Sell It Before You Make It: Revolutionizing E-Commerce with Personalized AI-Generated Items

E-commerce has revolutionized retail, yet its traditional workflows remain inefficient, with significant resource costs tied to product design and inventory. This paper introduces a novel system deployed at Alibaba that uses AI-generated items (AIGI) to address these challenges with personalized text-to-image generation for e-commerce product design. AIGI enables an innovative business mode called "sell it before you make it", where merchants can design fashion items and generate photorealistic images with digital models based on textual descriptions. Only when the items have received a certain number of orders, do the merchants start to produce them, which largely reduces reliance on physical prototypes and thus accelerates time to market. For such a promising application, we identify the underlying key scientific challenge, i.e., capturing users' group-level personalized preferences towards multiple generated images. To this end, we propose a Personalized Group-Level Preference Alignment Framework for Diffusion Models (PerFusion). We first design PerFusion Reward Model for user preference estimation with a feature-crossing-based personalized plug-in. Then we develop PerFusion with a personalized adaptive network to model diverse preferences across users, and meanwhile derive the group-level preference optimization objective to model comparative behaviors among multiple images. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The AI-generated items achieve over 13% relative improvements for both click-through rate and conversion rate, as well as 7.9% decrease in return rate, compared to their human-designed counterparts, validating the transformative potential of AIGI for e-commerce platforms.