A tale of two PDPs: How CPG brands are transforming product detail page workflows with generative AI

If you’re a consumer packaged goods (CPG) leader, you already know the importance — and exhausting, resource-intensive process — of creating product detail pages. A well-crafted product detail page (PDP) is fundamental to the buying process, providing essential information that helps consumers make informed decisions.

A large CPG company may sell products in 100+ countries across hundreds of eRetailers, requiring thousands of PDP variations. Factor in ongoing SEO updates, seasonal promotions, and annual refreshes, and the workload quickly becomes overwhelming — impacting both efficiency and revenue. Given its complexity, PDP creation is an ideal starting point for CPG brands adopting AI in their mission-critical workflows. Platforms like Writer improve this process, making AI integration both efficient and impactful.

Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We make it easy for organizations to deploy AI apps and workflows that deliver impactful ROI. We recently hosted virtual office hours to help CPG leaders streamline their PDP workflows and get hands-on AI training. Led by Head of CPG Industries Kushala Silva, Solutions Marketing Lead Christine Tran, and Customer Architecture Manager Smit Shah, the session tackled key challenges in PDP creation and showcased how two brands successfully automated their workflows with generative AI.

Summarized by Writer

• CPG companies face challenges creating and managing high-quality, frequently updated PDPs to enhance discoverability and conversion in the D2C eCommerce market.
• A global cosmetics company reduced PDP creation time by 50% by leveraging the multilingual capabilities of Writer.
• The pet care division of another leading brand reduced their legal review process from four weeks to two to three days using the generative AI capabilities of Writer.
• Writer AI Studio helps create no-code PDP apps. This improves the process by defining inputs, selecting AI models, setting content requirements, and generating copy in seconds.

The increasing importance of PDPs for consumer packaged goods during an eCommerce boom

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) eCommerce is rapidly outpacing the traditional retail world in terms of growth, with an 8% growth rate in 2024 compared to a 3% growth rate for brick-and-mortar retail. CPG companies have long relied on third-party retailers, but consumer demand for D2C products means you may need to rethink some of your mission-critical workflows.

This means strengthening your digital marketing strategies and providing a strong online buyer experience rivaling digitally native D2C brands. In a time when most shopping occurs via search bars rather than in-store, high-quality product details on different eCommerce sites are your key to winning customers.

“…Your competition also has a strategy around direct-to-consumer,” Kushala Silva points out. “They are also posting their products ‌on all these different channels. How in your organization today are you driving discoverability? How are you making sure your products are not only now visible, but converting and driving revenue out of that?”

To succeed, CPG brands must focus on two key factors — visibility and conversion. But achieving both comes with challenges.

Increasing discoverability on multiple retailer platforms

CPG brands need to make sure that their products appear in prominent positions on retailer and eCommerce platforms. You don’t want your product buried in the fifth row of the tenth page — you need it to be visible.

Each channel has a different algorithm, which requires personalized PDPs wherever you’re listing.

“Now you need to know what is walmart.com’s or the amazon.com’s or kroger.com’s algorithm in terms of prioritization,” Silva says. “And these things change all the time. So you are literally at the mercy of the organization’s algorithm.”

Improving operational efficiencies and reducing cost

Managing PDPs at scale is costly and time-consuming. Each stock-keeping unit (SKU) requires multiple versions for different regions, annual updates, and SEO adjustments — draining resources and impacting revenue.

“Last week, I was talking to one of [our] customers,” Silva says. “One of their divisions has about 200 SKUs. Now these two hundred SKUs are actually converted into somewhere around 16,000 description pages. Imagine 16,000 description pages just for 200 SKUs.”

This requires a significant amount of resources, both internal and external. Internal teams that should be focusing on market mix analysis and pricing strategies are instead spending their time creating and maintaining these pages. Agencies are also heavily involved, but the sheer volume and constant updates make it a costly and inefficient process.

Accelerating speed to market

According to Silva, retailers typically run brand promotions 20 to 22 times a year, not counting major holidays like Christmas, Black Friday, or Valentine’s Day. “Imagine the sheer amount of assets that you need to create to be ready for these events,” he points out.

CPG brands must create and update a large volume of assets quickly — including product images and copy — while making sure they’re high-quality and optimized for each event. It’s a resource-intensive task that can divert focus from other critical priorities, like market analysis and new product launches.

To see how these challenges play out in real-world scenarios, let’s look at two companies that teamed up with Writer to successfully implement generative AI in their PDP workflows.

How a cosmetics company addresses limited-resource markets

A leading cosmetics brand in the consumer packaged goods industry partnered with Writer to solve challenges faced by their teams serving global markets. While the US team had ample agency support, smaller teams in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) dealt with less agency spend, fewer resources, and higher costs. Despite their expertise, many PDPs were deprioritized, affecting discoverability and revenue.

Starting with the French market, they used the multilingual capabilities of Writer to adapt PDPs for three key retailers and refresh keywords. The team saw a 50% reduction in the time spent on creating, adapting, and refreshing PDPs. A process that once took 20 minutes was now completed in just 7 minutes, thanks to using generative AI at various points in the workflow. Now, they’re expanding their use of generative AI to even more markets and brands.

How a pet care company augments their internal digital shelf teams

CPG brands aiming to control the customer experience and build loyalty must prioritize their digital shelf. Generative AI can boost traffic and reduce time spent creating PDPs.

The pet care division of a leading brand had a small, internal digital shelf team responsible for the entire PDP lifecycle. They manage everything in-house — from creating high-quality product images to copywriting to updates — without agency support. To address these challenges, the company partnered with Writer to enable their digital shelf team with generative AI.

“This was a really great opportunity to actually get everybody together in the US headquarters,” Tran says. “We had a whiteboard. We had all the key stakeholders in the room, and we talked more broadly about what’s possible. We walked through all of their processes and work workflows, and we broke those workflows down step by step.”

By the end of the half-day workshop, they had a fully mapped PDP creation workflow. Partnering with Writer, they built custom AI applications for different parts of the process — like creating universal copy and adapting it to the dozens of retailers they work with.

The team also mapped how the workflow interacts with other functions, like legal reviews, which went from four weeks to just two or three days with Writer.

These time savings are critical, but the real impact is on revenue. Faster time to market, more updated pages, and improved discoverability are driving measurable results.

How to automate PDP workflows with AI

71% of CPG leaders have adopted AI in at least one business function in 2024. As Silva explains, generative AI is transforming critical D2C workflows like product pages.

Here are three key priorities for implementing AI in your PDP workflows: 

• Discoverability: This isn’t a static priority. Each organization, retailer, and channel has its own evolving algorithms — so your product needs to be continuously updated to stand out in the right places.
• Automation: PDPs are a mission-critical workflow. And with the sheer volume of PDPs required to run your business, automating certain manual tasks is crucial.
• Concise PDPs: Writer-created, concise PDPs will outperform manually created ones. “What that means is that you are going to drive your discoverability, and the growth in the discoverability will give you revenue for your organization,” Silva says.

Big book of generative AI use cases for retail and consumer goods

Read the guide

Build no-code PDP creation apps with Writer

Let’s see how a PDP creation app works in Writer. We’ll use a sample haircare product.

The app pulls details from your product information management (PIM) system — name, descriptions, benefits, and usage instructions — and generates retailer-specific copy for Amazon and Sephora with a few clicks.

For Amazon, it creates a product name (200-character limit with keywords), long and short descriptions, bullet points, benefits, and usage instructions. Sephora has different requirements, like varying lengths and structures. But the app adapts accordingly, tailoring copy for both retailers in seconds.

“The way we build these out is we have this tool called AI Studio,” Shah says. “You don’t need to be a developer — anyone who’s comfortable writing a prompt ‌for an LLM, anyone who’s comfortable using ‌an AI chatbot should be able to learn how to create what we call a no-code text generation app.”

Here’s the quick process of AI Studio:

• Define inputs: Select data from your PIM.
• Choose models: Pick the AI model for each prompt.
• Set requirements: Define structure, length, and specific needs.
• Generate copy: Input data, and let the app do the rest.

If you’re not ready for no-code AI app creation, start with our pre-built PDP creation app. Take a product tour here.

PDP workflows are just one of the many ways CPG companies are reinventing their business operations with AI. There are plenty of other use cases for retail and consumer goods, like breaking down silos for research and development teams or enabling customer support agents with a knowledge assistant.

Want to see how AI can improve your PDP workflows? Watch the full webinar and partner with Writer to transform your mission-critical workflows.