“Text robots are the future of e-commerce.” This is what Patrick Zackert, Product Manager E-Commerce at Otto, reports in the current article of the “Lebensmittelzeitung” (LZ) – the leading trade medium for the consumer goods industry – and puts forward a thesis that could revolutionize the entire industry.
The e-commerce giant Otto is already generating the description texts for the products of several Otto shops automatically using the Natural Language Generation Self-Service software platform from AX Semantics. To date, more than 100,000 texts have been created automatically using the tool.
The outcome: individual and unique content
The functionality is simple: Product information data from the shop system serve as the information basis for the software. The user defines logical rules, tonality and style in the tool and receives individual, grammatically correct texts at the touch of a button. There is an initial effort, but it is so manageable that the efficiency increases significantly after only a short time. If new products are added to the range, a product text is live within seconds. This also creates a significant advantage in terms of search engine optimization and conversion rates.
Higher quality than handwritten texts
In the LZ article Patrick Zackert describes the quality of the texts as higher than that of handwritten ones. There are fewer errors in the texts and a quality difference to handwritten texts is not perceived by the readers. In addition to up-to-date, complete and search engine optimized content, automated content generation offers a further advantage: According to Zackert, the company is not interested in savings; copywriters and editors are still needed for other tasks that the robot cannot and should not perform – and have more time for them, as they don’t have to write repetitive product descriptions.
About the collaboration of Otto & AX Semantics
The Otto GmbH & Co. KG has been a customer of AX Semantics since 2012, previously aexea. As part of this collaboration, texts were created for over 15 product categories, including tablets, home cinema systems and coffee machines. The projects developed for and with Otto have grown in parallel with the AX Semantics software and its new versions over time.
