Ask a merchant how long it takes to write a product description and most will answer with the time it takes to type one: maybe ten or fifteen minutes for a decent paragraph. That answer is almost always wrong, not because the typing estimate is off, but because typing is the smallest part of the job. I learned this the expensive way while trying to fix product content across roughly 60,000 listings at Lotz Outdoors. The actual cost of a manually produced description includes research, prompting, formatting, copying, importing, checking, and repairing, and every one of those steps takes real time that rarely gets counted.
Here is the full sequence my old process actually required, per batch of products, not per description:
Ten steps, and only one of them is writing. The other nine are the hidden cost that never shows up when someone estimates that a description takes fifteen minutes.
Writing is fast once you know what to say. Finding out what to say is the slow part. A thin supplier description gives you almost nothing to work with, so before you can write anything useful, you have to track down materials, dimensions, intended use, and whatever else a shopper would actually want to know. That research happens outside the writing tool entirely, in browser tabs, spec sheets, and sometimes emails to a supplier who may or may not answer quickly.
This is the part of the process most merchants underestimate the most, because it does not feel like writing and so it does not get counted in a time estimate. It is, in practice, often the largest single cost.
A general AI tool has no memory of your brand voice, your structure preferences, or your banned claims from the last session. Every batch means retyping the same instructions: keep the tone direct, always include a materials line, never claim waterproof unless verified, format as HTML with these specific tags. Multiply that retyping across hundreds or thousands of products and the tax adds up to real hours that produce no new information, only repeated instruction-giving.
The most expensive step in the old workflow was never the writing. It was the repair work after a failed import: a field that got overwritten, a description that ended up on the wrong product, a batch that partially failed and required checking every single row to find the one that did not take. This kind of repair work is unpredictable, which makes it hard to plan around, and it often happens hours or days after the original work, when the context has already faded.
You do not need precise numbers to see the shape of this cost. Try tracking a single product through the full manual process, honestly, including every step above:
Add those five numbers together, then multiply by the number of products you actually need to touch. Most merchants find the real total is several times larger than their first instinct, because the first instinct only counted the writing.
This is the specific cost the Enrichio workflow, build a template, load products, generate, then review and publish, is designed to reduce. A template removes repeated prompting, since your tone, structure, and rules are set once and applied automatically. Loading products directly from Shopify removes the export-and-spreadsheet step entirely. Research happens as part of generation, rather than in separate browser tabs. Review and publish inside the same system reduces the risk of the failed imports and overwritten fields that caused the most expensive repair work in the old process.
None of this eliminates the need for human judgment. You still review drafts, verify facts, and approve what gets published. What changes is how much of the surrounding labor, the exporting, the repeated instructions, the formatting, the import checking, disappears from the process entirely.
If you want a starting estimate for your own store, try this simple exercise:
That number is usually the moment a merchant realizes the real constraint was never writing speed. It was everything happening around the writing. Enrichio supports research and generation across that whole workflow, but the time savings will vary by catalog, category, and how thin your existing content is, so treat any specific hours-saved figure as an estimate you should verify against your own experience, not a fixed guarantee.