ChatGPT & WooCommerce: 5 Ways to Use AI in Your Online Store

📚 Table of contents:

1. Set up an AI chatbot
2. Rewrite product descriptions
3. Research similar products for comparison
4. Come up with keyword ideas
5. Generate social media content

1. Set up an AI chatbot ⚙️

This approach to using ChatGPT & WooCommerce hinges on a plugin. You’ll also need an OpenAI API key to connect the plugin to ChatGPT. OpenAI will bill you for using its API, but rates are very low for simple queries, which are what will power the chatbot.

The plugin we recommend using is called AI Engine, and you’ll need to use the premium version. You can use it to connect ChatGPT with WooCommerce and set up a chatbot you can “train” with information about your store and its products.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you’ll need to enter your OpenAI API key by going into the AI Engine → Settings tab and looking for the API Key field:

After entering your API key, go to the Chatbots tab and select the Default option under the Site-Wide Chat menu. This will add the chatbot to every page in your WooCommerce store:

Here’s what the chatbot will look like if you’re browsing the store as a visitor. It’s a simple live chat screen, but one powered by ChatGPT:

If you use the free version of the plugin, the chatbot won’t be able to access your site’s information and use it for context. That means it will reply to users, but it will give information that might not have anything to do with your store.

To fine-tune the chatbot, you’ll need to train it and give it information about your store, so it can give accurate replies. This process might take a while, but it can be a highly effective alternative to using live chat if you don’t have staff that can reply to customers.

2. Rewrite product descriptions ✍️

If you run a store with a large product catalog, you know that writing product descriptions can be a time-consuming process. At some point, you might find yourself repeating information or writing snippets you’re not happy with.

We don’t recommend using ChatGPT to write product descriptions from scratch because it doesn’t understand the intricacies of each product. Even if it can generate a passable description, it’ll do so with outdated information if it can’t connect to the web.

What you can do is prompt ChatGPT to take a description you write and generate dozens of variations, which it can do in seconds. In this example, we give it a product description as a prompt and ask it for 20 variations of it:

The goal of using this approach is not to steal product descriptions from competitors, but to get your creative juices flowing. Having access to basically endless variations of a product’s description can enable you to pick the style and voice you prefer and tweak it a bit to get the ideal results.

For extra points, we recommend expanding on the initial prompt to include information about what kind of customers the descriptions are targeted at. You can also tell ChatGPT what kind of “voice” to use to get results that align more closely with your brand.

3. Research similar products for comparison 🔎

It’s worth noting that this method only works if you have access to a ChatGPT Plus subscription. That is because you need to use plugins in order for ChatGPT to be able to connect to the web. That element is necessary if you want to use it for product research.

The main ChatGPT plugin you can use for web access is called WebPilot. You can use it to ask ChatGPT questions about specific web pages:

Install the plugin and then select it when using ChatGPT-4 (which the Plus subscription gives you access to). With the plugin active, you give ChatGPT prompts such as “Make a list of alternatives to this product: yourwebsite.com/productid.”

Our results with this approach vary a lot, depending on the prompt and the product. The plugin will look for information online that compares the initial product to others and return that information. You can ask it for additional options and to look for similar items that fulfill specific criteria.

You can use this information to analyze competitors for the products you’re selling. This data will give you insight into what options customers have, so you can optimize your offerings and make them more attractive to potential buyers.

4. Come up with keyword ideas 💡

If you run a WooCommerce store that uses content to drive traffic, you probably spend a lot of time researching keywords and coming up with related topic ideas. There are two ways you can go about using ChatGPT to come up with keyword ideas to make that work easier. The first approach involves using the WebPilot plugin, which only works if you have access to a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

We’ve discussed this plugin in one of the previous points, so just to remind you, the plugin enables ChatGPT to access the web. This means that you can give it a URL as part of your prompt. In this scenario, we use it to ask ChatGPT what keywords a page is optimized around:

You can use this approach to analyze the top URLs in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for keywords you want to rank for. This will give you some insight into what keywords those pages are optimized for without having to go through the content.

Another way to use ChatGPT to come up with keyword ideas is to ask it for them directly. For example, you can ask the tool to give you a list of keyword ideas and potential topics for them based on a specific niche:

Keep in mind that the results you get will not include any information about keyword difficulty or search volume. This is purely for brainstorming, so if you like any of the ideas you see, you’ll need to use a keyword research tool to check if they’re worth pursuing.

5. Generate social media content 📱

If you struggle to generate social media content such as tweets (or Xs) and Facebook posts for your store, you can use ChatGPT to help you come up with ideas. Nowadays, every online store needs a presence on social media, so if you’re not active on the platforms where your customers are, you’re missing out on engagement and sales.

The approach here is simple: you can just ask ChatGPT to generate dozens of ideas at a time geared toward specific platforms. For example, if you have a Christmas sale coming up, and you want to tweet about it, you can give the service a prompt such as “Give me 20 ideas for tweets for a Christmas sale for a sporting goods store:”

ChatGPT can be relatively good when it comes to understanding context. If you ask the tool for tweets, it will include emojis and hashtags, which are essential to most social media marketing campaigns.

It’s important to understand that the content you generate using this approach will not be perfectly tailored to your store. You can include additional context in the prompts to make them focused on the kind of products you sell, but ultimately, you’ll need to edit and customize the posts that you like. If you simply copy and paste what ChatGPT gives you, your social media feeds can end up looking very generic.

Conclusion 🧐

There are a lot of fun and useful ways to use ChatGPT with WooCommerce. As long as you’re aware of the tool’s limitations and how to use it effectively, it can be useful to lighten the workload of running a store and to make it more engaging for visitors.

If you’re not sure how to use ChatGPT & WooCommerce together, here are some suggestions to get you started. Some of these will require you to use ChatGPT Plus, but it’s not strictly necessary in most cases:

1. ⚙️ Set up an AI chatbot.
2. ✍️ Rewrite product descriptions.
3. 🔎 Research similar products for comparison.
4. 💡 Come up with keyword ideas.
5. 📱 Generate social media content.

Do you have any questions about how to use ChatGPT with WooCommerce? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

Keep reading the article at CodeinWP. The article was originally written by John Hughes on 2023-09-01 07:00:00.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.