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AI Tools for Ecommerce Teams

What Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools actually are, why ecommerce teams are using them, and what you can do with one right now—no setup required.

Last updated 2026-02-24

Summary

AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT are conversational assistants you can use immediately—no training data or IT setup needed.

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  • Ecommerce teams use them for repetitive, language-heavy work: product descriptions, email campaigns, customer feedback analysis.
  • They're best at volume and first drafts, not strategic decisions. You edit, they accelerate.

You’ve probably heard that your competitors are using AI. You may have tried it once and gotten something mediocre. Or you’ve been meaning to look into it but weren’t sure where to start.

This article covers what AI tools actually are, why they’re particularly useful for ecommerce work, and what you can do with one today.

What we mean by “AI tools”

When people say “AI tools” in this context, they mostly mean large language model (LLM) assistants—conversational tools you interact with by typing. The most widely used ones are:

  • Claude (made by Anthropic)
  • ChatGPT (made by OpenAI)
  • Gemini (made by Google)

All three work similarly: you describe what you need in plain language, and the tool generates text in response. No code. No special training. You just write to it like you’re explaining something to a smart colleague.

This is different from older AI tools that required training data, machine learning pipelines, or dedicated IT resources. These tools are ready to use the moment you open them.

Why ecommerce teams in particular

Ecommerce operations involve enormous amounts of repetitive, language-heavy work:

  • Writing and rewriting product descriptions
  • Adapting copy for different channels (marketplace, email, social)
  • Pulling insights from customer reviews and surveys
  • Drafting email campaigns and subject lines
  • Standardizing inconsistent supplier-provided data
  • Documenting processes and SOPs

Most of this work is high-volume and time-consuming, but the individual tasks follow recognizable patterns. That’s exactly where AI tools shine. They’re much better at “write me 40 variations of this description in this tone” than at strategic decisions that require judgment about your specific business.

What you can do right now

You don’t need any setup to get value from an AI tool. Open Claude or ChatGPT and try any of the following:

Rewrite something. Paste in a product description that’s not working and ask it to make it clearer, more persuasive, or match a specific tone. Compare the output to what you had.

Summarize reviews. Copy 20 customer reviews from any product and ask: “Summarize the main things customers like and dislike about this product.” You’ll have a VOC summary in under a minute.

Draft an email. Give it a brief: product name, sale percentage, audience segment, and ask it to write a campaign email. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll give you a draft faster than starting from scratch.

Clean up data. Paste messy, inconsistent product attribute data and ask it to standardize the formatting. It handles this remarkably well.

The results won’t always be perfect. Iteration is part of the process—but even a rough first draft that you edit is faster than writing from scratch.

Where SkillShelf comes in

AI tools are powerful by default, but they work even better when given specific, carefully crafted instructions. That’s what skills are: pre-written instruction sets built for particular ecommerce jobs.

Instead of figuring out how to prompt an AI tool to write product descriptions, you can install a skill that already knows how to do that job—including asking you the right questions, handling edge cases, and producing output in a useful format.

Browse the skill catalog, or if you want to understand more about what AI is actually good (and bad) at before diving in, read the next article.