One of the most time consuming tasks for any Shopify or e-commerce store owner is writing product descriptions. This has all changed since ChatGPT made it super simple for anyone to create product descriptions fast.
But what if you have an exiting Shopify store and you want to re-write all your existing product descriptions and also SEO meta information. Even actioning this one by one in ChatGPT is still very time consuming. Especially is you have 1000s or products.
Below you can see our quick and nasty method to re-write Shopify product descriptions and seo meta information at scale.
Key Takeways
- The tools you’ll need to re-write product descriptions
- Downloading Shopify products
- The setup using ChatGPT and Google Sheets
- Running the tools
- Uploading products with new descriptions to Shopify
- This method can also be used for other e-commerce platforms such as WooCommere or BigCommerce.
What You’ll Need
- a paid openai.com account
- GPT For Sheets
- Google Sheets
- Shopify Product Export
Why You May Consider Re-Writing Shopify Product Descriptions
There are a number of reasons you may want to re-write Shopify product descriptions and update SEO meta information, such as the SEO title and SEO description.
- Poor Quality: Your current products descriptions and meta information is simply poor quality
- Unique Content: You are using a vendor or dropshipper catalog upload or sync, which may mean your product descriptions and SEO meta information is identical to store owners that are using the same catalog. This has two implications. Firstly your content is not unique, which may mean your product pages may not rank in the search engines as well as they could, and secondly there is no point of difference for your customers.
There are other reasons, such as improving conversion rate optimization or legal implications. Whatever the reason, it’s long been a time consuming and ultimately costly task for store owners.
The following method will explain how to implement this and re-write 100s or 1000s of product descriptions and SEO meta in minutes, and upload them to Shopify.
If you’d rather just watch the video below, we walk through the same process.
Getting Started
The first thing you’ll need to do it gain access to the tools.
Openai.com
To leverage the power of AI for this task, you’ll need a paid Openai.com account, and access to the API. If you haven’t already got an account, head on over and sign up. To get your API navigate to –> View API keys
Copy your API key and save it somewhere.
Even though it does cost, it’s extremely cheap, and likely to update all your products will only cost you a few dollars. Very large stores it will be a little more.
GPT For Sheets
The GPT For Sheets addon for Google Sheets is feature rich addon that gives us the power to use ChatGPT within in a Google Sheet and easily work with large data sets.
Firstly make sure you’re logged in to your gmail account or associated account. Go to GPT For Sheets and install.
The GPT For Sheets Youtube channel has easy to follow tutorials on how to install, add your Openai.com API key, and an overview of how it works. Rather than going through all the steps here, you can watch the tutorials here: GPT For Sheets On Youtube.
For this method, you likely only need to watch:
Once installed, you’ll be able to see the addon here:
Now we’ll walk through the steps for re-writing product descriptions and SEO meta information.
Step 1: Downloading / Exporting Your Shopify Products
Head to your Shopify and export the products you wish to re-write. You can re-write all your products at once if you wish, but is does sometimes increase the error rate. (More on errors later.
Generally we try to run the sheet at around 100 products or less at a time. In most cases we may export one collection or one product type at a time.
When you click “Export”, a .csv file will either be emailed to you of downloaded to your local machine immediately.
Open the .csv file, and locate columns
- Title
- Body (HTML)
These should be column B & C
Keep the .csv file open, ready to copy those columns to the G Sheet Template.
Step 2: G Sheet Setup
You can either open a new G sheet with GPT For Sheets installed, or use this template.
First make a copy of the template (DO NOT ADD DATA TO THE RAW TEMPLATE FILE).
Make sure GPT For Sheets is active by viewing the Addon tab as mentioned above.
Name the copy of the template whatever you like. Close the original template URL.
Now you have open the G sheet template that has 2 tabs.
FILE: This tab is where you’ll add you existing Shopify product titles and Body (HTML) rows.
PROMPTS: This tab is simply where we store the prompts and associated formula for each column.
Step 3: Copy Existing Shopify Product Data To The G Sheet
Go back to the Shopify product expert .csv file that your opened previously, and located the columns for “Title” & “Body (HTML)”.
Select all for the column “Title”, copy (cntrl + C) and paste into the Title column in the G sheet (cntrl + v).
Continue to do the same for the Body (HTML) column.
Now navigate back to the “Prompts” tab, and copy the formula for the H1 title.
Paste this formula into cell C2 in the File tab.
After a few seconds, the re-written title will be displayed.
Now drag the cell down the column to continue loading each title. Generally we may only drag 50 to 100 cells at a time. If you load up too many before they complete, errors can occur.
Continue this process until you have completed the column
Now complete the same process for the description column (D), SEO Title (E) and SEO Description (F), using the correct formula from the prompts tab for each column.
Once complete, you will have a full sheet or re-written content.
A Note On Prompts
The prompts used here in row C1, D1, E1, and F1, can be adjusted to what you require. Feel free to use these, or create your own. The best approach is to go to ChatGPT and experiment with prompts that will work best for your use case. Then simply swap them in the sheet.
Step 4: Replace The Re-written Content In The Original .csv File
Go back to the .csv file product export. Delete the content in the columns labeled below, and replace with the content from the G sheet.
- Title –> Replace with content from C1. Be sure to label the column header as “Title”
- Body (HTML) –> Replace with content from D1. B sure to label the column header as “Body (HTML)
- SEO Title –> Replace with content from E1. Label the column header “SEO Title”
- SEO Description –> Replace with content from E1. Label the column header “SEO Description”
As mentioned above, it’s imported to ensure the header label in the .csv match what was present in the original Shopify download. Otherwise the import (Step 5) will not work correctly.
Step 5: Import .csv To Shopify
The last step is to simply import the completed .csv sheet back to Shopify.
Make sure to double check all steps first, and that columns and rows align. ie the Correct content aligns with the correct product.
You now have re-written your selected products in bulk leveraging AI with GPT For Sheets.
