Building an e-commerce brand with AI

Prototype products in minutes, for the cost of a latte.

Note: This post uses Midjourney V4. Some of the design and upscaling options have changed for V5.

Instead of spending thousands to prototype a new product, you can use AI tools to design, market, and test new ideas in a matter of minutes, for the cost of a latte.

Take the image above: the photos, title, and description were all created using AI. Let’s take a closer look at how it was done.

To follow along, you'll need access to:

• Midjourney

• ChatGPT

• remove.bg (optional)

• Canva (optional)

Huge thanks to reader Katrina McKinnon, content writer and founder of CopySmiths for the inspiration for this post!

Nerd Kit

For the purposes of this project, I wanted to create a new e-commerce brand: Nerd Kit. This hypothetical brand sells clothes and accessories to a tech-minded audience.

As the hypothetical CEO of Nerd Kit, I’m considering launching a new line of drinkware, but I don’t know what the demand is. I want to test the waters before investing tons of money into inventory.

Designing a product

Let's start by creating some product designs with Midjourney. If you're not familiar with how to use Midjourney, take a look at the getting started post.

Here's my first prompt:

"Coffee tumbler with circuit board pattern, gold lines, sleek, ultra detailed, photo realistic"

Top tip: Always try multiple prompts. Start with something basic, but experiment over time. And don't worry if it takes a few tries to get good output. Writing good prompts is like writing good marketing copy. It's a skill that takes practice.

If you're struggling to come up with prompt ideas, here are a few ways to find inspiration:

• Search Midjourney's gallery for images similar to what you want and read their prompts.

• Ask ChatGPT to generate a prompt for you.

• Use a tool like img2prompt to generate a prompt from an existing image.

• If you're really stuck, visit a paid marketplace like PromptBase to buy prompts. These marketplaces are very new, so buyer beware.

But even with our simple prompt, Midjourney creates great images:

The bottom right image looks intriguing - let’s create some variations.

These all look great, but the top right image really resonates. Using the Discord interface, we can upscale the image to a higher resolution.

Watch out! The upscaled images in Midjourney are not going to exactly match the lower resolution versions. There will likely be different or additional details.

Creating product photography

Depending on your Midjourney photo, you might want to skip this section. If you already have a great product image with an attractive background, you're all set!

In my case, I'd like to see if I can get a more approachable photo than an ethereal white background. As a first step, let's remove the background with remove.bg.

Once that's done, there are some options to add a background:

• Canva. The lowest cost option, Canva is free to get started and has some a huge library of assets.

• Photoshop. If you have access to Photoshop (and someone with the right skills), you can quickly make more product photos.

• Booth.ai. There are now companies (including Booth) selling AI-generated product photos. In practice, I wouldn't recommend this as it's difficult to get the right output. Plus, it starts at $199/month which is outside of this project’s budget.

Since I have zero Photoshop skills, I’ll be using Canva. Luckily, Canva makes it easy to grab a stock photo of an office desk to use with my tumbler. With a little bit of image editing magic, I now have a lifestyle photo to go with my product.

Branding the product

Now we have the concept in place, but there’s a lot of written content that needs to be completed. What should we name the product? Why should customers buy it? Luckily, we can generate all this using ChatGPT. Here’s a prompt to create some names:

You are an expert at branding and product marketing. My business, Nerd Kit sells clothing and accessories to tech-minded buyers. Our newest product is a beautiful coffee tumbler with a green and gold circuit board pattern. Come up with some potential names for the product.

Not bad! Personally, I'm a fan of Binary Brew. Let's go with that. Next, we'll generate a tagline.

The name of the product will be the Binary Brew Tumbler. Write some potential product taglines.

Let's go with #7: "Tech meets taste with the Binary Brew Tumbler." Next up are some product features and benefits.

Let's go with "Tech meets taste with the Binary Brew Tumbler." Write some product features and a list of potential benefits for the customer.

This saved me at least half an hour trying to write my own product description.

Buyer beware! ChatGPT has a tendency to hallucinate (lie with confidence). Don't blindly copy its output, do your homework and verify the product features.

Marketing the Binary Brew tumbler

As a bonus, let's get ChatGPT's thoughts on how we might wholesale this product.

What are some unique strategies for wholesaling products aimed at a tech audience?

This is excellent. I probably would have come up with one or two of these myself, but all five combined are incredibly useful.

Putting it all together

Once we have our content, we can build a product page in Shopify, WooCommerce, or your store of choice.

In practice, the next steps would be to either market the item as a pre-sale or put interested customers on an email waiting list. In either case, you could measure customer demand without committing to any design or inventory costs.

If you want to see it for yourself, you can visit the Nerd Kit Store - the password is “ai”.