Where AI earns its place in ecommerce content

Open the men’s ready-to-wear section of a luxury fashion site and count the products. When we did this for one house in 2025 there were 588 in a single category. Then open a few product pages and look at what each one actually carries.

The studded leather jacket near the top of the range had everything. Product shots from several angles, a model wearing it, campaign imagery, video. The down jacket a little further down had product shots and a model. The Chelsea boots and the holdall had product shots on a white background and nothing else. No model, no motion, no context.

That pattern is not unique to the house we looked at. It is what every large catalogue looks like, and it is the shape of the opportunity.

The three tiers

Every big ecommerce catalogue sorts itself into 3 tiers of content, whether or not anyone decided it.

Top tier. The hero products and the new collection. Product, model, video and campaign imagery. These pages get the creative director’s attention, the shoot budget and the homepage. They are a small share of the products and a large share of the brand.

Secondary. Product and model stills shot in the studio, sometimes with campaign or lifestyle imagery alongside. Good pages. Not special ones.

Tertiary and accessories. Product-focused imagery only. Flat shots, often excellent, of a product on white. No model interaction, no video, no context for what it looks like on a person or in a life.

The pattern makes sense from a production point of view. A shoot costs what it costs, so it goes on the products that justify it. The problem is that revenue doesn’t follow the same curve. Individually, a tertiary product sells less than a hero. In aggregate, the long tail is a large part of what the site turns over, and every one of those pages is asking a customer to spend real money on a product they can see less of than they would in a shop.

Where AI earns its place

Here is where I’d point generative tools, and where I wouldn’t.

Not at the top tier. The campaign imagery is the brand. A luxury house’s hero content is the result of a creative team’s judgement, and the fastest way to make a luxury brand look cheap is to let a model generate the bit that was supposed to be art.

At the tertiary tier, the choice is different. Nobody is going to shoot the holdall on a model. The alternative to AI there is not a photographer, it is nothing. So the question becomes whether a model-on-body image generated from the existing product shot, or 4 seconds of motion that shows how the bag hangs, or a lifestyle context around a product that only ever existed on white, moves more people from the page to the basket than the flat shot does on its own.

That is a conversion question, and conversion questions can be tested.

The specific things we proposed, because they already existed as content types on the top-tier pages and so had a known effect on the customer, were these.

1. Model-on-body imagery for products that only have flat shots, generated from the product shot itself so the garment is right.
2. Short motion from stills for products with no video, enough to show drape, texture and how the product moves.
3. Lifestyle context for accessories, placing the product in the kind of setting the campaign imagery uses for the hero range.

In each case the point is to raise the content on the pages that currently receive less production attention towards the standard of the pages that receive more, without an additional shoot or additional physical production.

How to run it

Treat it as a conversion programme with a brand gate, in this order.

Audit. Pull the product list with the content each page carries: image count, model shot yes or no, video yes or no, campaign imagery yes or no. Add revenue and sessions per product. You now have a map of where the money sits relative to the content, and the gap between the two is the list of pages worth working on first.

Set the bar. The brand’s, not the tool’s. Decide who signs off AI-assisted imagery and make it the same person who signs off a campaign image, against the same standard. If a generated image fails on fabric, fit or finish, it doesn’t ship. You will learn quickly which product categories the tools handle and which they don’t, and in 2025 the honest answer was that knitwear and anything with a complex drape were still hard, while structured bags, shoes and outerwear were workable.

Test by tier. Pick a tertiary set, add the new content to half the pages, leave the other half alone, and measure conversion and return rate over a sensible period. Return rate matters because content that misrepresents a product converts once and comes back. Then do the same on a secondary set, where the uplift will be smaller because the pages were already decent.

Scale what passed. Roll the content types that beat control across the tier they beat it in, and keep the tiers that didn’t move as they were.

The three things that go wrong

Disclosure. If a customer finds out the image of the jacket on a person was generated, after they bought it, you have a trust problem on top of a return. Say it, plainly, where the image sits. Most customers care far less than the brand team fears, provided they weren’t misled.

Rights. A generated model is not a model with a contract, but the product shot it was built from has a photographer, and a lifestyle context built from reference imagery has a source. Keep the chain clean, because the saving on the shoot is not worth a dispute with a photographer.

Tone creep. The cheapest tier is the biggest tier, and once it carries generated content the house risks having most of its product pages set by a tool rather than a creative director. The gate exists to stop that. The hero range sets the standard the generated work has to reach, not the other way round.

Why this is the AI argument I actually believe

Most of what gets pitched to brands as AI creative is a way to make the hero content cheaper. I don’t think that works for luxury, and I’m not sure it works for anyone whose brand is the point. The version that works is less glamorous: find the hundreds of pages production will never reach, bring them up to the standard the customer already expects from the rest of the site, and measure whether it sold more.

It is a conversion rate project with a creative director holding the door. That is a smaller claim than “AI will transform your content” and it has the advantage of being true.