How to write an AI skill for your e-commerce brand

If you have explained your product page format to AI more than once, you have found a skill. You just wrote it in a chat window instead of a file.

Most brands try to fix generic AI output by writing a better prompt. That fixes one output. Then the session ends, the next session starts empty, and you type the same instructions again. Slightly differently, because nobody remembers their own instructions word for word. Which is why the copy drifts.

I have spent 17 years building brands, with projects led in previous agency collaborations for Amazon, Pier 1, Dressbarn and MAC Cosmetics. The pattern in every team I have trained on AI is the same. They are not short on effort or short on prompts. They are re-briefing from scratch every single morning, and nobody has written the brief down.

What is a skill, actually?

A skill is a plain markdown file that teaches your AI one specific process exactly the way you want it done. Think of the SOP you would hand a new hire on day one, or the training doc you would give a VA before letting them touch the store.

Your context files tell the AI who your brand is: what you sell, who buys it, how you sound, what you never say. A skill tells it how the work gets done: the format, the length, the order, the structure, the rules.

Both live as files in your brand folder. Neither one is a prompt.

Here is the part that surprises people. You do not attach it. When the AI has access to your brand folder and a task matches, it searches the folder, finds the relevant skill file, reads it, and applies the format without being told it exists.

Which SOP should I write first?

The rule is simple. Anything you have explained twice is a skill you have not written down yet.

For an e-commerce brand, the candidates are almost always these five, in this order:

1. Product descriptions. Highest volume, most repeatable, format already in your head. Start here.
2. Email campaigns. Subject line rules, preview text, body length, how you talk about a discount.
3. Review replies. Especially the bad ones, where tone matters most and the founder is the bottleneck.
4. Ad copy. The variations you need per angle, and the claims legal will not let you make.
5. The weekly read. How you want the numbers laid out, and which ones you actually care about.

Do not write all five this week. Write one, use it for a week, and edit it twice. A skill you have corrected twice is worth more than four skills you wrote in one sitting and never revised.

What goes in the file?

Six parts. Be boring and be explicit. This is the single biggest mistake I see: people write skills the way they write brand decks, in adjectives. Your AI cannot act on an adjective.

Concise is not an instruction. Under 120 words is. On brand is not an instruction. Never open with the fabric is.

1. When to use it. One line, so the AI knows to reach for this file and not another.
2. What it needs first. The inputs: which files, which export, which product.
3. The steps. The order the work happens in, numbered.
4. The format rules. Word counts, structure, what goes first, what goes last.
5. The never list. Words, claims, and moves that are out of bounds. This is where the taste lives.
6. A worked example. One finished output that is exactly right. This does more work than the other five sections combined.

The template, ready to copy

Create a file called product-descriptions.md and paste this in. Replace the bracketed parts with your own. Written badly and true beats written well and vague, so do not polish it.

Every time you re-explain something to your AI, you have found a skill that needs to be written down.

Where do I save it so the AI finds it?

Inside the brand folder you already connected, make a subfolder called skills and put the file there. Then add one line to the master file at the top of your brand folder, the one that loads automatically at the start of every session:

That single line is the difference between a folder full of documents nobody opens and a system that briefs itself. Without it the files are available. With it they are used.

Four more worth writing

Same six-part structure, different job. Here is the spine of each so you are not starting from a blank page.

Email campaigns

Subject line rules and character count. Preview text as a second line, never a repeat of the subject. Body word count. How you handle a discount, which for most premium brands means the offer arrives after the reason, not before it. Whether you use the customer's first name. What your sign off is. One campaign of yours pasted in as the example.

Review replies

Separate paths for five star, three star, and one star. The rule on what you never say in public: no arguing, no policy quoting, no discount as an apology unless you have decided otherwise. Length cap, because long replies read as defensive. Whether you sign with a name. Two real replies pasted in, one good and one bad.

Ad copy

How many variations per angle, and what the angles are for your category. The hook rules. The claims you legally cannot make, quoted exactly. Character limits per placement. Whether the brand name appears in the first line. The three ads that performed, pasted in with their numbers.

The weekly read

Which numbers you want, in which order, compared against what. The length cap, because a report nobody finishes is not a report. The instruction to flag anything that looks strange rather than smoothing it over. And the one line most people forget: tell me what to stop worrying about, not only what to worry about.

When the output drifts, edit the file

This is the habit that makes the whole thing compound.

When something comes back wrong, do not type "make it better." That changes one output and teaches the system nothing. Say what is wrong as a rule, then put the rule in the skill file.

• Wrong: "this feels too salesy."
• Right: "the offer is arriving before the reason. The reason always comes first." Then add that line to the format section.

Treat it as a living SOP, exactly the way you would revise a training doc when a new hire keeps making the same mistake. Six edits in and the file is worth more than any prompt library you could buy.

What should never be a skill?

Anything that requires judgment rather than process.

AI will hand you forty subject lines in nine seconds. Knowing which one is right is still the whole job. Deciding whether a campaign fits the brand, whether a claim is honest, whether an image is beautiful: those are taste calls, and taste is the part that does not get automated. It is also the part that is yours.

Write skills for the production. Keep the deciding.