The number of orders dropped sharply! A large number of sellers' listing titles were tampered with?

Since ChatGPT became popular, a wave of AI craze has been set off. Leading companies in many industries have announced their entry into the field of artificial intelligence or applied AI to their own businesses. E-commerce giant Amazon is no exception.

In 2023, Amazon launched a number of AI functions for sellers, helping them save a lot of labor costs. It also made full use of AI technology in platform auditing, pushing the intelligence of the entire platform to a new level.

However, it is well known that artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. While it brings convenience to people, it may sometimes cause considerable trouble to some people.

The number of sellers’ orders has dropped sharply, and a large number of listing titles have been automatically modified by AI?

For Amazon sellers, in addition to product pictures, the product title can be regarded as the first thing that consumers see. Its quality basically directly determines the click-through rate of a product.

However, during the New Year's Day holiday this year, some sellers discovered that the titles of their links had been inexplicably modified by Amazon, followed by a sharp drop in traffic and order volume.

According to the seller, when he first discovered that the title had been modified, he thought it was because the product was being copied by sellers on other sites, but after a thorough investigation, he could not find any clues of copy-selling.

Finally, I submitted a title modification through the help page, only to find out that Amazon had used its AI function to change my title.

After this incident was exposed, it quickly caused heated discussions among sellers. Many sellers said that they had encountered similar situations and their order volume was greatly affected.

"I had 3 variations modified yesterday, and the originally complex title was changed to extremely simple."

“My order volume dropped significantly after Amazon modified my listing title…”

Some sellers revealed that Amazon's use of AI to modify titles was not without warning. Previously, some sellers had received relevant emails, which stated that Amazon was piloting a new program that would try to use AI to generate richer product information.

It is worth noting that in the email, Amazon emphasized that sellers need to review the relevant content and provide feedback before the planned release date. If sellers have objections to the proposed changes, Amazon will retain the existing attribute values, that is, the listing will not be modified.

Although the modification was done by Amazon’s AI function, sellers reported that the modified titles only met Amazon’s requirements but did not comply with the platform’s algorithm, which would seriously affect the weight of the listing. Especially for mature products that encounter such forced title modifications, the system will re-capture keywords, greatly affecting traffic.

Sellers need to pay attention to emails in a timely manner to avoid listings being modified by AI, which would affect sales. Sellers whose titles have been modified can click on the help interface in the upper right corner of the Amazon backend to submit a request to modify the title. If "We have added a specific value to the Title using artificial intelligence technology" appears, it means that the title was modified by Amazon AI. Sellers can choose to remove the current Title through the prompts on the page below. After the application is successful, the title will be restored to its original value.

Judging from the current feedback from sellers, Amazon's new plan obviously needs to be improved, but judging from Amazon's previous move to launch a number of AI tools, it can be foreseen that the importance of AI on the Amazon platform will continue to increase in the future.

AI "cause trouble" incidents frequently occur, and sellers say they can't stand it

It’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s AI features to trap sellers.

It is understood that in the second half of 2023, Amazon launched an AI review analysis function, which will extract "hot keywords" in the reviews and mark them with different colors.

The labels are divided into good, medium and bad reviews. Good reviews are green labels with a check mark; medium reviews are gray backgrounds, reminding sellers which aspects are acceptable but still have room for improvement; bad reviews are yellow labels with a termination symbol, which is an obvious warning.

On the surface, it is an intelligent upgrade, which not only simplifies the processing of review content, but also creatively introduces a color-coded "hot keyword" label system to make product feedback more intuitive.

However, this will also make the requirements for sellers more stringent. For example, if the number of positive reviews under a label is more than twice the number of negative reviews, then the label will be displayed as positive, which may represent widespread customer satisfaction; otherwise, it will be negative, which may be the starting point of a listing crisis. If the difference between positive and negative reviews is not much, it will be judged as a medium review.

In addition, Amazon uses AI to summarize reviews, not only to identify common review themes, but also to provide concise summaries on product detail pages, highlighting some product attributes, such as performance, ease of use, and stability, and putting a check mark next to them to indicate that the product has these characteristics.

In this way, the advantage in the number of reviews that some big sellers are proud of will be infinitely weakened, and the neutral and bad reviews hidden in a large number of reviews will also be brought to the surface.

After the feature was launched, it was criticized by many sellers and consumers. For example, an inversion machine that can relieve back pain was described by Amazon AI as "a table that can relieve pain"; and among more than 3,000 reviews of a product, only 16 customers complained about rust, but Amazon AI directly generated a summary of "some customers reported rust on this product."

Amazon should optimize this function in the future to make its product evaluation more objective and comprehensive.

AI is still the future trend

In 2023, AI has been widely used in the field of cross-border e-commerce.

In addition to Amazon, e-commerce giants such as eBay and Shopify are betting on generative artificial intelligence and have launched many related tools for sellers and consumers.

In March of this year , Shopify announced that it would add the ChatGPT assistant to store applications and websites to solve the pain points of slow response rates and high labor costs of traditional customer service.

Many cross-border sellers were not to be outdone and said they would try to combine generative artificial intelligence with their business to complete tasks such as copywriting, customer service communication, and building independent websites, so as to further reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Although there are still many problems with the AI ​​tools on the market at present , it is foreseeable that with the continuous development of AI technology, it will inevitably further empower the development of the cross-border e-commerce industry.

McKinsey's report also shows that in the next few years, AI will bring an additional 20% of revenue to the e-commerce industry. Therefore, sellers should avoid being resistant to AI functions because of the inconvenience they bring in the short term.

Artificial intelligence is a major trend in future development. Only those sellers who can adapt to the changes of the times will have the last laugh.

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