Amazon has a new ambition for its giant online marketplace, and it’s using generative AI to execute the vision.
The company is already the largest e-commerce platform in the Western world, selling millions of products itself and supporting millions of third-party merchants who offer even more items through the platform and its warehouse and logistics network.
That’s not enough for Amazon, though. Recently, the company has been expanding its marketplace in new ways. This year, for example, Amazon launched a “Buy for Me” feature that recommends products from other brands’ websites and lets shoppers buy those from within the Amazon app.
An internal planning document obtained by Business Insider sheds new light on how Amazon is using AI to help these endeavors.
The document, from late 2024, describes a project, codenamed Starfish, that uses AI models to “synthesize” information from various data sources, such as external websites and images. It then generates “complete, correct, and consistent product information globally.”
The eventual goal of the multiyear project is to make Amazon the best source of product information for “all products worldwide,” the document added.
More listings, less time
Starfish is part of an effort to simplify product listings for third-party sellers. Amazon began rolling out elements of this in 2023 to help merchants craft stronger product descriptions from short inputs or individual URLs. It also introduced AI tools that automatically generate product images and video ads.
“Starfish enriches product data using LLM, improves Catalog at scale by filling missing information, correcting errors, rewriting titles, bullet points, and product descriptions to make them more relevant for the customer,” the document explained.
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In recent years, the company has stepped up efforts to improve its listing quality, removing billions of inactive or non-selling products from its marketplace, BI previously reported.
A $7.5 billion boost
Generating more product listings and making them accurate and compelling can potentially increase sales, which is crucial for Amazon’s e-commerce business to keep growing.
Manually creating listings is time-consuming for sellers, so speeding up this process could be a win-win for Amazon and its merchants.
Amazon’s internal document estimated that Starfish would contribute $7.5 billion in extra gross merchandise sales in 2025, thanks in part to driving better conversions and building a broader product selection.
GMS measures the total value of all items sold through the company’s e-commerce platform. $7.5 billion is a lot of sales, however, Amazon generates hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue from its Marketplace business.
Broader ambitions
Indeed, the internal document shows the Starfish initiative has much broader ambitions. Turning Amazon’s Marketplace into the top global source of all product information is a goal that puts the company on a track to potentially compete more with Google’s Shopping service.
One day, Starfish could scour the global web to collect mountains of data that would help the AI system auto-fill product descriptions by itself.
According to the internal planning document from late 2024, the new AI tool was expected to collect product information from 200,000 external brand websites this year by “crawling, scraping, and mapping external items to Amazon catalog.”
Many Big Tech and AI companies have bots that crawl the internet to scrape, collect, and index data from websites. Mapping is the process of organizing and displaying the extracted information. Amazon has its own crawler, called Amazonbot.
The company says on the Amazonbot webpage that this crawler collects information “to improve our services, such as enabling Alexa to more accurately answer questions for customers.”
It’s unclear if this bot is being put to work on the Starfish project, or whether the crawling and scraping parts of this initiative are still in the works.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on this part of the project, but shared other details with BI in a statement.
The spokesperson confirmed that Starfish is mapping data for certain features, such as the new “Buy for Me” recommendation system for external products.
“Amazon is continuously leveraging generative AI to enhance the customer and seller experience,” the spokesperson added. “This feature improves descriptions of products in our catalog for sellers, ultimately helping customers find the products they want and need.”
To measure Starfish’s effectiveness, Amazon is running A/B tests, internally comparing the sales of products that received AI enrichment and those that haven’t, according to the internal document. Amazon has also built a new bulk listing feature and plans to expand Starfish to additional countries later this year, it explained.
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