MyStartupWave / PS 03
Catalog Genius
AI-Powered Product Generation & Authenticity Detection
Generate e-commerce product images and listings, and assess image authenticity in one platform.
Catalog Genius
The objective
The challenge.
Small online sellers, D2C brands and catalog teams need affordable, consistent product listings, while buyers need images they can trust. Manual photography and copywriting are slow; generic AI tools can change a product’s colour, shape, branding or printed text. Standalone image detectors also struggle with edited images and rarely explain their verdicts. Build one platform that combines fast catalog creation with trustworthy authenticity analysis, helping sellers publish attractive listings without misrepresenting the real product.
Small and medium sellers, D2C brands and independent vendors; also marketplace catalog and trust teams, agencies and buyers.
Turn minimal text or a phone photo into a complete, marketplace-ready listing, with product-faithful images and understandable authenticity reports in the same platform.
Product capabilities
What to build.
Required features
- Generate product images
Create professional product images from descriptions or reference photos, including clean white-background packshots and at least one lifestyle or context scene.
- Preserve product fidelity
When a reference photo is supplied, preserve the product’s shape, colour, branding and printed text. Check fidelity and flag generated or enhanced outputs that fail.
- Enhance and show consistent views
Support background removal, lighting and colour correction, upscaling, and multiple consistent views, such as front, side and angled images.
- Generate complete listings
Produce titles, highlights, descriptions, structured specifications, tags or categories and SEO content. Adapt content to the character limits and rules of at least two target platforms.
- Analyse image authenticity
Estimate whether each uploaded image is a real photograph or AI-generated, with calibrated confidence. Include content-based pixel analysis; metadata alone is insufficient.
- Explain the result
Provide a trust report with visual indicators, such as suspicious-region heatmaps, plain-language reasons, and metadata and provenance checks, including EXIF and C2PA Content Credentials where present.
- Export to both stores
Provide one-click export to both Shopify and WooCommerce using their APIs or official product CSV import formats.
Optional ideas
- Batch catalogs
Process an entire catalog, for example 50 or more products supplied in a CSV.
- Multilingual listings
Offer English plus at least one Indian language.
- Embedded provenance
Embed disclosure labels or C2PA Content Credentials in generated images. This enhancement is optional; disclosure in exported listings remains required.
- Partial manipulation detection
Detect splicing or object insertion and removal, alongside fully synthetic images.
- Guideline checker
Check marketplace image dimensions, backgrounds and text overlays.
Typical workflow
Enter a description or upload a phone photo → review and edit the images and listing → check any image’s authenticity → review its trust report → export to Shopify or WooCommerce, or download a complete listing pack.
Demo & deliverables
Show it working.
- Live catalog creation
Create at least three complete listings across different product categories from minimal input.
- Live authenticity test
Analyse a judge-provided mixed set of real and AI-generated images, including compressed and cropped versions. Produce a report for every test image.
- Working store export
Demonstrate a successful export to either a Shopify development store or a WooCommerce test site. The product must still support both platforms.
Success criteria
What success looks like.
Listing generation and export work for all demo products. A user can create a complete listing in under 5 minutes, and vendors rate generated images as publishable in at least 80% of cases.
Generate a complete listing, including images and text, in under 60 seconds per product. Return authenticity analysis in under 5 seconds per image.
Reach at least 85% accuracy on the judges’ balanced hidden test set, with no more than a 10-percentage-point accuracy drop on JPEG-compressed, resized or cropped versions of the same images. Confidence scores must be well calibrated.
Preserve product fidelity in judge review, invent no product specifications, disclose AI-generated imagery and communicate uncertainty for every authenticity verdict.
Document generation cost per listing and justify a pricing model for small vendors, targeting a cost well below one professional product photograph.
Scope & constraints
Build within the brief.
Image generation and enhancement, listing generation, explained authenticity detection, and Shopify and WooCommerce export belong in the same product.
Payment processing, inventory or order management, live publishing to production marketplaces, legal certification of authenticity, and video generation.
You may focus on 2–3 product categories, use test stores for integrations, and target current mainstream image generators for detection.
Technical & safety requirements
Use a web-based platform with any open-source or API model stack. The vendor interface must work in mobile browsers; the solution should run on cloud or free GPU tiers.
Generated text must not contain specifications absent from the input. Follow the official Shopify and WooCommerce export formats and the target platforms’ content rules.
Use uploaded images and data only for the requested task. Do not use copyrighted or third-party brand imagery without permission.
Authenticity results are probabilistic estimates, never definitive proof or legal certification. Show confidence levels and an inconclusive band to avoid false accusations. Detectors may not generalise to future image-generation models.
Clearly disclose AI-generated images in exported listings, in line with the brief’s Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 requirements against misleading product information.
Resources & help
Useful before you start.
Use image-generation and vision models or AI APIs you can access, at your own discretion and cost; no partner API or technology credits are provided. Free GPU tiers are acceptable. Set up your own Shopify development store and local or hosted WooCommerce test site; both can be set up free.
Use self-captured, public-domain or openly licensed product photos and real-versus-synthetic image datasets, within their licences. Detection will be evaluated on a hidden judge test set.
Shopify and WooCommerce API and product-import documentation; the C2PA Content Credentials specification; marketplace image guidelines; Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020.
