, AI is revolutionizing the way we do business in marketplaces. From writing product descriptions to image enhancement and generation, security, grammar, and chatbots, AI can automate and streamline many of the processes that are essential to running a successful marketplace. However, there is more and will be more in the future. For example, there is AI-driven analytics. It is yet another exciting new feature that is gaining traction in the industry. By analyzing user behavior and preferences, AI can help marketplace owners make data-driven decisions. It then can improve user experience and drive sales. As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative features that will help us take our marketplaces to the next level. So, let’s embrace the power of AI and use it to create marketplaces that are smarter, more efficient, and more profitable.