Make AI Work for your Small Retail Business

1. Class Introduction: Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Ronnie Hermosa, and this course is for non technical teams who feel a bit overwhelmed by AI. Maybe you have been using Chat CPT. You've been using it to rewrite emails or maybe brainstorm your social media post. But if I ask you, could you plug AI into your everyday workflow and confidently say that you are saving time, you probably would hesitate. And that's what I want to fix right here with this class. This is a practical course. Not going to overwhelm you with 50 different tools or bore you with theory. We'll focus on a small set of workflows you can actually use on your business tomorrow, like finding new markets, communicating more clearly with international buyers, and showcasing your products under their best light. I'll also share hands on prompts and real use cases you can plug straight into your day to day work and that even if you don't consider yourself tech savvy. The goal is simple. Work faster, reduce busy work, and make better decisions with less effort. And ideally, you will also save money because you stop outsourcing things you can handle in quick context, the core of this class comes from a live workshop I delivered last week to 30 plus W FTO members. So that is ethical and fair trade brands. Most of them were in fashion and retail selling products like clothing, home decor, and toys. I decided to turn that workshop into this class because these workflows are too good to stay within that one Z honestly, because they apply to pretty much any retail business. By the end, you'll know how to use AI as a daily assistant, how to do better research, how to get AI to write strong prompts for you, how to review your website through the eyes of your target buyers, and how to improve product photography using an AI image generator. In the course, I'll be using Leonardo AI. To generate my photos. But if you prefer, you can use any other tool like HGPT or the Google AI models to generate your images. All you need to get started is access to your favorite AI chatbot, like HGPT, Gemini, or Cloud, plus an AI image generator. Alright, let's jump in. 2. How I Use AI for Everything: I want to start this course with a practical example that illustrates how I think about AI day to day. The more I use it, the more I figure out ways to integrate it in my daily work. Not as one magical prompt, but as a habit. Small decisions, small task, but repeated constantly. So what you'll see next is the actual way I opened the workshop with the 30 organization. I decided to keep that passage in the course deliberately just to make a point. Let's get into it and you'll understand what I mean. Making AI work for your ethical business. Before we jump in, you might notice something on this slide. Okay, this slide is kind of missing the photo here, and I did this on purpose. It's not a mistake. It's missing a photo because I wanted to figure out which is the best photo together with you guys right here. So I'm going to go for the next slide and ask you to use the little chat that we have right here in the Zoom core, the webinar to tell me which one of these four photos do you think best represents WFTO? Curious to see your opinion. I think this is a nice little icebreaker, as well. So yeah, just use the chat and tell me number one, two, three, or four. Which one of these four photos best represent WFTO in your opinion. Four, three, four. Okay, a combination. One, four, one. Okay. I've got all of them. So you know, in order to actually get an answer to my question, I decided to also ask CHAT GPT. Okay? So I took a screenshot of my four slides. Which one of these four cover slides is best for the first page of my presentation for the webinar. I'm trying to find the most appropriate photo. The audience is a bunch of fair trade companies, part of the WFTO network. And then I added the link to the WFTO website. Here is the short answer. Short answer, I had a longer conversation, but the short answer is for WFTO specifically, I would go with slide number four. Why? Because your promise is making AI work for your ethical business. The visual should then feel relatable and not too flashy. Slide number four feels like someone actually running a small ethical enterprise, figuring things out. My slide for this webinar, my intro slide should be slide number four. I also agree that most of these would actually work. And if you look at my presentation right here, you see those pages. I had them hidden, but you can still see them here. But I agree that the first one, this one right here or actually, this one right here should come all the way here to my first page, and I'm going to go ahead and delete my first slide and now delete all of these, as well. And we now have with AI figured out the best option. Why am I showing you this and opening up with this? Well, I want to show you at what level AI has kind of penetrated my everyday work. I use it for everything. I use it in my everyday workflow, and I use it to take all sorts of decisions, little decisions, important decisions, big decisions. And this is really today's topic. I want to pass on some of the practices I've been testing, some of the workflows I've been experimenting with so that you can start applying them in your fair trade businesses, in your ethical fashion businesses because they are important. Okay, so that's really the topic of today making AI work in your everyday workflow. 3. Making AI Work in your Everyday Workflow: This lecture is the big picture. I try to break down the AI tools a small retail business should be using to speed up their everyday workflow. I'll focus on areas where I actually do have the most expertise like everyday task, content creation, branding, and visual communication. So the way we are going to do this, I'm going to try and hit as many nails on the head about what fair trade organizations actually do and actually need in terms of their workflow. Okay? So I've tried to list here a bunch of different tasks that an employee or a person working at a WFCO organization, like Fair Trade Organization actually does on a day to day. Obviously, you do much more than this, but this is kind of where I can bring my expertise. So everyday tasks like email, research, client proposal, sending proposals, product descriptions, negotiations, and also asking for feedback. In terms of content creation design, we have, yes, content creation for social media, editing photos, generating mockups, creating consistent brand, writing reports, documents, marketing campaign. And then on the visual side, where we need to take product photography, lifestyle photography, visual storytelling, all of these things. So what I put here on top of each of these columns are the tools that I am currently using to achieve these different things. Okay? And we are going to cover some of that in the workshop. See how they work, see how we can start using them and see what kind of prompts we should be using to use. Now that we have the overall approach, let's get practical. In the next lecture, I'll show you how I use AI as my text support, and I believe this is the easiest win for most teams. 4. Which AI Model Should I be Using?: In this lecture, I answer one question from the webinar's participants. And I have decided to keep this question in the course because it's a very common question when working with AI, beginning to really implement the AI tools in your everyday work. So I figured if this person in the webinar had the question, you might have the exact same question. Now, the question was do we know which AI took to use, hGPTGmin et cetera? It's really a question of preference. I think all of these, HAGPTGemini or Claude, they are all very good. So there is no fundamental difference for people like us. I mean, we are not rocket scientists or we are not data engineers or we don't need to use the models to their very last frontier. If we are using it for everyday business use, you won't notice much of a difference between the level of intelligence of these models. The difference is when the user experience, so how the interface looks like and the features that they have. Open AI, so the creators of CHANGPT have been very good at making HGPT sticky by giving it a memory. So because it has this memory feature, it knows you, right? And because it knows you, it feels comfortable to just keep coming to the same tool because you don't have to explain all of your life story, so to speak to the model. It already knows you, it knows what you do, it knows what projects you've been working on because of that so that's kind of what keeps you locked in a tool once you start using it. So if you are at the very beginning of your journey, I would say, I don't know, like build for example, Gemini is more integrated with the other tools you might be using like Gmail or Google Sheets or Google Docs. If you buy one of the cheapest plan for Google AI, you will have access to the power of the LL. Of Gemini in those different platforms, like your sheets, your Gmail, everything. It will be integrated. So it's better integrated because it's Google. On the other hand, HAGPT is kind of like the preferred consumer AI platform because it has this memory and it's easy to use, and it was one of the first one or the first one to kind of breakthrough. Businesses prefer anthropic and cloud because of the trust and the kind of ethical consideration this company is kind of focusing on. So it's the preferred business solution. Yeah, I don't have me. Personally, I use HAGPT because I'm locked in because of that memory, because of all the context. I've been finding myself also experimenting with Gemini. Now, let's move forward with the course and see how I use AI as my everyday tech support. 5. Using AI as your Tech Support: If you only use AI for one thing this week, make it this tech support. Anything confusing on your computer, on your phone, a feature you can't find a bug that is happening and preventing you to move forward or tool you keep hearing about and you want to try, just ask your favorite AI chatbot. Let me show you exactly how I would do it. The main benefits for me of using AI, sometimes people don't realize really what AI brings them or what AI can bring to an organization. For me, it's very clear me work smarter and faster. So smarter because I feel like I have the super intelligence at my fingertips. These models know everything, and so every time I have a doubt, I have a question, there is something I don't know, there is something not working on my computer. I rely on AI to give me the answers or find the answers or teach me. So that's why I also put feedback in coaching. I use these models to get a lot of feedback on my work and to kind of get some free coaching. Let's see some of the examples of me doing that. Using ChRGPT is my tech support. Just going to give you a few concrete examples of my stuff, and then we'll dive into practical stuff, practical examples for fair trade organizations. But first, the first pillar, how do I use it in my everyday workflow? Well, recently, I noticed this new little button in my ChatGPT app on my desktop. So you can either use it as your browser, ChatGPT. That's why most people use it in your browser. But there is an app or that you can download and start using it locally on your computer. And they added this little button right here. Didn't know what it was. So I just took a screenshot. What you see here is the screenshot and prompted. What is this new feature record in the Chan GPT Mac desktop app? Okay? And I can click here to go to that conversation. I want to show you the actual conversation. Yes. Zoom in a bit. So that's my prompt. And it started giving me basically the answer. So when you hit that record button, you can start using the new voice capture mode, and it just gave me a bunch of information about what it is. And then I continue to prompt or to ask more questions asking, for example, can it record a Google met or a Zoom call? Can it do that? And can you also tell me what other participants are saying in this call? And then I got my answer. No, actually, I was trying to find the best solution for an AI note taker. I've noticed in several Google Meet or Zoom coors that I was part of it was this little butt that was just recording everything that everyone was saying. And after that meeting, I receive an email with all the notes, everything that has been said, action points. And I thought, This is super convenient. Like, I would love to have something like this for myself. So I was trying to find that product. So I continued asking, What is the best solution for AI note taking during meetings? Give me some ideas, and then continued, I need the best tool that allows me to record both Google Meets and Zoom coors that I organize and also other cores that other people invite me to, et cetera, idea here is to show you how you can start a conversation with a simple question right here was more like a tech support kind of question. What is this? Sometimes something is not working on my iPhone. And I ask, how do I get to this feature? How do I make this work? And then it kind of shifted to something more like in the realm of advice or product review or whatever. But it gave me my answer at the end, and I started installing this fathom app, so fathom right here, which is great. It's just an AI note taker. Free. You just invite it to your Google Meet or your Zoom Coll and it will start recording, taking notes, and send every participant a summary. That's just one little example of how making me work smarter. It would have taken me a long time to actually go there and analyze the market for an AI note taker and compare them with each other, try a few different ones, didn't want to do all of that stuff. So just got my answer very quickly. Okay, tech support is, in my opinion, kind of your way of putting your foot in the AI door. Once you trust it for solving small problems, you start to use it for bigger kind of work. Next up, I'll show you how I use AI to do all sorts of research and also give you a few tips on how to get precise answers instead of generic fluff. 6. Using AI to do Research: This lecture is about research, not Googling, but real deep research where the AI will go out, explore the Internet, explore various sources, and come back with a structured report that could be formatted in whatever format you prefer. And with all the sources it has used cited in your research paper. And you'll see I'll be doing a research for my own work, so it's something related to Canva, but the method can work for any industry. So obviously, feel free to apply this to your own. Something else is really good at. I'm referring to the LLMs, the large language models. So that is the likes of a ChatGPT anthropic Cloud or a Google Gemini. So these are what we call LLMs, large language models or chatbots because they materialize in the form of a chatbot, where you go, you ask so these LLMs are very good at research as well because they can work super fast and they have access to all the information that is online. They've been trained on that. So most of them have this functionality called deep research, which will allow you to ask the models to really go out and research a specific topic, and it will come back with after maybe 10 minutes or it depends on the models, and it depends on how long and how hard you ask them to think. But it takes on average 10 minutes, and they can produce really in depth reports that you can use about any specific I want to show you this one example and then I'll move on to some more practical fair trade stuff. But this one is a prompt that I have used for my own work. So my work as an educator, Canva expert, influencer. Okay? So I said, act as a research assistant. I need a comprehensive database of the questions people ask about Canva. And then research sources, the task, the output. So I told model, I need you to research what people are asking about Canva. I have been very specific about the task I wanted it to conduct. So build a topic taxonomy for Canva learning, extract the actual questions, phrasing people use, etcetera, et cetera. And the output, how do I want this output delivered? I want a table of 200 to 500 i questions with different columns in that table. I launched this prompt, took about 10 minutes and I got a massive report with questions that people had about Canva from all sorts of places. I want to show you this report by going back to the conversation right here, which is this one right here. Yes. This is the report. So it's super long. I'm not going to go over this. This is the table I asked for, and it goes more on This side is more columns. Obviously, you can open this. You can open this directly into a, and this is all the sources that it has used or identified to conduct that research. So I'm showing you this to show you, okay, the possibilities are almost infinite, right, about what they can do. So the deep research so I think it's important to understand how to ask the best questions. So this one right here. You might wonder, Okay, Ronny, this is nice, but the prompt that you use, this part right here is something I don't know how to create because with these tools, the quality of the output will depend on the quality of your input. If you ask a question that is not well structured, detailed, precise, if you ask something like you would ask Google search, you won't get this kind of a result. Deep research with AI is powerful, but just like for anything else, the quality of that output will highly depend on how you ask the AI to work to do that research in the first place. And in the next lecture, I will give you the shortcut. Today, you don't need to give the AI very elaborated prompt for good results. You just need to tell it exactly what you want and some context to work with. 7. Asking AI to Write Prompts for You: What I'm about to show you might be the most important takeaway from this entire course. Stop trying to write the perfect prompt. Instead, use AI to write the prompt for you. In this lecture, I'll show you how I use ChatGPT to turn a messy brain dump into something well structured. Two years ago, it is true that you needed to know how to write a prompt like this. But today, you don't this is my point. Like, this is this slide right here. You don't need to be a prompt engineer, prompt engineer, meaning the person who engineers the prompt, the questions you ask the you need is to know how to ask the model to help you. Okay? So what you see here on this page is the actual prompt that I input it in order to get to this. Okay? So let me explain. In ChatGPT. So let's just go to the ChatGPT conversation. All right. So coming back up. Yes. So what I did to start this conversation is this prompt right here. And this prompt, I didn't type it. You see this little guy right here, the little microphone that says dictate? When you click on that, I'm not going to do it now because it's going to prompt something else. But when you click on that, then you can use your microphone to give some context. That's what I did. If you read this, you will realize this is mostly spoken language. I said, I'm trying to build something kind of like a dashboard where I could monitor what other creators who talk about Canva are publishing on different social media platform. So the goal for this tracker is to keep track of what's going on. I started the conversation like this and it gave me, this is the structure you should have in your tracker. Okay? Then I asked it for the prompt that I would use for a deep research. I did the same thing. I didn't know how to structure this well structured prompt of the task, the output, and everything. I just tell it, help me with a prompt for a deep research, both on ChatGPT, Gemini, and perplexity. These are all different kinds of LLMs. I want to do a deep research to find out what people are asking about Canva and how to tutorials. I'm trying to create an exhaustive list of everything that a beginner or intermediate Canva user can to learn on the Internet. Not going to waste your time and read everything, but this part is important. You don't need to be a prompt engineer anymore. You just need to know how to use a microphone and explain with your own words what you are trying to do, what you are trying to build, what kind of outcome you are trying to you can do so in a messy all over the place way. It was relatively well structured, but sometimes some of my audio prompts are all over the place that it's okay because the mothers are so intelligent that they will understand. I launched this prompt and I got the prompt that I read to you previously. Tim previous page, this one, the very well structured prompt that was optimized for my deep research. I went from this c audio brain dump to a well structured prompt because I was able to use the model to create the prompt for me. Okay? Once I had this, I could use that little copy button, which is what I did. I used that, and I came to Gemini. So the other model. So Gemini is from Google. There you go, so I came here, and I inputed that prompt somewhere here and it gave me the whole thing. So once you copy it, you can simply paste. I didn't paste here, but, like, so you paste your prompt and you're good to go. Just make sure you use the deep research tool. So under the tools right here, deep research, make sure it's selected. If that's what you want, if what you want is a more in depth kind of yes, research with an outcome that will be a report, large spreadsheet or something like this. Okay, enough time spent on this. This is an important one. You don't need to be the master prompter anymore. Just ask the models to write your prompt. We are ready to apply all of this to real business assets. So in the next lecture, we'll see how we can use AI to review your website and improve it. And to do so, we'll try to review it through the eyes of your potential buyer. 8. Improving your Website with AI: If you sell to international buyers, your website is either building trust or killing it. In this lecture, we use AI to audit a website's homepage, like a serious buyer. And I'm going to use a real example that is the website of one of the organizations that attended the webinar, and I want you to treat that as a case study. And then you can repeat the same process to your own website. Let's start with websites. I've been given a few examples when I was preparing for this webinar. One of them was Mahaguti I decided, Okay, let's see how we can maybe have a look at Mahaguti's website, use AI and see how we can maybe make some improvement, get a nice feedback and understand how we can work with AI to improve our website. The first task was, how do I figure out the prompt? Just like I told you, not a prompt engineer. I started with my microphone and my audio prompt. I asked HGIPTT is ha have the conversation right here. If you scan this, you should be able to access that same conversation and continue it for yourself. Maybe scan it if you want the link. So took my microphone, and this time, I'm going to read the whole thing because I'm going to take you with me on that journey of using hATIPT to review Mahguti's website and give me some suggestions on how to improve it. So when you analyze a company's website, specifically a fashion retailers website, would you evaluate the website? Okay, that's the beginning of what I said my prompt. And then I give it some context. So I said, I mean, what are the different criteria that are important? Because I'm doing some website reviews and feedback for ethical fashion producers, fair trade producers, and most of their website are not super good. So I would like to help them by giving them some constructive feedback on how they could improve their website. Of the time, these companies are looking for finding international clients who would be distributors, importers of their products. Sometimes they also sell direct to consumers. So they want to present their collections under their best light. So product photography is important, but also stories like impact stories of how their products actually empower local communities, et cetera. So stories, product photography, they need to show professionalism so that international clients are willing to work with them. So all of this is kind of reflected by their website. You see how this is spoken language. You can see that when you read this prompt because, yeah, it transcribes everything I say in my microphone. So your task, I need you to give me a list of criteria for my website analysis. What should I focus on? What should I pay attention to, and what kind of feedback would be helpful for these organization? That's how I started this entire project, and it's right here on this HGPT conversation, so I'm going to go back to it. Alright. So the answer. Alright, if I land on a fashion brand website and they tell me, we want international distributors to take us seriously, I'm not looking at colors first. I'm asking one brutal question. Would I trust this company with a 50,000 euro order? That's the is how I would break down a proper website review for ethical and fair trade fashion producers. Not going to read the whole thing, but there is a few different points here. One, first impression and positioning, what it calls the five second test. So do I immediately understand what they sell? Who is this for? Retailers, wholesalers, consumers. Where do they operate? What makes them different? Then it gives me a common problem. So the homepage, in most cases, the homepages talk about empowerment for three paragraphs, but never clearly shows the product. So if that's the case, feedback you can give Professionalism and trust signals. This matters a lot for international buyers. Look for clear company information, location, year it was founded team, et cetera, certifications, WFTO, fair trade, GOT, et cetera, red flags, no physical address, no company registration info, generic stock photos everywhere, broken English. So that's kind of like some of the red flags I should be paying attention to. Product presentation. This is huge for fashion. Photography. Are these images high resolution, consistent background, consistent lighting? Are they style in a way that matches the brand, multiple angles for the photos, close up of fabrics or texture, et cetera, et cetera? Fb2b clarity, very often missing. If they want distributors, the website must support that. So check if there is a dedicated wholesales page. If it's easy to request a catalog if there is a downloadable line sheet, if there is a clear call to action like request our wholesale catalog or become a retail 1.5, storytelling and impact. Now, we talk about the heart. Ethical brands have powerful stories, but often they are told in a messy way. I should evaluate, is the story structured? Do we understand the problem that the company is solving? Are there any real numbers, job created, percent women employed, wages, above local average, et cetera? Are there real faces and names? It gives me an example. What's a weak version? We empower community. What's a stronger version? We work with 64 women artisans in Waaka. Their income is 2.3 times the regional average. It's much better than we empower communities. Feedback, six, navigation and structure. Is the menu clear? Are there too many items? Is it logically grouped, easy to find products mobile, friendly, responsive. So common issues, overloaded menu with vision, mission, heritage, value, craft, philosophy. It should be more simple than that. Simplified to shops wholesale about impact contact, reduce, clutter, continuing point number seven, conversions and call to action. Do they want visitors to do? Buy, request a catalog, book a meeting, sign up for a newsletter, language and copy quality. This is sensitive, but important. Is the English natural? Is it too emotional? Is it too vague, too activist? For B to B, especially, buyers need clarity. So replace abstract phrases with concrete details, shorter sentences, clear benefits for retailers. The technical basics, quick checklist, brand coherence, et cetera, doesn't give me an analysis of Mahaguts website. So far, I haven't showed Mahaguts website. All I've done here is ask for some criteria for me to evaluate the website. If my goal is to use AI to evaluate Mahaguts website and then make some improvement, that's the whole task. I need to break down this task into smaller task and the first smaller step is to ask for some solid criteria for evaluating this website. That's a common and that's something I would encourage you to do if you have a project that is relatively complex, improving your website. Break the task into smaller steps because if you ask the AI just I make my website better and you paste the URL? You will get some of this, but you will not get this level of precision. Here, we have ten very detailed points and each point could be an entire webinar. You've got something solid. So break the task into smaller chunks and move progressively. So now that I have all of that, what I did is simple. So I figured out the prompt, right? That's what I just did. My next slide here is. So, this one was a good one. Like, would I trust this company with a 50 K or? Really the core of what we are trying to solve here. Like, the website should answer yes to this question. If your website can do that, then it means it's actually working. If your goal is to sell internationally, find some new customers, which I know a lot of you and a lot of your companies are actually working toward that goal. I had my prompt. I had my contacts, my criteria. Now it was time to leverage it. And I did this by switching tools. I'm not sure why I went to Gemini, not continued in Chat GPT. But just also to show you that the tours are not really the differentiator. I came to Gemini. I asked it because I wasn't sure how to do this. Like, how would it see my website? So I asked, If I give you some URLs of websites. Are you able to access them and actually evaluate the content of these websites? I'm talking about visuals. I'm talking about structure of the website copy of the website overall structure. So basically, I'm looking for feedback about website design, copy and efficiency only by providing you a URL. Right now, I'm just looking for yes or no answer. Can you do this? So it's a very straightforward question. I give you a URL. Can you analyze my website? It said yes, I can access the text, the structure, and the code of the website to evaluate the copy, the SEO, search engine optimization, and information architecture. While I cannot see the website in the way human does as rendered image. So I can analyze the underlying CSS and layout the data to provide detailed feedback on design principles, and user experience. Basically told me, yes, I can analyze your website, but I cannot see your website. I said, Okay, understood. Now, if I give you a screenshot or screenshots of the landing page, could you see it or if I export it as a PDF, could you then see? And then upload that to the chat. Can you give me some proper design feedback about visuals and visual consistency and the visual look of the website? So I'm trying to find a work around, like, Okay, you cannot see it, but what if I give you screenshots or I exported my website as a PDF and just give you that? Can you then do what I'm asking? Absolutely. In fact, if you provide screenshots or PDF, that's the best way for me to give you high quality design feedback. Give me more blah, blah, blah here, but I didn't know how to export my website as a PDF. So I asked, Do you know a good tip to export a website to a PDF? Scroll, because I'm not sure how to do that. And it gave me. So this is me going back to the tech support kind of way of using DAI. I need a tool. So it gave me a few options like the no Install, browser, trick browser extension thing. He told me there's a browser extension for Chrome. It's called Go Fool page. It's highly rated. It's very simple. You click a camera icon. It scrolls for you and you can download the result as a PDF or a PNG. So I thought, Yeah, let's give that a try. So what I did, I just came to the Chrome extension page. So let me show you something like this, manage extension. And here in the Chrome web store, you can download new extensions. So I went ahead, find the Go full page. I installed it took 1 second, and now it's installed on my browser. You can see the little icon right here. So what I did, I came to Mahagut's website right here, and I use my little extension right here. So I clicked it and you see what's going on, GofoPage. It's scrolling the page. I'm not touching anything. It's just scrolling the page. You see the little Pacman thing going. And once it scrolled all the way down, it gave me this, which is a full scan of my website page, the entire page from the top, the navigation to the footer. And here I can save that as a PDF download as a PDF. Remember the long conversation I had with the website review, all of these ten criterias, I copied all of that stuff from hat I came to my prompt here. I uploaded the Maga agutiHmepage PDF. I just created with my tool, so it's here. So now you can see it and I pasted all of that context. This is a super long prompt, but I didn't write it. I just asked ChaGPT to create it, then I run that. I gave me, here is the comprehensive framework your b2b BTC audit, applying your brutal question. Would I trust this company with a 50 K order to the MahagutiHme page and PDF? The answer currently is no, not yet. So again, I'm doing this respectfully. I don't want to offend anyone here. I'm just doing the reviews as, like, in a way that we can all learn from this, we can all improve from this. Let's get into the reviews. Wilder Craft and mission are clearly authentic. And maybe we should have a look at the homepage for just a few sec. Okay, so we have a slider right here, Artisans made ceramics or home decor. We have different slider. Then we have a message from Sunil, the CEO of Mahaguti. Then we have some top sellers, some nice and cool animation. Some links to direct product categories, I imagine. You can shop by categories. Okay? So we have the categories. You can navigate y Mahaguti. So these are kind of like the selling points featured offers, pashmina, ceramics, home decor, new arrivals. Again, it's a carousel, Blog posts. They're still loading, but some quotes, more products than statements about Mahaguti and the footer. Okay? So that's what we are evaluating right here. Okay, so the first impression, the five second test. The hero slider mentions handmade toys and figurines. However, the navigation and categories suggest a massive range of product, home furnishing, clothing, wearables, dining. So the problem, it lacks a sharp headline. Is Mahaguti a toy shop? Is it the furniture shop? Is it the textile provider? By trying to show everything, they position themselves as a general gift shop rather than a specialized producer for ethical retailers. Also, it picked up a visual conflict. Hero image shows pottery. But the text talks about toys. This creates immediate cognitive friction. So actually, I noticed that as well, Artisan made ceramics for home decor, and we see toys. Then when we go to the next one, handmade toys and figurines, but we see the ceramics. So they kind of mixed up the images together with the tag line in that slider. And the AI picked that up the visual conflict. Moving down here, professionalism and trust signals. Credibility gaps, the CEO statement is a wall of text that is difficult to read. International buyers want data, not a manifesto in the hero section. So I tend to agree with this. This is nice for explaining maybe the vision and who is kind of navigating the ship. But for an international buyer, this doesn't bring much. Now, maybe that's not the goal of this website to talk to an international buyer. I'm not sure. Missing B to B there is no wholesale or distributor link in the primary header. A 50 k buyer doesn't want to use a contact us form to get in touch with the company. They want to see a wholesale portal or download catalog button. Certifications. While Mahaguty is a known WFTO member, the logos are not prominent. Above the fold, they need to be front and center to establish instant trust. Okay, moving on to product presentations, photography, the product shots the notebooks that cause. Are inconsistent. Some have harsh shadows and the actual framing, the cropping of the photo varies. Styling, the featured offers images are much stronger than the individual product listings. However, the mix of high end lifestyle photography and basic product on white shots makes the brand feel disorganized. Technical specs. On the homepage, there is zero information on material or sizing. A buyer needs to know if it's 100% lock up paper or handmade hand loomed cotton immediately. So it gave I would say a very thorough analysis of the website storytelling and impact vague versus concrete. The copy uses phrases like preserving Nepal's rich cultural heritage. Improvement. They should replace the CEO long paragraph with mahaguty by the numbers section. Artisans supported percentage of women led WFTO certified since why, why, why? I agree with that. Quick wins. Fix the typography. So this one it picked up a question mark somewhere. I'm not going to talk too much about this. B2b called to action, had a wholesale international trade button in the top right corner. The header, so a wholesale section or international buyer, hero alignment, ensure the text handmade toys matches the images of toys, not the ceramics. So a few things to fix here. Go to leave it here for this example because me, honestly, I was quite blown away. It picked up the misalignment of the slider with the text and the image, which for me, that was showing me that it's a deep analysis that went on. Your website done. Next, we move to the one thing that I believe will make the difference between people clicking that By button or closing the tab, and that is your product photography. 9. Improving your Product Photos with AI: This lecture will teach you how to use your favorite LLM to improve your product photography, how many images you actually need per product, which angles matter, what to add, what to reshoot, and what most retail sites are missing. I'll show you the framework first and then we'll see how to apply this to a real product page with some real product photos from one of the webinars participants. But again, you take that knowledge and apply it to your own product photography. The AI models have become sparingly good at creating real images. There's obviously all of the ethical considerations here, so I want to open with this. What I'm going to show you, I'm not saying that you should per se, use that all of the time, but I believe it's useful. But it should be used ethically, meaning we can pretty much create images of whatever we want nowadays with the right prompt. It's important that in the framework of being a producer organization producing products that the photos that you will present to your buyers and your clients, they need to be faithful to the reality of the product. So it's tempting and easy to embellish the product with these technologies. But I encourage you to use the technology responsibly. So that being said, let's dive into it. Let's see how we can produce smarter visual production with AI, and we are going to focus on product photography. Alright, so the next use case I'm going to use is KTS Combahar Technical School organization from Nepal Kathmandu which I had the pleasure of visiting and work with. So the specific pages I'm looking at, let me get to KTS website here. So that's their website, and they have on the product, they have a bunch of different product categories. So I think the one I analyzed was the carpet. So this is what we see. They produce these beautiful carpets hand woven knitted. So that's the product photography. Okay. So there's only one photo per product, and they're mostly all taken in the same room, same kind of angle. But I wouldn't say it's really presenting the product under its best light because this is natural lighting. I mean, best light in in the literal sense and also in the metaphorical sense. Product photography could be improved. Let's say there's room for improvement here. The specific use case that I use for demonstrating this section is this particular carpet right here. What I did here, I right clicked, I saved the images, and I just save that image as a PNG. I had the image of the carpet. Now let's come back to my presentation. Started from my favorite LLM, which is Chachi PT to try to figure out the prompt. Let's jump into that conversation. All right. So I said, with my microphone, no writing. I'm trying to help the fair trade organizations improve their product photography. I'm going to provide some screenshots of their website, the part of their website where they sell their product. They showcase their products. Okay? I need you to give me a detailed analysis and feedback on how they present this product via photography. What can they improve? What kind of shots would better present these products, how many shots, how many photos per product would be a good average for presenting one specific product kind of product shots angles would present the product under their best light. Give me some detailed suggestions on how to improve their product photography. You hear me rambling a bit in this prompt. It's not a perfect prompt. It's just a description of what I'm trying to do. Okay, so chatty here, perfect. This is exactly the kind of things that can make or break a fair trade brand. I agree. When you send me the screenshots, I'll give you specific feedback based on what I actually see. But before that, here is a solid framework you can use to evaluate their product photography in a structured way. And this is gold. It gave me a framework. So first question. Does this look like a brand I would trust with a wholesale order? Remember your audience. Most of these factual producers are trying to attract distributors, convince international buyers, sometimes sell direct to consumers. That means the photos must communicate professionalism, consistency, quality, story, scale. If the photography looks homemade, inconsistent or random, the brand looks risky and distributors don't take risks. This is a very thorough analysis. Point number two, how many photos per product, minimum acceptable four photos per product. Idea range four to eight. Less than three photo looks incomplete. A strong structure per product could be like it gave me seven different shots. A clean hero shot, the main image, alternate angle, a close up or detailed shot, lifestyle or in context, scale reference, optional but powerful, a packaging shot or back or underside when relevant. Manufactured side only show one or two photos. That's not enough. It gave me some actual examples of these shots. So the seven shot types they should be using one, the clean hero shot. I didn't insert any URL or anything. This is just knowledge that ChatGPT gives me, like showing me actual product shots. I haven't put any fair trade URL yet. So this is the most important image it's showing me the clean hero shot. And it's doing this for every single one of these seven category. So this one is the scale reference, so I can see how big or small the product is, et cetera. Just that is already super good. Lighting, the hidden killer. Most fair trade producers shoot near a window, use mixed indoor lights, don't control, white balance, et cetera. Background choices. They have three good options, pure white, light beige or textured, but consistent artisan surface, like wood, linen, clay. Avoid patterned fabric, cluttered rooms, visible messy environments, mixed surface position problems to look for story integration, et cetera. The story I like this point. Unlike Zara, H&M fatrad brands have artisans, communities, impact stories, handcraft process. But often that story is not visually connected to the product. So smart improvement would be to add one slide per product that shows the artisan making it or the weaving process, the dying process, the workshop. Okay, so I have my ten or actually nine criteria for evaluating websites here. Okay? So what I did come back the next slide, yes, the analysis. I actually ran this analysis in a separate chat. But you could do it in the same chat. I think I wanted to keep it clean so I can share the first one with you guys. So let me come back to this slide. If you scan this QR code, you will gain access immediately to this nine point with the examples of the shot. So I wanted to keep this chat clean, just that so you can use that and continue prompting from there if you want, but I wanted to give you a clean version of now, let me go to the actual conversation. I uploaded three screenshots here from the Cuboi Technical School website. Here you don't see them. That's because it's a shared conversation. So here are three different pages directly taken from the product stab on Cuboi. Okay, I think I had, the product page for the scarves, the carpets, and the sweaters. Upload these visuals. And now, please go ahead, diagnose specific issues, tell me what to keep, what to reshoot. So this is the end of the prompt that was given to me by CHATPT before. That's just that. I copied that and I pasted it again in my prompt here. And he said, Alright, I went through the three product pages. Okay, I lists them. I'm going to be direct. The craftsmanship looks real. The photography does not support it. Let's break this down properly, and let's have a look at what we are talking. We're talking about this page right here. We're talking about the sweaters. So this page right here, just keep this in mind what we are talking about. So let's break it down. The hand knitted sweaters, page one, what's working, clean white background, consistent mannequin style, grid layout, feels organized. The lighting is relatively even. Already better than many small producers. But what's weak? Everything is front facing. There's no close up, there's no model shots, no texture, storytelling. All images feel like catalog documentation, not brand presentation. Again, I'm going to show this for a couple of seconds so we can relate to what we just said. Sweaters have beautiful knitted patterns around the colors and chest area, but you can barely appreciate them at thumbnail size. So what I would reshoot 100% of the hero shots, no, but I would add depth. So keep one clean front shot on the mannequin and add maybe a 45 degree angle, backview, detailed shots of color, patterns, close up of kit texture, lifestyle image with a real person wearing it, et cetera, et cetera. So it's giving me this analysis, what we would keep, but what we should also add. Right. And it will do this for all of the different pages, the three pages, the carpets, the sweaters, and the scarves. Once you know the short list, then the next question is pretty obvious. How do you produce these product photographies cheap and easy? Well, the answer to that is in the next lecture, and it's related to Leonardo AI, more in the next lecture. 10. Generating Images with Leonardo AI: Let's create your images. In this lecture, we'll be generating some images, some product photos with an image generation tool or an aggregator called leonardo.ai. I'll be using Leo because it's fast and because it gives me access to all the latest models like nano Banana Pro. And you'll see how one single image reference of your product plus a solid prompt can produce an entire set of product shots. Is the original image downloaded from the *** Bei website. With this, I went to an image generation tool. The one I used is this one. It's called leonardo.ai. This is part of the Canva family. Leonardo is an image generation tool and an AI aggregator. You can generate more than images here. You can generate images, you can generate videos. You have different apps that you can use. I encourage you to explore it. Here. I went to the image little button right here. And I started prompting. But basically, I needed prompts for each of these shots that my analysis told me I would need. Okay? So I asked it, give me six precise nano banana prompts to help me generate the following product shots based on a single image reference. So the image I took from the KTS website, that one carpet. Required shots per product. Okay? So I need front view centered. Basically, I pasted all of the information it gave me of what I need to reshoot. So clean product shot, the hero shot, the alternate angle, the back view. So the six or seven shots it told me I should reshoot. And it gave them to me. These are the prompts for the image generation because I ask it, give me some nano banana prompts. That means it knows that nano Banana is the image generation platform. So how can I generate the based on one reference image, you always need that reference image, not always, but it's better if you want consistency, and you need the prompt. So here's the first prompt, the clean front product shot, the hero image. And here's the prompt. Use the uploaded reference image as the exact product. Generate a professional ecommerce hero shot, front view, perfectly centered, straight alignment, entire product fully visible, no cropping, neutral, white background, soft diffuse studio light, no harsh shadows, no reflections, no. High resolution, ultra sharp, true to original colors, maintain exact shape, proportion and details from the reference image, commercial catalog style export ready. I didn't invent this prompt, the model did for me. Took this and I came back to Leonardo and I pasted this prompt right here. That's the exact prompt I pasted. This is the first image that came back. We can see the same carpet. You could analyze them side by side. I did that yesterday. It's the same carpet. I gave me this shot, which is what I asked for the hero shot, the center, the one with the entire. The first additional photo. Then I ask it for prompts for all of the other shots that I needed. Okay? The close up, the back view, the 45 degree angle, and I'm going to show them to you. They are all right here. So let's get back to the presentation here. I have added all of the shots here for you to appreciate. That is the hero shot with the prompt. That is the 45 degree angle shot. This is the back shot. This one is the one that surprised me the most. So if you took a photo from the back of the carpet, I'm not sure it looks like this. So this is where you need to be careful about realism. Ethical consideration. If it doesn't look like that, then don't use that photo, obviously. The detailed close up, the scale reference, I ask you to generate the shot with the carpet held by a Nepalese lady artisan and the lifestyle photo. And this is where we need to talk about ethics because the tours are powerful enough that it's kind of easy to cross the line without you even noticing. So in the next lecture, we'll talk about ethics and gardwails. 11. Ethical Considerations: Before you publish any AI generated images, you need rules. If your product photos generated with AI end up looking better than the reality or different from the reality, you are setting yourself up for complaints, returns, trust, or even legal issues. I don't know what you think about this, but this blew my mind because you don't need a photography studio need anything. You just really need one photo and to have strong enough ethical considerations to decide whether or not you are blurring the lines here, whether or not it's ethical to present such a photo to a buyer, does it correspond to the reality, or is it too far away from? Okay. So this is why I want to finish with this. Like, you should if it's not close enough, you can try to refine, by adding these kind of lines to your prompt. Keep product identical to the reference image. Do not alter the design, pattern, shape, or color, maintain full accuracy. Because the models are becoming so powerful nowadays that they are able to reproduce identical objects, even person this is where we are. So let's approach this technology in an ethical manner. All right. Now, you have all the workflows and we have talked about the ethical consideration and the guardrails. It is now time to wrap it all up with four habits that will make it all stick together. 12. 4 Tips to Make AI work for You: Before we go, let's recap the most important takeaways from this course, the four habits that will make AI useful and practical for your retail business. This is my last slide. Four tips to make AI work for you. Let the AI create your prompt. Don't play the prompt engineer. This is not 2022 anymore. We have this now. So let's do the work. Give plenty of context with voice mode. Use your microphone. Brain dump everything you need, it will structure it. Break complicated tasks into steps, make it easy for the model to just do one thing and then move on to the next thing. Don't ask it for the final outcome immediately, and then save or organize your chats, your best prompts, what has been working for you. Save that into projects inside the LLMs, ChatGPT lets you organize by projects. The other platforms also have similar kinds of features or simply copy and paste them into a slide deck. I don't know, and share them within your organizations so that everybody can use. And you now have the full loop, daily workflows, research, prom building, website review, product photography upgrades, and ethical guardrails. It is now your turn to play. Just pick the thing that resonates with you the most from this course and start applying it to your business today or tomorrow. My tip is do not try to do everything all at once. Just pick one thing, apply it, and then come back and try something else. And you'll see if you work like this with AI, small wins will start to compound and stack up fast. Thank you for learning with me. I wish you all the best with your business, and I'll see you in the next class.