Action is an, originally Dutch, international discount store-chain providing mostly non-food products for affordable prices. Its unique formula primarily focused on physical stores which were selling cheap products. This often results in customers going to the store just for some batteries and coming back with 10 other products which they initially didn’t need.
It appeared that there was no demand for online selling of products due to low prices; shipping costs would make it less attractive for consumers to buy their products online. Then, in March 2020, COVID19 affected the brand’s unique formula: physical stores had to close because of government measures. This required Action to think about the future: it was unknown how long these measures would take, and expenses still needed to be paid. Moreover, it appeared that on marketplaces, Action products were offered against higher prices than in-store, simply because of convenience. For the board, this provided sufficient proof for the fact that there was a demand to be able to buy Action products online because this is more convenient for customers.
Challenge
Action offers an extremely wide range of products in many different categories. All these products need to be labelled with information and characteristics, to inform the customer so he will make the right choice. However, since Action focused on selling through their physical stores, there barely were any product descriptions available. With so many products, it is extremely time-consuming and nearly impossible to manually write product descriptions. Usually, you can write similar product descriptions within the same product category. But when your store has products in as many categories as Action does, this gets a little more complicated. Not only do these product descriptions need to be sufficiently informative, but they also need to be unique. Google and other search engines do not appreciate duplicate information and providing your website with the same texts all over will lead to a decreased findability on search engines. This leads to the second requirement of writing product descriptions: uniqueness.
Solution
Powertext.ai is a smart text generation platform that uses smart algorithms to generate unique and qualitative product descriptions for organizations that offer many products. Product data is implemented into Powertext and with just one click, thousands of product descriptions can be generated. However, due to Action’s huge amount of product data and differences within product categories, a proof-of-concept was executed to see if Powertext could be useful for Action. This proof-of-concept was successful and worked as follows: when (new) product data is uploaded into the tool, a product category is suggested by the tool. Subsequently, when new products are classified in a certain category, the product data within this category will be used in order to generate unique descriptions for the new product.
Action decided to start selling online, which allowed the brand to work outside of their national boundaries. With the help of Powertext.ai, the retailer is now also able to sell its products to customers in other countries. The smart tool makes this possible by generating product descriptions in multiple languages. Since Action was planning to sell their products to customers in France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Czech Republic, the brand was extremely satisfied with the translation option in Powertext.ai.
Result
Action is now able to provide their entire online product portfolio with unique product descriptions. These product descriptions are informative and unique, which will contribute to an increased findability in search engines. Increased findability may also lead to an increased conversion rate. Moreover, product descriptions can almost instantly be translated to all languages that Action wants to support on their website. This can also positively influence the company’s international success.