More than half of the entire e-commerce market consists of sales through marketplaces. Just on Amazon alone, there are 9.7 million registered sellers. It would be great to sell them some kind of platform 😉 Like the one this startup has! The market is so large that you can copy this idea and still find enough clients to make a decent profit.
The essence of the project
Aimerce assists sellers on the Amazon marketplace in quickly and easily creating standalone beautiful websites where they can sell their products. The AI is responsible for the “quick, simple, and beautiful” aspect 😉
The platform is currently in beta testing, and you can only join the waitlist for access. Despite this, the startup has raised $5.17 million in investment on top of a modest seed round it secured in May.
The website and product pages are generated fully automatically. All the seller has to do is provide the platform with the address of any product page and click the “Create” button.
After that, the Aimerce AI bot will extract information from the Amazon marketplace about the seller, all their products with images, descriptions, and prices, and generate a website with a design most suitable for that seller and their products.
The created website won’t be just a set of static pages. It will be a fully functional site with a product database, payment processing, and an order management system.
If the automatically generated design is not to the seller’s liking, they can ask the AI bot to regenerate the website, giving it more general or specific instructions – make it more colorful or more strict, “play with the fonts”, and everything else usually requested from website designers. Unlike human designers, the AI bot will comply with all these requests instantly and without question 😉
The seller can now manage the product base on the created website – adding, deleting, and editing their product catalog. Meanwhile, the AI bot can autonomously categorize newly added products in the catalog and generate their descriptions. There surely must be a module for synchronizing the updated catalog with the Amazon marketplace.
Product images can be edited manually or automatically using the platform’s built-in AI editor, capable of removing and replacing photo backgrounds and making product images more appealing.
The platform’s AI bot can generate not only product descriptions but also any marketing texts – slogans, brand philosophy, texts for advertisements and newsletters, descriptions of sales promotions, and the like.
The product pages created by the AI bot come already optimized for search. Plus, it will automatically translate them into other languages to ensure global sales for the seller.
The platform memorizes all the information about site visits and completed purchases to continue optimizing the created website. For this, the startup is currently training a special AI assistant that will focus on improving visitor engagement and conversion to sales.
What’s interesting
In principle, nothing prevents the use of such technology for creating websites for any online seller. However, Aimerce decided to create a niche product specifically for sellers on the Amazon marketplace.
This may seem like an unnecessary limitation, but it’s a good marketing move. Because Amazon sellers will trust a product made specifically for them more than a universal website creation platform.
Moreover, it becomes immediately clear where and how the startup should look for its customers – they are all visible on Amazon, so they can easily be contacted and offered the platform.
The potential market is huge. There are a total of 9.7 million sellers registered on the Amazon marketplace, 1.9 million of whom are considered active. This number is sufficient for the startup to grow rapidly in the coming years.
Moreover, every single day about 1,000 new sellers are added to the Amazon marketplace. 1,000 new potential customers every day, who are easy to find and attract – that’s really cool!
60% of sellers on Amazon don’t resell other people’s goods, but sell products under their own brand. This means that they will definitely benefit from having a website with a brand description and product catalog. Because, having started selling their products on the marketplace, they will surely want to sell them somewhere else, including directly to customers found online.
This is what happens. 73% of Amazon sellers sell their products not only on the Amazon marketplace. But for this, they need one “source of truth” – a central brand website with a product catalog, which is what Aimerce helps to create.
Some experienced sellers might say that Aimerce can create fairly primitive websites, and that they could be made much cooler in terms of technology and design by turning to professionals.
However, the catch is that the vast majority of sellers on Amazon are themselves quite primitive 😉. Only 10% of these sellers manage to sell products for more than $100,000 a year. Moreover, the number of sellers who can sell more decreases sharply as volumes increase – as can be clearly seen in the picture.
Thus, 90% of sellers sell little or very little. Plus, there are 1,000 newcomers appearing on the marketplace every day. At the very least, this means that 90% of sellers don’t earn enough money to be able to turn to high-level professionals. And at most – with such minimal experience and sales volumes, even “primitive” improvements will be able to help them 😉.
Where to run
The “primitive” nature of platforms is a big problem. No, it’s not a problem of the platforms 😉. The problem is that experts consider many of the AI platforms that are emerging now to be primitive — and often quite deservedly so.
For example, in the FastFounder chat, a video creation expert wrote about the Oxolo platform saying that its “editing quality and packaging overall is low,” and that with “20 years of experience in computer graphics and motion design,” he could do much better. I won’t argue!
But I’ll repeat once again that in any field, 90% of people are always at such a low level that even primitive solutions will help them.
For instance, 90% of salespeople are lousy salespeople. Sales department heads prefer to spend time and effort training good salespeople. However, if you start helping the lousy ones, their performance increases 3 times! After all, growth from zero is always the fastest and largest. This fundamentally changes the overall sales volume of the department because most salespeople stop being lousy, becoming average.
This is precisely the path the startup Siro took — creating an AI assistant for training salespeople, whose main goal is to help all salespeople. Considering that 90% of salespeople are lousy — to help specifically those lousy salespeople 😉
The aforementioned Oxolo helps sellers, who can only make entirely lousy videos, create clips that look quite decent against their backdrop. Although from an expert perspective, they still remain lousy by the principle “I don’t distinguish between types of crap” 😉
Therefore, the main conclusion is that AI platforms are primarily needed where they help lousy specialists perform their tasks at least decently — because this is the most widespread audience. Not where they help make the good even better — because there are too few who can do good.
Startup Basis, which made an AI assistant for accounting firm specialists. The problem is that there is a massive exodus of experienced professionals in this market, but the amount of work does not decrease — and an AI assistant can take on routine work and help newcomers work at least at an average level.
So, the main and general direction is the creation of AI platforms that help lousy specialists in some area perform their work a little better. But without putting in more effort! This is a fundamental requirement 😉
Since there are always many more lousy specialists in any field, these platforms have a chance to become mainstream. And since these platforms can be “primitive” — creating them is much faster and simpler than “platforms for the smart.”
So, the million-dollar question — for which audience of lousy specialists can you create a primitive platform that helps them do their work a little better, but definitely faster and with fewer efforts?
About the company
Aimerce
Website: aimerce.ai
Last round: $5.17M, 27.10.2023
Total investments: $5.17M+, rounds: 2