Product photo is enough

Amazon offers AI-generated advertising for retailers

For an AI-generated suggestion of an item description, photos of the products in question are usually sufficient.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com)

Amazon is now using artificial intelligence to generate services for the many retailers on its global online marketplace. In addition to AI-generated product descriptions, this also includes marketing texts, images and advertising. Dharmesh Mehta, the Amazon Vice President responsible for the marketplace, said.

"We are just at the beginning, but in the short time since the launch of these features, we already have 30,000 sellers here(in Europe, editor's note) using these offers," Dharmesh Mehta, the Amazon Vice President responsible for the marketplace, told dpa during a visit to Munich. According to Mehta, photos of the products in question are now sufficient in many cases for an AI-generated suggestion of an item description.

According to Mehta, Amazon AI can also take on creative tasks that were previously the domain of humans: "So many sellers not only generate product descriptions, they also want to advertise them. And so we create ads for them." For certain ads that Amazon generates in this way, click-through rates (CTR) can be up to 20 percent higher than for advertising based on standard product images.

The latter is an indicator that measures the success of online advertising by the number of clicks. According to Mehta, before a computer-generated ad is activated, it is presented to the sellers and checked by them: "In effect, we generate a proposal for the seller."

Germany is Amazon's second largest market
The Group's online marketplace now has two million retailers worldwide, 47,500 of which are in Germany and 125,000 in the EU. According to the US parent company's annual report, Germany was the second-largest market after the US in 2023 with sales of just under 37.6 billion dollars (around 35.1 billion euros), albeit with a huge gap: at 395.6 billion dollars, US revenue was more than ten times as high.

In addition to online retail, these consolidated sales figures also include other Amazon services such as streaming subscriptions and the operation of cloud data centers.

750 million products sold
According to Amazon's German headquarters in Munich, the 47,500 retailers in Germany sold 750 million products last year in purely quantitative terms, 25 million more than in 2022. Last week, Amazon announced further investments in Germany amounting to ten billion euros. Of this, 8.8 billion will go towards the expansion of cloud services, with the remaining 1.2 billion going towards logistics, robotics and two new company headquarters in Munich and Berlin.