A new product arrives, you photograph it, and then you sit in front of an empty description box trying to find two hundred words to say about a candle. Forty products in, the descriptions are either three identical paragraphs or half of them say nothing at all.
It gets worse when the same product has to go out on your own store, on two marketplaces and in a feed that wants shorter copy and different fields. The writing is not hard. Doing it four times, consistently, for every new line, is.
This guide turns your product data into listings in one pass, in your own house style, with every claim traceable to something you actually know. Budget about three hours to set up, then roughly ten minutes per product.
What you are building
A sheet holding the facts about each product, a short house style file describing how your listings read, and an automation that produces a title, a short version, a description, bullet points and the fields each channel wants. Drafts land in a review column. Nothing publishes until you say so.
Tools: a spreadsheet, your store platform and whichever marketplace you sell on, an automation tool such as Zapier, Make or n8n, and an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude.
Step 1: the spec sheet is the source of truth
The model can write. It cannot know that your medium runs generous, that the dye is not colourfast above forty degrees, or that one batch came from a different supplier. Everything it writes has to come from a row you filled in.
- What it is, in the plainest possible words.
- Materials, dimensions, weight and capacity, and anything a customer measures before buying.
- Care and compatibility: washing, storage, what it fits and what it does not.
- Who it is for and the one problem it solves, in a sentence you would say out loud.
- What is in the box, and what is not.
- Anything you must not claim, and anything you are required to state.
That last field is the one people leave blank and regret. If your category has rules about what can be said, write the boundary into the sheet once, so every listing generated from it stays inside the line.
Step 2: write the house style file once
Take five listings you are happy with, paste them into the assistant, and ask it to describe the pattern rather than copy it.
Here are five product listings from my store that I am happy with. Describe the pattern they share as a set of rules I could hand to somebody writing a new listing: how the first sentence works, how long the descriptions run, whether bullets are used and what goes in them, the words and phrases that appear often, the words that never appear, how sizing and care are handled, and how the last line reads. Write the rules as plain instructions rather than as a description of my brand. Finish with a short list of things I never do.
Save the output. It goes at the top of every generation prompt below, and it is the only reason forty listings written in one afternoon do not read like forty listings written by four different people.
Step 3: generate the listing
Generate one product first and read it properly before you run forty. The first output tells you whether your spec sheet actually holds enough, and it is far cheaper to add a column now than to regenerate a whole catalogue later.
Write the listing copy for one product. HOUSE STYLE: [paste the rules]. PRODUCT FACTS: [paste the row]. Produce these, each under its own heading. TITLE: under seventy characters, plain, no superlatives. SHORT: one sentence under twenty five words for category pages and feeds. DESCRIPTION: following the house style rules and using only the facts given. BULLETS: five lines, each one a fact rather than an adjective, covering materials, size, care, what is included and who it suits. SEARCH TERMS: eight words or phrases a customer would actually type, with no brand names that are not mine. Rules: use only the product facts above. Where a fact is missing, write MISSING in capitals and carry on. Do not invent measurements, materials, origins, certifications or benefits. Do not make a claim that is not in the facts. Do not use the words luxurious, premium, perfect or must-have.
Read the first ten in full. After that, stop reading the prose and check only the title and the bullets, which are the two places a wrong fact does actual damage.
Step 4: one product, several channels
Each marketplace wants a different shape: a character limit here, a required attribute there, a bullet format somewhere else. Do not rewrite the product for each one. Reshape the same approved copy.
Here is the approved listing copy for one product: [paste it]. Rewrite it for [name the channel] within these constraints: [paste the channel limits, for example title length, number of bullets, description character limit, required fields]. Rules: do not add any fact, benefit or claim that is not in the approved copy above. Do not remove a care instruction, a measurement or anything stated as required. If a required field cannot be filled from the approved copy, list it at the end under MISSING FIELDS rather than inventing a value. Keep my house style.
Writing once and reshaping keeps the same product honest everywhere it appears, which matters when a customer compares your marketplace listing against your own site before deciding where to buy.
Step 5: wire it up, including the updates
- Keep one row per product in the sheet, with a status column holding draft, approved or live.
- Trigger on a new row, or on a change to any of the fact fields in an existing row.
- Call the assistant with the house style file and the row, and write the generated fields back into the same row.
- Refuse to move a row to approved while any field still contains the word MISSING.
- Once approved, push the fields to your store platform through a connector, or export the approved rows as the CSV your platform imports.
- Log the date each listing was generated and which version of the house style file produced it.
The update half is what makes this worth building rather than prompting by hand. When a supplier changes a material, or a size chart is corrected, you change one cell and every channel regenerates from the same corrected fact. Doing that by hand across three marketplaces is exactly the job that never gets done.
Step 6: work through the listings you already have
Most stores start this build because of the new products, then discover the real backlog is the two hundred listings already live, written over three years by whoever had an hour spare. Do not try to rewrite them all in one sitting. Work through them in batches, in the order that actually matters.
- Anything that generates support questions. Your inbox already tells you which pages are unclear.
- Your best sellers, because a small improvement to a page that gets traffic is worth more than a perfect page nobody visits.
- Products where a fact has genuinely changed: a new supplier, a corrected size, a discontinued colour.
- Everything else, twenty at a time, whenever there is a quiet afternoon.
The work is the same in every case. Fill in the spec sheet row from the existing listing and from the product in front of you, mark anything you cannot confirm as MISSING, and let the automation regenerate. The old copy is a source of facts, not a draft to be tidied, and anything in it you cannot verify should not survive the rewrite.
What changes
New products go live the week they arrive instead of sitting in a draft folder waiting for somebody to feel like writing. The listings read the same everywhere, the facts come from one place, and a correction is one edit rather than an afternoon of copying and pasting.
Producing useful copy at volume without staring at a blank page is the subject of Workflow 06: Automate Your Content, the AutomateFirst module about creating and scheduling content on a rhythm you can keep. This guide is one complete build from it, free. The playbook has seven workflows for one payment of $297, with a 30 day refund.
Workflow 06: Automate Your Content
Six more workflows, written exactly like this one
The AutomateFirst playbook covers seven repetitive jobs end to end, with the prompt library, PDF checklists and lifetime access. One payment of $97, no subscription.
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