How To Write Prompts that Actually Work

"Prompting is the new black" – something that is mentioned almost every day in news outlets, on social media and in spaces even beyond just tech-related industries.

Prompting has become an increasingly hot topic in recent years. With the myriad of articles available surrounding how to curate the best prompt, choosing the best way to put together a prompt can be challenging. So, given the influx of information, how do organizations really choose the best way to formulate a prompt that can optimize the output towards content that will be profitable?

The simple answer is that prompting is never one-size-fits-all. In fact, it is very industry-dependent, and it is also very dependent on your ultimate business goals. In this blog, I’ll share some insights into how to choose the best type of prompting that will be useful for specific goals, using e-commerce as an example.

A study done by Shopify, one of the largest e-commerce hosting platforms, sheds light on how best to curate an AI prompt that can be optimized for an online store. It categorized prompts into the following categories:

• Instructional prompts that are used to direct the tool to do specific tasks.
• Creative prompts to generate new ideas.
• Informational prompts that are used for factual data, explanations or clarifications.
• Reasoning prompts, which are good for analyzing, deducing or solving problems.
• Interactive prompts that allow engagement with the tool.

Once you identify the type of prompt that you need, it will guide the process on how best to structure the prompt. There is a vast amount of tips for curating the best possible prompt, but the overlapping suggestions include: being specific, giving an overview of context (where applicable), including examples, and specifying things like the target you want to achieve from the prompt. For instance, if you would like a prompt to provide a product description or title that will be useful for SEO purposes on Google Shopping specifically, then that should be included in your prompt. If you need a prompt that asks for a product description that will showcase your products in a strategic way that is better than your competitors, state this and also list who your competitors are.

Another strategic way to structure a prompt that can improve product visibility and potentially boost sales is to create a product-feature-based prompt. Here, inputting the features that are specific to the product in terms of its selling point can be included in the prompt in list form and the tool can be told to create an idea product description from these features. From this, a product-feature template can be made, which can be reused for all existing products and for new products that are uploaded thereafter. An example of a type of langchain-prompts is shown below: 

input_variables=["product_name", "customer_interest"],

template="""

You are an AI sales assistant for an e-commerce store. Your goal is to provide personalized product recommendations by suggesting complementary or premium products based on a customer’s interest. Make the recommendation friendly, persuasive, and focused on value.

Customer Profile and Interest : {customer_interest}

Product They Are Considering: {product_name}

Suggest one or two complementary products and explain why they pair well with the product the customer is considering.

"""

)

Beyond product recommendations, a prompt like this can be used to write up a product description tailored to your e-commerce goals (optimization, feature-focused, storytelling, professional, persuasive, etc.).

But curating a profitable prompt doesn’t stop there. Another study identifies the 15 best types of product description prompts for ChatGPT, with examples. This showcases varying prompts designed to produce the information that you wish the product description to focus on. For instance, should you choose for a product description to be crafted in a storytelling format, this is the study’s recommended prompt:

These are, of course, not exhaustive, given that types of businesses and product types are always different. Additionally, your business may excel in one sphere, but require some assistance in another – it's all about finding the gap and seeing where AI can be useful for you.

Additionally, adding an AI-assisted chatbot to your e-commerce platform can significantly boost sales. A report by Deloitte mentioned a 15% boost in conversion rates for sites that have 24/7 chatbots. (Which makes sense, as many customers may have a question that they do not want to wait an entire day for a human staff member to answer during office hours.) Using AI to assist with finding a suitable chatbot for your site is helpful, especially because most chatbot programs use AI for curating responses.

LLMs can also assist with curating things like promotional materials, social media marketing assets and adjusting product descriptions and titles for SEO purposes. The next blog in this series will unpack some insight into the best optimization practices.

Posted by Ammaarah Mohamed on 11/14/2025