If you are doing anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million on Shopify, Amazon, or both, you have lived this.
You want better product visuals. You get an agency quote back for thousands of dollars per listing, with a turnaround of three weeks at best and ten weeks at worst. So the project gets pushed to next quarter, and the same tired hero image keeps working against you through BFCM.
Monte Desai spent five years at Bain & Company advising Fortune 500 CEOs on ecommerce and retail before he kept hearing the same answer from clients: creative is always the bottleneck. He spun Pixii out of Bain, trained it on more than 100,000 top-performing listings across Amazon, Shopify, and other marketplaces, and built a system that turns one listing URL into seven optimized, fully editable visuals in about three minutes. Side hustlers, agencies, and Fortune 500 brands now use it, and Monte reports customers seeing an average 30% conversion lift by changing nothing but their images.
In this conversation, Monte breaks down the strategy layer most brands skip entirely, the AIDA sequence that turns seven images into a story instead of a gallery, why your Shopify PDP and your Amazon listing need fundamentally different creative, and how the “creative factory” model lets a brand clone one perfect listing across 500 SKUs in an afternoon. Whether you are optimizing your first hero product or refreshing an entire catalog before Q4, this is the playbook.
Ready to dig in? Let’s dive in. 👇
✅ Why “does it look good” is the wrong question entirely: Monte’s read on what actually separates a listing image that converts from one that just looks nice, and why the answer sits upstream of design in a place most brands never look.
✅ The AIDA sequence hiding inside your seven listing images: how image one, image two, and images three through seven each carry a different job, and what happens to your conversion rate when the sequence is random instead of intentional.
✅ Why your Shopify PDP and your Amazon listing should not share creative: the storytelling versus comparison split Monte draws between owned experiences and competitive marketplaces, plus what changes again when you get to TikTok Shop.
✅ The objection you should be raising in your own images: a counterintuitive return prevention play where telling the wrong customer this is not for them protects your reviews, your margins, and your ratings.
✅ What a $3,000, three week agency listing costs in the AI era: the real pricing, the token and allocation question, and the honest math on when the scale plan pays for itself.
✅ Where humans still win: Monte’s answer on whether brands need designers and agencies at all anymore, and the specific work he believes AI will never take.
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The big idea in this episode is one most operators will find uncomfortable: your listing images underperform for almost nothing to do with your photographer. Monte Desai’s answer to what separates a converting image from a merely attractive one is entirely strategic. Do you understand your customer deeply? Are you hitting the emotional and psychological need underneath the purchase? He frames it as old-school Ogilvy thinking, and he is blunt that the analysis and strategy layer is what is missing on almost every listing he sees. His reasoning is simple math. On Amazon, he puts average conversion at roughly 10%. On Shopify, closer to 2%. Most people on your page aren’t buying a competitor. They are buying nothing at all, sticking with the Diet Coke they have had for ten years instead of trying your product. Your images have to argue against inertia, not just against the seller next to you.
From there, Monte walks through what Pixii actually does when you drop in a listing URL. In roughly three minutes, it reads your reviews, analyzes competitors and alternatives in your market, benchmarks against a database of 100,000 top-performing listings, builds a creative strategy, and designs seven visuals that reflect your brand. The sequencing follows AIDA. The main image must stop the scroll wherever it appears, whether on Amazon, Google, or your own storefront. The second image holds interest. Images three through seven move the shopper from “this could be interesting” to “I need to buy this now, no more deliberation.” Category logic layers on top of that: supplements need ingredients and supplement facts and sometimes before and after, apparel needs a size chart and feature zooms. And Monte makes a point worth sitting with: good creative also prevents returns. If you sell a gentle cleanser and someone wants an intense chemical experience, your images should make them hesitate. Better a lost sale than a return and a one star review.
The Shopify versus marketplace distinction is where this gets practical for this audience. On Shopify you own the experience, so the job is storytelling, aspiration, and reassurance: you are in the right place, this is the brand for you, and here is why the objection in your head does not apply. On Amazon or Walmart, you are fighting on a competitive PDP where your competitors sit inches away, so the creative has to explicitly argue why you are the better option. TikTok Shop is a third animal entirely. The PDPs are still square images, but Monte describes the aesthetic as QVC on Adderall, deliberately over the top, while still reading as authentic to a generation that assumes it is being sold to. His example is a Graza demo that pours olive oil straight onto a counter, which is wasteful and messy and completely effective at showing texture and squeeze motion.
Steve ran the free listing grader live during the recording on a supplement he actually takes, and the verdict was specific enough to be useful: premium creative, weak click hook, clean main image with no scroll stopper, CTR identified as the bottleneck, with instructions to pre-qualify in the gallery and rewrite the titles and bullets. Monte explains the thinking behind giving it away. It is the enterprise diagnostic he used to sell at Bain, delivered in about sixty seconds, and it reads more like a creative director at Ogilvy than a scorecard. It also works on competitors, which is exactly what people use it for. Behind it sits Deep Strategy, an unreleased feature that analyzes you, your competitors, and all your reviews to determine where to play and how to win. Monte’s line about it is the one you will remember: he used to sell that analysis for a million bucks a pop.
Then comes the part that reframes the whole tool. The bigger use case is not the first listing, it is the factory. Through the API and MCP connection, brands make one perfect PDP and tell Pixii to scale it across the next 500 products. Roughly 50 listings in 20 minutes, with the system reinterpreting each one intelligently, swapping vanilla husks for actual strawberries when the flavor changes, adjusting wording and details without a single prompt. Teams are running it inside Slack, dropping an ASIN and getting finished visuals back three minutes later. On pricing, Monte lays out $250 and $750 per month tiers with a free trial, and does the comparison plainly: an agency charges around $3,000 for one listing, and the scale plan does 200 for $750. He targets 10x ROI as the floor and 100x as his internal goal.
Where Monte lands on the future is more measured than you might expect from a founder selling automation. He does not think agencies disappear, because what an agency really provides is that they will do whatever you need, and that list keeps regenerating. Somebody still has to take real photos, still has to stand outside a Target and talk to actual customers, still has to decide whether the output is any good. Taste is not solvable. And what people want keeps changing, because humans are strange animals you cannot fully predict. That is the human in the loop, and it is not going anywhere.
This is not a story about replacing your creative team. It is a blueprint for removing the sentence “do we have time for that this quarter” from your PDP roadmap permanently.
👉 Fix the strategy before you fix the pixels. Monte’s core argument is that what you say matters far more than how you say it, and that the analysis layer is what is missing from nearly every listing. Before you commission a single new image, get clear on who your customer actually is, what pain they are carrying, and how you differ from every alternative including doing nothing. If you cannot articulate that in a sentence, no amount of design polish will save the listing.
👉 Treat your image gallery as a sequence, not a set. Under the AIDA framework Pixii uses, each image has a distinct job: the main image stops the scroll wherever it surfaces, the second holds attention, and images three through seven walk the shopper from curiosity to decision to purchase. Most brands upload seven images that all argue the same point. Audit yours and ask what job each one is doing, because a gallery with no narrative arc is just seven versions of your first image.
👉 Stop reusing the same creative across Shopify and the marketplaces. On your own store the job is storytelling, aspiration, and rewarding repeat buyers, because the shopper already chose to be there. On Amazon or Walmart you are on a shared PDP with competitors one click away, so your images have to argue explicitly why you win the comparison. Running identical assets on both means one of them is doing the wrong job, and you are usually paying ad dollars to send traffic to it.
👉 Use your images to disqualify the wrong buyer. This is the counterintuitive one. If your cleanser is intense, signal it clearly enough that someone with sensitive skin thinks twice. Preventing that purchase costs you one sale and protects you from a return, a refund, a negative review, and the ranking damage that follows. At the $250K to $5M stage, review quality compounds faster than order volume does.
👉 Test on one listing before you scale to two hundred. The right sequence here is not a catalog refresh. Take one product that is selling reasonably well but not exceptionally, run it through the free grader, generate a new set, then A/B test it on Shopify where you can iterate fastest. Monte’s own framing is worth borrowing: moving a landing page from 2% to 3% is 50% more revenue with zero additional ad spend. Prove the lift on one SKU, then decide whether the scale plan earns its keep.
👉 The leverage is in the factory, not the first listing. Generating seven good images is the demo. The actual unlock is cloning one proven PDP across your catalog, roughly 50 listings in 20 minutes, with the system reinterpreting flavor, persona, and detail automatically. If you have a large catalog or a seasonal refresh cycle, this changes what is even worth putting on the roadmap. The question shifts from “can we afford this project” to “what else should we be refreshing while we are here.”
Monte Desai
Co-Founder, Pixii
Monte Desai is the co-founder of Pixii, the AI design platform that turns a single product listing URL into a complete set of optimized, fully editable visuals in about three minutes. Before Pixii, Monte spent roughly five years at Bain & Company as a Senior Manager, solving ecommerce, retail, and analytics problems for Fortune 500 CEOs and private equity backed brands. Pixii began as a side project inside that work, after Monte started asking clients directly whether the dashboards and analytics he was building would actually move the needle. The answer came back the same way every time: what would really move the needle is creative, and creative is always the bottleneck.
That insight became a company. Pixii was built on analysis of more than 100,000 top performing listings across Amazon, Shopify, and other marketplaces, and the platform now serves everyone from first time sellers to agencies to Fortune 500 brands, with reported customer results including roughly 30% conversion lifts and, in published case studies, five figure monthly savings on photoshoot costs. Monte holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and the Pixii team is drawn from Amazon, Meta, Bain, Harvard, and IIT.
What makes Monte’s perspective genuinely useful for Shopify operators is that he is a strategist who happens to have built a design tool, not the other way around. He talks about Ogilvy and customer psychology before he talks about models and outputs, and he is refreshingly unwilling to overclaim on AI. His view that agencies survive, that taste cannot be automated, and that human judgment stays in the loop is the kind of grounded read worth hearing from someone whose incentives point the other direction.
Featured in This Episode:
Over 9 seasons, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to chat with some of the brightest founders building amazing Shopify brands, as well as the partners shaping the app and marketing ecosystem. Every conversation has taught me something new, and I’m grateful for the chance to learn alongside you.
What matters most is that this podcast helps you solve real challenges and discover new ways to grow. Your support, feedback, and stories have made this journey truly special. Thanks for tuning in, sharing your wins and losses, and being part of the eCommerce Fastlane community.
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Steve Hutt
Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I’m your host, Steve Hutt.
Today’s conversation is all about product visuals and whether the images on your listings are literally costing you money—or whether they should be improving your sales.
If you’re doing anywhere from $250,000 to $5 million, you’ve definitely experienced what we’re going to talk about today. A better product page, whether on Amazon or in your Shopify store, can help grow revenue if you have better images.
A lot of people go to agencies and get quotes for thousands of dollars per listing, sometimes with turnaround times of up to 10 weeks. They do a lot manually. Maybe they’re using some AI to help, but at the end of the day, you might get a clean shot in a couple of days. Some are good, some are not great.
The agency also may not know your product as well as you do. That’s the challenge a lot of people have. You want high-quality product visuals, especially if you’re selling in international markets and want to localize your product photography.
There are tools available now, and that’s what my guest is here to talk about. His name is Monte Desai. He’s the co-founder of a company called Pixii—P-I-X-I-I.
Pixii spun out of Bain & Company. I did a little research before recording, and I believe Monte was there in 2023. The company was built on analysis of more than 100,000 top-performing Amazon listings.
Everyone from side hustlers to Fortune 500 brands uses it. Their case studies are compelling, and many agencies are now using the platform.
I wanted to bring Monte on because I think the timing is right. We’re in this pre-BFCM period. It’s the Super Bowl of commerce, and it’s coming up soon. It’s only the first week of September, and I know it’s the end of Q3, but it’s incredibly important that we think about product photography as a growth driver.
I’m hoping that by the end of this recording, you’ll know what separates a listing image that actually converts from one that just looks good.
So, hello, Monte. Welcome to the show.
Monte Desai
Hey, Steve. Thank you for having me on.
Steve Hutt
My pleasure. Let’s talk a little about the origin. Pixii spun out of Bain in 2023. What were you seeing inside client engagements at that time that made you think there was a creative bottleneck that brands didn’t really know about?
Monte Desai
Yeah, for sure. I was a consultant at Bain, working with Fortune 500 brands, private-equity brands, and smaller growing companies. We were doing all this eCommerce and retail work—analytics and dashboards.
Once you get familiar with a client, you can ask them directly, “Hey, is this stuff going to make you any money? Is it really going to move the needle?”
Their answer was universally that the thing that would really move the needle was creative, but creative was always a bottleneck. Creative was always a bottleneck.
I kept hearing that throughout 2022. Around that time, AI was turning the corner, so we started Pixii as a side project. It became its own company.
Steve Hutt
It’s interesting because the research I found says you analyzed more than 100,000 top-performing listings. Through technology, there are ways to scrape top Amazon listings and figure out why they work.
Product quality is one thing, but the listing itself and the visuals that go with it help paint a better picture and improve conversion. What do you believe separates top-performing images that actually convert from ones that just look nice?
Monte Desai
Yeah, it’s fascinating. It comes down to whether you understand the customer deeply. Are you hitting that emotional, psychological need they have through the visuals and copy, and getting them to add to cart immediately?
If you can resonate with them emotionally, that’s old school. Ogilvy. There is a lot more detail to it, but at the highest level, it’s strategy.
Who is your customer? What is their pain? How are you different from all their other options? That includes not only direct competitors on Amazon and Shopify, but also the option of doing nothing.
The average conversion rate for a lot of Amazon listings is only 10%. On Shopify, I think it’s around 2%. So if 98% of people are not buying, maybe they’re buying a competitor, but most often they’re just not buying anything.
Steve Hutt
Right.
Monte Desai
They’re thinking, “Do I need Poppy, or can I just get by with the Diet Coke I’ve been drinking for 10 years? Do I need the supplement, or am I fine without it?”
If you can convince them that they need this, that it’s the best option for them, that they can’t just continue their life the way it is, and that they need to buy it now—that’s what it really comes down to.
There’s much more to get into, Steve, around what kinds of images to use, what sequence to use, and all of that. But the fundamental thing I see missing is the analysis and the strategy.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, because I see that you can provide one URL—an ASIN in the Amazon world, I guess—for one particular product, and minutes later, a whole bunch of creative comes out that can be used.
Can you walk us through what happens? I know we’re not visual right now, but for people listening, if I drop in a link, what’s going on in the background, and what do people get?
Monte Desai
Oh man, it’s a whole new world with AI now. You drop in a listing URL. It could be an Amazon listing or a Shopify listing. In three minutes, you’re going to get seven visuals optimized based on what customers have been saying about you.
What happens in the meantime is Pixii reads all the reviews, looks at competitors and alternatives in the market, and looks at our database of 100,000 top-performing listings across Amazon, Shopify, and a few other platforms.
It comes up with a creative strategy and designs those visuals for you. It understands your brand. There’s a lot happening.
To get that first listing from a typical agency, it could take a few months—at minimum, three weeks. Here, you’re getting it in three minutes.
Steve Hutt
It’s amazing. I’ve seen some of the demos and examples. It’s pretty neat.
There was one consumable product where I loved that you gave a lot of different options. You don’t necessarily have to use them all, but you have images on a white or transparent background, then the on-brand experience. I like the competitor comparisons with the checkmarks and other elements that were created. I also like that nutritional facts had been scraped and reorganized correctly into a visual.
If you were to do all of that by hand, or even with AI yourself, individually, the time required to get it done would be huge. You’re saying you get seven beautiful visuals. The lifestyle photo is interesting. You put all these things together and say, “Here you go.” Can you iterate on that further? Yes, you can. But here’s the first seven to get you started.
Monte Desai
Totally. It dives deeper as you get into the categories.
With supplements, for example, you’re going to want ingredients and supplement facts. You might want a before-and-after. With apparel, you’re going to want a size chart and lifestyle imagery. You’ll want to zoom in on features that make you different.
You also want to prevent returns and negative reviews. That’s a big part of our process. If somebody should not be buying this product—if they should be buying another product in your catalog or not buying from you at all—there are things you can do to signal that.
You don’t want to say, “Don’t buy it,” but you can signal that this is a very intense skin cleaner that will work on acne. That way, people with gentle skin have a second thought. Conversely, if you sell a gentle skin cleanser and somebody wants something more intense, you need to let them know this is for people who want a gentle skin cleanser. It is not for people who want the chemical experience.
Steve Hutt
Right. I noticed on LinkedIn that you were talking about getting about a 30% lift on average from using images created through Pixii.
That’s a big number for not doing anything other than changing out your images. Can you tell me where that number comes from? Is it because of the variety, the quality, or the background research that informs the images being created?
Monte Desai
We surveyed a bunch of customers to figure that out, and honestly, that’s conservative. We definitely see 200% lifts quite often. Every month, I get a few emails saying, “Hey, I doubled my revenue this month on this product, and I didn’t do anything else except change the visuals.”
Why is that happening? Understanding who your customer is, communicating effectively, and understanding your product deeply are huge parts of it. Then, of course, there’s the market research and benchmarking we do.
Let me back up. The research, analysis, and strategy are the main things. What you’re saying matters much more than how you say it.
Steve Hutt
Right.
Monte Desai
But the second part is definitely how you say it. Is it on brand? Is it beautiful? Is it in a sequence?
We use a specific framework: AIDA. The main image, the first image, should catch attention, whether it shows up on Amazon, Google, or even your storefront page.
Then, as you move through images three through seven, it’s about getting them to decide and act. Every image tells the story and moves the customer from, “This could be interesting to me,” to, “I think this is the right fit for me. I’ve got to buy it right now.” No more deliberation, no more searching.
Steve Hutt
Right. What’s interesting is that my listeners are definitely Shopify-first and then marketplace-second—not always, but I think that’s generally the reality.
How does your tool differentiate between a product page on Shopify and those images versus what it looks like in a marketplace grid? They seem similar but different.
Monte Desai
Yeah, totally. What’s great about Shopify is that it’s your experience. You can tell your story and make it aspirational.
You want to communicate, “Hey, shopper, you’re in the right place. We are the brand for you, and we have exactly the solution you need.” You want to reward repeat buyers if they keep coming back. It’s your experience.
On Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces, it’s competitive. There, it’s very much, “Here’s how we’re better than the next option showing up on the same PDP.” You work so hard, spend ad dollars, and do all this work to get people to your PDP, and right there are competitors. Your images have to say, “This is how we’re better.”
On Shopify, you don’t have to do that as much. It’s more about storytelling. You still need to deal with objections. If you’re getting a lot of returns or negative reviews for a specific reason, you need to address that ahead of time to prevent that pain.
Steve Hutt
It’s interesting. I went into one of your case studies, I think through Huel, the supplement company from the UK. I think they’re worldwide now.
It’s interesting how they’ve put it together. When you go to their top product—the Black Edition high-protein powder meal—you can see why it’s a quality product. I’m looking at the Shopify store right now, and the hero image is very intentional. It has the Good Housekeeping Institute Approved badge in the corner, and it offers a little bonus with a free T-shirt and shaker.
Then it goes right into all the benefits you were talking about. I can see how this could bleed over a little bit. I haven’t gone to the Amazon listing yet for this particular SKU, but I can see the benefits of saying, “You’ve arrived, here’s why we’re great, and here’s what we’re all about.”
Monte Desai
Yeah, totally. I don’t have their permission to talk about their details publicly, but I can definitely talk about it as an outside observer.
The storytelling is definitely different on one versus the other. A lot of times on Shopify, especially, it’s repeat buyers. If you can get them to try something different, get the seven-pack this time, or try other flavors, there are so many cool things you can do with it.
What I love about Shopify is that I think you can A/B test faster.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, that’s true.
Monte Desai
If you’re doing different landing pages, you can try five different versions and see which one works. Going from 2% to 3% is 50% higher revenue, just like that. You don’t have to spend more on ads.
Steve Hutt
No, I agree. I’ve seen this a lot: long-form product pages and landing pages convert better because there’s a full visual story instead of just a regular product page, an add-to-cart button, subscribe-and-save, and all those things.
Those elements are important, but when you send a hero product to a fully custom landing page, you can still have live buy-now and add-to-cart buttons on the shop. It’s pretty neat what’s available right now.
Monte Desai
Long form is so interesting. It’s probably better for these AI tools as well, right? ChatGPT has more to work with.
Steve Hutt
Yeah. Imagine the content and visuals created, with a human in the loop who can look at the images and say, “No, these are fact-checked, and these are the reasons why these are meant to convert so well. We have the data to prove it.”
Now, how do we integrate these? Maybe you have brand guidelines that you put into ChatGPT, Claude, or Claude Design. Even Shopify has Sidekick now. There’s lots going on where you can create landing pages by uploading the images created through Pixii, applying your brand guidelines, and iterating for half an hour to create something pretty epic.
Monte Desai
Totally. There are many ways you can do it. You can download the high-resolution assets from Pixii, use your tool or do it manually, and put them back into Amazon or Shopify.
We also have an API that connects directly if you’re using Claude or other AI agents. People use that for brainstorming and creativity, but the bigger use case for us is actually the factory.
Think of Pixii as a creative factory. You make one perfect PDP and say, “Hey, Pixii, scale this to my next 500 products.” That can happen in an afternoon.
It takes the seven images you made and reinterprets them. If you’re targeting a different persona for a different product, or moving from chocolate to vanilla and strawberry, it reinterprets everything. It will show actual strawberries in the background instead of vanilla husks. The wording and details all change.
This happens without any prompts. It can do maybe 50 listings in about 20 minutes, so 500 in an afternoon is very reasonable.
Steve Hutt
This is amazing. For the technical people listening, you have a connection—a server, I guess—that connects directly to Pixii. You’re able to query directly through there.
Is that just for image generation and these kinds of ideas, or are there other ways of pulling data out? I’m trying to understand the MCP endpoints so people know what they can expect by connecting it.
Monte Desai
We also support video. Pixii designs videos for listings, social media, product pages, and ads. People are using it for video. You can generate new listings and designs from scratch, or clone existing listings that you’ve already made somewhere else or in Pixii.
We haven’t released this quite yet, but one of the big features that has been successful inside the app is called Deep Strategy. It analyzes you, your competitors, and all the reviews, then tries to figure out where to play and how to win.
Steve Hutt
Right.
Monte Desai
I used to do that as a consultant and sell that work for a million bucks a pop. Here, we can give it away essentially for free, or very close to it.
That’s been fun, and people have been loving it. We’re going to expose more and more of those kinds of analytics and probably expose them through the MCP as well.
Steve Hutt
Right. That’s eventually going to be publicly released as Deep Strategy. I can see how it could be very powerful, knowing that your strength is obviously in creative but backed up by data.
Now your harness sits on top of these large models, and you’re able to research, come up with best practices, and maybe highlight some outlier cases: “Hey, you might want to think about this. This is trending. This is interesting. This is unique.”
The reason I’m asking is because TikTok Shops are blowing up right now. The data around Gen Z buyers is out of control. Gen Alpha is buying now too. In my opinion, it is non-negotiable for most brands if they’re trying to reach a younger demographic.
What’s your thought on TikTok Shops as it relates to content production? Video seems like a big thing, but I’m curious about your framework.
Monte Desai
TikTok Shop is awesome. It’s growing at such a rapid clip. We work with TikTok Shop to get more brands on there that have been successful on Shopify or marketplaces.
In terms of creative, there are two parts. There’s getting click-through rate, which is a video in the feed, and then there’s conversion rate, which is the images on the listing.
TikTok Shop listings and PDPs still use square images. I’m sure they did that because it’s easy to bring over what you already have elsewhere. They do have a different style, though.
The way I think about TikTok Shop is QVC on Adderall. Does that make sense?
Steve Hutt
Okay, fair enough.
Monte Desai
It has to be really attention-grabbing and a little over the top. But I think the generation using it has also grown up feeling deceived by media, politicians, corporations, and so on. They value authenticity quite a bit as well.
A lot of the designs we create for TikTok Shop are kind of gross, to be honest with you, but that seems to really work there.
We did one for Graza as a quick demo. One of the things they’re doing is pouring olive oil onto the counter. Why would you do that? It causes a mess and wastes olive oil, but it gets attention. It shows the texture of the olive oil and the squeeze motion, and I think it’s pretty effective.
Steve Hutt
I see there’s a tool available on the site where you grab an Amazon listing, and I think it’s a listing grader. In 60 seconds, it audits that listing. It could even be a competitor’s listing.
What was the thought process behind doing this? Is it a gateway to help people learn more about Pixii, or is there real free value in the report?
Monte Desai
You always want to know with real data, “How’s my listing?” That’s what it is.
We have this 100,000-listing database, and we thought, “Well, we can’t expose that, but can we? And what would you even do with that?” If we can give you a tool that grades your listing and tells you what’s strong and what has issues, that’s useful.
Now, because it’s AI, it’s not just a bunch of numbers. I read one recently where I ran Versace, and it said the brand name is very clear, but people have trust issues because you only have one image. You’re not communicating that this is your brand, and the image is not up to your brand standards.
It feels much more like what a creative director at an agency like Ogilvy would say to you. That’s what we wanted to create. We give it away for free. It’s fun.
You can also look at competitors’ listings. People definitely use it for that.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, I can see that being powerful. Competitive intelligence is incredibly important. It’s not always about price. Price is certainly one factor, especially on Amazon if you’re in a commodity market.
But if you’re building your own brand, you want to go upmarket as much as possible from a margin perspective, because at the bottom, nobody wins.
You can check what competitors are doing and get ideas. I put in a supplement that I take and I’m running it live right now because I’m curious to see what comes back.
This one came back with “Premium creative, weak click hook.” It’s saying the main image is clean, but there is no scroll-stopper. CTR is your bottleneck. Use the gallery to pre-qualify caffeine, rewrite the titles and bullets, and so on.
There are a few interesting action items, plus a score and a breakdown of main image, supporting images, content—where it’s saying A at 12 out of 15—and reviews. Then it says, “Fix it with Pixii.” What happens next?
Monte Desai
You’ll click a button, and it’ll probably ask for your email address. Two minutes later, you’ll get a listing optimized to resolve the issues identified in the grader.
Steve Hutt
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Monte Desai
Yeah, it’s so fun that we can do this. Then you scale it to your next 500 listings, and you do it again for the holidays, Valentine’s Day, or whatever season matters to your business.
Steve Hutt
This is absolutely insane. My mind is blown. I’m really glad I was able to do this live because it’s an easier way to articulate it.
I’ll make sure I put links to this particular score in the show notes. I’ll encourage people to try it for themselves with an Amazon listing.
Would the same thing happen on a Shopify listing?
Monte Desai
It doesn’t work for Shopify yet, but that’s a good idea. Maybe we should add that.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, because it could be a competitor or your own product. You could say, “I want to improve this hero product,” or, “This one isn’t selling very well. I wonder why. I have some hypotheses, and you also have your own hypotheses based on that link and the research happening in the background.”
Monte Desai
Totally. I was thinking about what I said earlier: better listings come from better understanding of your customers and communicating that.
I’m sure that’s an obvious point, but most PDPs today were either designed when you didn’t have much time and were just getting started, or by an agency or freelancer who doesn’t quite understand your brand, product, the science behind it, or what makes it special.
Even if they did understand it, they have time constraints. They have other clients and deadlines. There are always translation errors, and there’s a game of telephone whenever you use outside support.
Even then, there are time constraints. It’s whatever you could do before you ran out of time and had to move to the next problem. If you’re a founder, operator, or agency owner, you have a million other things to do besides PDPs.
Much of the benefit is that we can do it in two minutes. You can get it done instead of asking, “Do we have time this quarter for this project?” Now you don’t need to ask that question. You can just bang it out and move on.
Steve Hutt
Right. With the MCP or API connection—I’m not sure whether you have a command-line interface or whatever—I want to talk about costs.
I guess there’s a free option where you can literally go to pixii.ai and try it out. That’s probably the first step for a lot of people. You don’t know what you don’t know.
It’s hard when we’re not showing it visually, but if you have something you’re selling on Amazon and maybe a matching Shopify store, it’s worth trying to see how it compares with what you’ve already produced.
What happens with the MCP or API connection? I’m curious about pricing and how it all fits. Some people might think at wider scale. From what I understand, you’re connected to a lot of large language models and even some open-source models to do certain tasks.
It’s an interesting, low-cost option if someone gets access through their Claude or ChatGPT connection to your MCP, knowing they can query it and get images and video out of it because you’ve already pre-connected to some of these frontier models.
I’m curious about pricing and what you believe next steps might be.
Monte Desai
Yeah, for sure. The free trial is great. You can design a couple of listings in maybe three minutes. Sometimes that’s all you need if you just want to work on one product that day.
If you want to upgrade, there are a few options. We have a $250-a-month plan and a $750-a-month plan. It depends on how many brands you’re working with, how many products you have, and how much creative you want to do.
Steve Hutt
I see. Are there token costs through the MCP or API? Some people are more Claude-forward, while others will use the app itself.
Monte Desai
No. There’s an allocation that you get, and most people stay within those allocations pretty well. If you need an extra pack, you can always buy one.
Steve Hutt
I see. So, acceptable use.
Monte Desai
Right. You still get high-resolution assets, storage for all that stuff, strategy tools, and team collaboration. There are a bunch of things in the platform, whether you’re using the tool itself or the API.
One cool thing people have been doing with the API and MCP is putting Pixii in their Slack. They can say, “Hey, redesign this listing,” drop in the ASIN or listing URL, and three minutes later, they get beautiful images in Slack itself.
Steve Hutt
I see. That’s amazing. You mentioned cloning and scaling from one listing across the entire catalog. I guess that would be more of the Scale plan. The $749-a-month option would give that capability? One listing could literally turn into 100 listings or more.
Monte Desai
Yep, exactly. If you have a bigger catalog, you’re doing a big refresh, or you’re an agency, the Scale plan is made for you to push a button and refresh the entire catalog.
Steve Hutt
It sounds like a good A/B test for people who want to give Pixii a whirl. Go in, use a product that’s selling reasonably well or is somewhere in the middle, and make changes based on Pixii’s recommendations.
Then test and analyze it, or A/B test it through Shopify, and see which version converts better. From there, it opens things up.
For $250 a month, it almost seems like a joke how inexpensive it is. To buy Claude alone is going to be $100 a month, sometimes $200 a month. This is everything to get your product visuals.
If that improves conversion rate, it’s obviously a massive net positive for brands in the growth stage. Then you scale up and pay $749, even if it’s for a limited time to refresh your catalog. The value is there.
Monte Desai
If you’re doing it yourself, it would take weeks and weeks. If you had an agency, it would be around $3,000 to do one listing only.
For $750, you get to do 200. It’s a deal. And the fact that it’s three minutes a pop—I mean, we like to deliver at least 10x ROI, but 100x is my internal goal.
Steve Hutt
This is kind of forward-looking before we wrap up. I want to say a year out, but a year in AI is ridiculous. It’s like five years.
Do you really think a brand needs to hire a designer or an agency at all anymore, given the way the technology, frontier models, your harness, and your platform work? Does the designer’s job become something else entirely now?
Monte Desai
The role of the agency is really interesting. What does an agency provide? They provide expertise, tools, and labor.
But I think the main thing they provide—the number one thing, and I’m thinking a lot about this because we serve a lot of agencies—is that they will do anything. They will do whatever you need.
What that means now is that a lot of the rote design work can change. Agencies are basically saying, “Maybe we play more of a part in branding or creative brainstorming. Then, once we lock that in, we use Pixii to scale.”
Maybe one day Pixii will do the brainstorming and creative work as well. But agencies still need to talk to the client. They still need to take real photos of the product. They need to go out in the real world, stand outside a Target, stop customers, and have real conversations.
I think the list of things AI can’t do is going to evaporate, but the job will keep changing. People will always need an agency, I think. I don’t see a world where agencies are completely obsolete.
Steve Hutt
The words that get floated around in our space are context—understanding the business from inception. People don’t necessarily have a full Markdown file in Claude that says, “Here’s how I started, here’s my whole story,” and keeps it updated.
The other phrase that comes up a lot is “human in the loop.” Humans have to be there because there are creative things where the human has to understand the direction of the business. It’s kind of an odd term. I tried to get that domain too—human in the loop. It’s a pretty cool domain.
That’s really the truth about where AI continues to iterate. It’s not replacing humans. This is not the apocalypse. It’s not happening.
If anything, I believe that with AI now—and I’m sure people listening feel the same way—you do the same amount of work or more, but you get more quality done. I think that’s interesting.
I’m not working three hours a week and sipping margaritas. That’s not it at all. I feel like the quality and output have doubled or tripled—definitely tripled the output. I think that’s the same thing Pixii does.
The human in the loop understands the direction of the business and is strategic, but leverages the intelligence available through these frontier models and a platform like yours.
Monte Desai
Yeah, I think there’s always going to be a role for humans in the loop, especially with creativity. Even if we can make something perfectly optimized—every single thing is absolutely perfect—it’s still a matter of taste.
Do you like it? Does your client like it? Do customers like it?
What people want is always changing. People say, “Well, AI predicted it.” I doubt that, because humans are strange animals. You can’t predict us.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, exactly.
I know we chatted before recording. You wanted to offer a special listener-only bonus or promotion. Obviously, there’s the free trial. People can go right away to pixii.ai—P-I-X-I-I.ai.
What’s the special offer you want to share with our audience?
Monte Desai
Listeners should definitely get the free trial. After that, if you use the discount code FASTLANE—all caps—you’ll get 20% off the first month of any plan.
Steve Hutt
Okay, perfect. So that brings the Growth plan down to about $200 for month one after the free trial. It’s dirt cheap for what it does.
When you see the free trial and run it through—like I just did with the supplement product—it’s pretty amazing what can come out.
Thank you, first of all, for coming on the show today and being flexible with the timing to make this work. I think we’re at a really good time, being in early September. It’s back-to-school, back-to-work-ish. Summer’s done-ish, Labor Day is happening, and we’re seeing all these BFCM webinars. People are thinking about the Super Bowl period of commerce.
This is a great time to think about your creative, and this is a great way to scale it out. Try a couple of products, prove the value, and then scale the you-know-what out of it. I think it’s a really cool platform you’ve built.
Monte Desai
Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I agree—this is the busy season. This is where eCommerce is where we shine.
Steve Hutt
Yeah, this is awesome. All right, thank you so much, Monte. Have yourself a great afternoon.
Monte Desai
Have a great day. Thank you, Steve. Bye-bye.
Steve Hutt
All right, take care.
