Shopify – LLM powered page generation

THE CHALLENGE

How can we automate consistent content creation that is crucial for SEO, Google rankings, and building trust in an integrated admin experience.

The challenge we faced was addressing the time constraints of busy Shopify merchants who struggled to consistently add content to their websites, particularly blog posts. Despite the critical role of blog posts in SEO and search rankings, many merchants found it challenging to dedicate time to create and optimize content.

Role: I served as the Staff Product Designer working with Content and UX designers, Product, and Engineering team. I led initial design thinking from initial concept all the way to build. 

Simple controls, scalable across other areas of the Shopify Admin.

CORE GOAL

Helping new merchants jumpstart their Shopify store by creating quality content quickly.

Simple and easy page generation.

Refining for Usability

Even with a great product, there are a lot of steps to get set up and selling. Our core goal was to use LLM’s to create content quickly. This was the first area we started with magic content generation but we needed this component to be scalable across other parts of admin. In order to work for a wide variety of merchants we experimented with tones and special instructions to truly make unique content. This was part of the MAGIC Shopify initiative. As the Growth team we started this first, got it ready to our editions launch and since then a core team is maintaining it.

Ideation and Prompt Engineering

Working with a Staff Content Designer we created a prompt that would give consistent results and use existing store data to add context to the prompt. Data such as product category, location of store, product descriptions, etc.

We had to try a lot of variations and detailed prompting to get reliable results every time.

Research

This project had a tight deadline, but we still managed to take live stores and merchants and manually run prompts for them and give them back content. We then followed up with them to make sure the content was fitting. Our target was less than 5 percent of the content needed tweaking. The result, all the merchants we tested with agreed the content was valuable, especially about pages, return policies, and FAQ pages.

Sizing chart generation

Results:

The launch of the AI-powered page and blog post generator during Shopify editions received widespread praise from merchants and saw a significant increase in user engagement. Merchants appreciated the efficiency and convenience of the tool, which allowed them to focus on other aspects of their business while still maintaining an active and optimized blog presence.

  • New stores using this tool were able to get to first sale 15 days faster.
  • Utilized by more than 40 percent of new users
  • Groundwork for Shopify sidekick
  • Worked in tandem with a few other teams designing AI experiences in other parts of the product, regularly shared learnings and ideas