Have you heard of ChatGPT? It’s a super smart AI chat bot that helped me write this product description for an imaginary cat-shaped bath bomb:
AI is growing every year and ChatGPT is the latest breakthroughs. Because it's here to stay, Etsy sellers like you and me should take advantage of this opportunity and use it to grow our Etsy shops.
In this article, you’ll see how you can use this revolutionary tool to speed up your workflow by automating tasks like writing listing description and customer messages.
ChatGPT is language model chatbot developed by OpenAI. It’s capable of surprisingly human-like conversations. It’s also capable of answering complex questions and requests. It’s much more powerful than previous AI tools.
One of the features of ChatGPT is that it remembers what you said earlier in the conversation. That means it allows you to modify or build on top of previous answers. We will go through examples of this later in this guide.
ChatGPT has two plans: A free plan, and ChatGPT Plus, which is $20/month. Plus has the following benefits:
You can register here to use ChatGPT, but there are times that they stopped accepting new users because of the high demand.
Being a powerful chatbot with a huge set of data from the internet, there are many ways ChatGPT can help you with different Etsy shop tasks. In general, you’ll get the best results if you give it a detailed prompt, and further modify the answer with follow-up prompts.
After testing it extensively, here are some aspects that I find it particularly good at:
Let’s get into some use cases of how ChatGPT can help your Etsy shop:
Prompt:
I sell (describe your product) on Etsy. Can you write a product description for me?
One of the ways you can use ChatGPT is to write your Etsy listing description. In general, it follows good copywriting best practices:
The first product description it generates could be a bit generic as it addresses multiple potential products. In your follow-up prompt, you can ask it to write for a specific product. Make sure to give it more details about the product like its style, colour, flavour, size, etc. ChatGPT will adjust the product description accordingly to fit your product using a similar structure to the first answer.
Some follow-up prompt ideas include:
Example:
Prompt:
Write a reply for this customer question about (describe the product): “(message from customer)” The answer should be: (your stance, decision in point form).
ChatGPT can also be a capable customer service assistant. It can help you reply to your customer enquiries when using the right prompts.
If you want the best results, I recommend giving it some key points to work with. If not, it’s possible that ChatGPT would generate an answer that contradicts your intended decision.
You can further modify the response with follow-up prompts like:
Example:
Prompt:
I sell (describe your product). List 20 potential questions that my customers on Etsy would ask me.
This is a good way to anticipate some general questions that your customers may ask you. You can use these questions to set up the Etsy message saved replies. This way you can speed up the day-to-day process of running your Etsy shop. You can even ask ChatGPT to answer specific questions with follow up prompts.
Example:
Prompt:
I sell (describe the product) on Etsy. Can you give me a list of listing tags?
In my experience, usually the tags generated are quite generic and overly competitive. But it could serve as a good starting point for brainstorming long-tail keywords that you may have missed.
If you’d like more tailored answer, you can try “Here are some extra information about my product: (more description about your product like style, colour, material, etc). Can you give me more specific Etsy listing tags?”
Example:
Prompt:
Give me Instagram post and reel ideas for my Etsy shop selling (describe your products)
ChatGPT is also capable of generating Instagram post and reel ideas. It can give you some general directions to follow when creating your social media marketing content.
After using the above prompt, you should get a few post and reel ideas. You can then ask it to elaborate on a particular idea that you like by typing “Can you give me a detailed instruction for point x?”
Another useful follow-up prompt would be “Can you write a fun post caption for idea x?”. You can also ask it to generate relevant hashtags for the caption.
Example:
Other than the use cases above, I've also experimented using ChatGPT for other aspects for your Etsy business:
I’ve put together a comprehensive and constantly updated course on ChatGPT - Supercharge Your Etsy Shop With ChatGPT.
This course is exclusive to members of GYC Etsy Academy.
As you can see from the examples above, ChatGPT can be a very helpful tool for your Etsy shop, but it’s not without its limitations:
It doesn’t have access to current market data on Etsy, which means it doesn’t know whether a niche is too competitive or not popular enough. As you can see from the ‘Listing tags’ example, most of the tags that it generated are highly competitive, like “digital planner” and “organiser”.
If you use the keywords generated directly from ChatGPT in listing titles and tags, it’s unlikely that you will see an improvement on Etsy search ranking.
As an Etsy seller, you’ll need to do market search yourself to find the long-tail keywords that are high demand with manageable competition in your niche. You can use Etsy SEO tools to do that, or learn how to improve your sales in our GYC Etsy Academy 2.0.
Etsy shoppers are unlikely to read if they see a big wall of text in product description, shop announcement, about section, etc. ChatGPT has the tendency to generate paragraphs of text. Sometimes you would need to step in and re-format the text generated by ChatGPT to make it more readable. Some ideas to do that include:
As ChatGPT has limited knowledge of events after 2021 at the time of writing, some of the information it generates could be outdated. I asked it about the fees of selling on Etsy:
Here, other than the outdated transaction fee of 5% (it increased to 6.5% in 2022), the information about Etsy payment, direct checkout and digital product fees are also inaccurate. You can check out this guide for the most up-to-date information.
Sometimes ChatGPT can be very confidently wrong. Take this funny math question for example:
Despite the limitations mentioned here, ChatGPT is still a powerful tool that can help you and your Etsy shop. It is a great opportunity for Etsy sellers like you to become more productive in your creative workflow.
So go try out ChatGPT for your Etsy business today! And be sure to get my course - Supercharge Your Etsy Shop With ChatGPT - by joining GYC Etsy Academy 2.0.
