Don't just focus on the plate! Nowadays, cross-border experts are using AI to reconstruct the entire chain

In Tuke e-commerce in 2026, if you are still relying on manual product selection, staying up late to edit videos, and mechanically replying to emails, then you are really racing a tractor against someone else's supercar.

How do we turn AI into a "super employee" in our business? Today, let's break down how to make the most of this new era tool.

Image source:TikTok

No more guessing products, let AI be the "market spy"

How did we select products before? By looking at the Best Seller list or just by intuition. The result often was: what you thought was good ended up as inventory in the warehouse.

The real approach now is called "demand calculation". AI doesn't have aesthetics, but it can do the math. It can crawl global social media (especially TikTok) for trending topics, high-frequency words in comment sections, and even changes in weather in different regions to reverse engineer what the product should look like.

For example, a post-95 entrepreneur Liu Shiqi from Quanzhou, Fujian, who makes slippers, couldn't keep up in the price war, so he decided to let AI be the product manager. By analyzing social trends among young people in Europe and America with AI, he came to a counter-intuitive conclusion: young people are pursuing a kind of "weird comfort".

AI suggested he shouldn't make those traditional pretty slippers, but instead combine "Chinese-style foot massage points", "fluorescent colors popular on US social media", and "DIY pendants" to make an "ugly slipper".

And the result? This pair of slippers, which looks weird in China, sold for $145 a pair in North America, with a wholesale profit margin as high as 92%.

Image source: Internet

This is a typical case of letting AI understand data, not aesthetics.

You only need to give AI the instruction: "Analyze the most liked videos under the #athome#relax tags on TikTok in the past month, extract the pain points and high-frequency adjectives mentioned by users, combine with weather changes in North America, and give improvement suggestions for the slippers category."

The "Industrial Revolution" of TikTok Content Creation: One Person Is a Whole Team

TikTok is now the main battlefield for traffic, but it's also a bottomless pit that devours time and money.

To shoot a high-quality product video, you need photography, lighting, models, editing, and sometimes hiring a foreign voice actor can cost hundreds. But now, AI video generation tools have completely brought down the cost.

You don't need to know how to shoot videos, or even know foreign languages. The specific operation is like this:

You just need to upload a product image with a white background, then open a popular AI video generation tool and select the "video generation" function.

You can upload a picture as a product reference, and upload a video clip with the camera movement you want as a style reference.

The instruction for AI is also very simple: "@Image1 as the main product, generate a 15-second TikTok vertical video. The background should be a bright kitchen, the camera moves from close-up to wide, showing the product in use, automatically generate authentic Spanish voiceover, and make sure audio and video are synchronized."

How effective is it? Before, you could make at most 3 videos a day by staying up late, but now with AI, one person can generate dozens of product videos in different scenarios and languages a day, and the cost drops from hundreds per video to just a few bucks.

For example, a seller selling a 3D book-shaped ceramic mug, with less than 5,000 followers on a small account, posted an AI-made video—the video only shows a "glowing book" and a steaming cup of coffee, full of atmosphere.

The result: 18.1 million views in 7 days, 38,000 orders sold, and nearly $600,000 in sales. Another seller of robot dog toys used AI videos to show the dog "barking and moving", selling over 30,000 units in 20 days.

Image source: Internet

Customer Service and Sales: The "Gold Medal Salesperson" Who Never Sleeps, 24/7

Anyone who has done Tuke knows that time difference is the biggest enemy. Often, when American customers wake up and want to ask something, you are sound asleep, and by the time you wake up, the customer has already placed an order with your competitor.

Now, AI customer service is grabbing back those orders that should have been yours.

TikTok Vietnam recently launched an intelligent customer service tool called "Lead Genie", which can automatically handle user DMs and accurately identify high-potential customers.

Research shows that if a brand can respond to a customer's inquiry within 3 minutes, the sales conversion rate can be 2.2 times higher than before.

This is emotional value—someone responds to you in the middle of the night, and the consumer is so touched that their hand doesn't shake when placing an order.

Image source: Internet

Speaking of this, you might feel anxious: with so many tools, which one should I learn?

In fact, real experts now don't bother studying how to "type commands" for AI. Because technology is developing so fast, this year you need to input complex prompts, next year you may only need to say it in plain language.

Just like the seller from Quanzhou shared: "Our team never spends energy learning those complicated AI commands, because those skills will be outdated in half a year. What we need to do is focus all our energy on 'strategy'."

What you need to do is first clarify your company's business processes and standardize each step.

Then tell AI your "strategy": for example, what is our pricing strategy? What tone do our target customers like? Leave the "brain" role to yourself, and hand over all the repetitive, execution-level work, such as making images, editing, sending emails, replying to basic questions, to AI as the "hands and feet".