Case Study

How Schäfer Shop Achieves More Productivity With Automated Product Descriptions

schaefer-shop-sample

The Case

SSI Schäfer Shop GmbH has over 250,000 customers in 10 countries and sells thousands of products. For these, the company needs high-quality product descriptions in multiple languages.

The Challenge

Schäfer Shop asked themselves how they could manage to significantly reduce the time to market for a product and at the same time improve the quality of the product information so that the customer is well-informed and orders the right product at Schäfer Shop. Based on the high requirements for a product description, it takes the Schäfer Shop content team up to an hour to write a new product description by hand and again a lot of time, when content must be updated. This is too much effort to write all product descriptions manually. Their goals:
  • Generate high-quality product descriptions for all products
  • Increase the speed of product description creation and thereby significantly shorten the time-to-market for a product
  • Achieve a permanent up-to-dateness of the content

Text robots help us write descriptions for our e-commerce shop with 85,000+ articles.

harry olfertHarry Olfert, Head of Content Management, SSI Schäfer Shop GmbH

The Solution

The Schäfer Shop team knew they needed to find a way to create high-quality product descriptions and speed up the time to market. So they decided to use the content automation software AX Semantics.
  1. Automation of product descriptions

    With the AX Semantics content automation software, SSI Schäfer Shop can automatically generate product descriptions based on structured data from a PIM system. The configuration of the content is in the hands of the copywriters. This means that the specific requirements for text quality can be excellently implemented by the experienced staff of the Schäfer Shop.
  2. Fast time to market of the products

    After the initial configuration of the content automation project in AX Semantics, the team has generated new descriptions at the push of a button. This shortens the time until a product can go live enormously.
schäfershop-Beispiel
Automatically generated product description on the Schäfer Shop website

The Results

Using content automation, Schäfer Shop has already generated more than 85,000 unique and high-quality product descriptions. In addition, four other positive effects have emerged:
  1. Reduced costs:

    Instead of €26 for a manually created product description before, Schäfer Shop has now reduced costs to only €3 per description. That is only 13 percent of the previous costs.
  2. Higher productivity:

    Instead of manually creating 2,000 descriptions per year, editors now create 30,000 descriptions per year – that’s 15 times more.
  3. Higher shopping cart values:

    The average value of a shopping cart has increased by 10 percent. That means the improved product descriptions have led to customers buying more.
  4. Satisfied copywriters:

    Editors are grateful for the work relief AX Semantics provides them with for repetitive writing tasks.
Schäfer Shop about their work with AX Semantics (German)

Schäfer Shop

SSI Schäfer Shop GmbH is a leading European B2B company for office supplies and office equipment.
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