Interactivated Growth Lab:
Tech, Design & Business Insights

Every online retailer wants their visitors to become customers before leaving their website. Different businesses will look for different things in an eCommerce platform, yet they all share the same bottom line. It’s all about bringing your product to people’s attention, while simultaneously increasing sales and expanding your customer base. Optimizing your site to provide first-rate user experience is an important step in achieving this goal, but ultimately, it all boils down to how good your product description page is.

The quality of your product description page can truly make or break your eCommerce website. It’s one of the four main ingredients that make for a successful online store. You already have a great product that you want to sell, as well as the channel (in this case a website) that allows you to do that. Potential customers have found your store and are interested in buying your product. Now it’s up to you to lay out the features of your product and motivate visitors to follow through on their purchasing plans.

There’s no universal definition of what constitutes a good product description page. The name suggests that it should focus on your product and provide an extensive description of its purposes, properties, and design (where necessary). But it’s not just about describing the product: it’s about presenting it in such a way that is guaranteed to seal the deal with your visitors. After all, this is the last thing they’ll see before potentially proceeding to the checkout, so it must give them enough incentive to buy what you’re selling.

Keep the Description Short, Engaging, and Product-Specific

When describing your product, every word should be well-thought-out and product-specific. If you look around the internet, you’ll find hundreds of descriptions that boast about the “excellent quality” of the product in question and dub it the “number one choice for all your (corresponding) needs.” These may seem like a good idea while you’re writing them but are in fact an excellent example of how not to do it. They say nothing about your product and are meaningless to people who want to learn more about it.

Of course, you believe in your product; if that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t be selling it in the first place. No manufacturer will ever proudly exclaim that what they’re offering is “near-perfect,” “not too shabby,” or “acceptable” while trying to lure customers into purchasing their product. These hyperbolic claims are just empty, useless statements that serve no other purpose than to waste the valuable product page copy space. Featuring them at the beginning of the description might even turn potential buyers away.

Knowing that most people will likely just glance over the description, copywriters advise keeping things as short as you can. This means using brief sentences made up of simple, easy-to-understand words, as well as short paragraphs with no more than two or three sentences each. Keeping your readers engaged is crucial to the success of your product description page. Moreover, utilizing short and simple words is the safest way not to alienate potential customers who might not understand the complicated jargon.

Bullet points are a perfect tool to highlight the features of the product: its dimensions, functions, and accessories it comes with. This is the information buyers are most interested in, so cover everything and keep it well-organized. If there’s a compelling history behind the product, try to tell it in an interesting way using as little copy space as you can. Needless to say, you shouldn’t lead off with this story, but instead, use it after the main description to make what you’re selling more appealing to your visitors.

Implement a Design That Puts Your Product Front and Center


The product description page is where your product gets to shine. A unique, functional design solution is almost as important as the description itself. If you’re new to eCommerce and are hesitant to invest the money needed to have your store custom designed, there are many ready-made eCommerce website templates available to buy. They are fairly cheap, and although they are good enough to get your store off the ground, they will need tweaking and customization to suit the specific products you’re offering.

For example, if you’re selling a motor vehicle, potential customers want to see high-resolution photos of the car taken from each and every angle before deciding to part with their hard earned money. On the other hand, if your store is selling wine, a photo or two of the bottle will provide illustration for your buyers, who will be more interested to read about the ingredients and the taste before making the purchase. It’s important to keep in mind that each product needs a different style of presentation.

It’s also important for your design to have some unique features compared to other online stores selling the same product. Consider this scenario: a buyer sees the product and remembers the look of your page, but decides to return to it at in a little while and forgets to bookmark it. Later, they will search the web and find the product, but it will be another eCommerce website that uses the same premade theme you’re using, too. They will be the ones who get the sale, not you – and you mustn’t let that happen.

Because everything on this page should be in the service of the product you’re selling, de-cluttering the page from all the extraneous elements is highly recommended. The font should be easily legible, the background colors neutral and unobtrusive, and the info that’s pertinent to the product laid out in a neat and accessible way. The inclusion of call-to-action buttons is imperative: design them so that they’re spotted immediately and make the text (“add to cart” or “proceed to checkout”) short and to-the-point.

Lure Your Visitors into Becoming Customers

Call-to-action buttons are known to have a positive effect on your business, but there are some additional features that are just as important in taking you towards closing the deal. When an item you’re selling comes in several different colors, include a drop-down menu so that the visitors may pick the one they prefer. Similarly, if you’re selling items of clothing, a drop-down menu where users can choose the size that fits them is a smart idea. The menu should be placed near the top, closely below the product name.

Being prepared to meet all your customers’ needs is vital to running a web-based retail business. It often happens that they are impressed with a certain product, but one specific feature is stopping them from purchasing it. For instance, they might find an external hard drive that has all the characteristics they are looking for, yet its capacity is 500 gigabytes and they need a 1-terabyte model. If you have that one in stock, feature a small snapshot in a “similar products” section on the bottom of the page for easy access.

Occasional sales and limited-time offers are often utilized by eCommerce websites as a sure-fire way to attract potential customers. When you decide to lower the prices of one or a group of products, don’t be quiet about it. Place a small button underneath the main photo on your product page that highlights how large of a discount you’re offering. If it’s a limited-time offer, add a counter that shows the time left until the original price is restored, urging buyers to act quickly in order to take advantage of the discount.

Before completing the purchase, customers like to read a few trustworthy reviews of the product they’re interested in. You can complement your product description page by showcasing the positive feedback submitted by your buyers. To motivate users to write product reviews, consider implementing some type of a reward system. For instance, give them a certain number of points for each review they submit and let them transform those points into a small discount on the next purchase they make in your store.

Search Engine Optimization Is a Must

In the overcrowded web environment, it’s crucial to make your eCommerce website SEO-friendly. This helps rank your site higher in Google searches and is vital to attracting legions of prospective customers. The previously mentioned user reviews are a good strategy to do this, as one comprehensive study has proved. Research shows that the product description pages that implement customer reviews bring about a 62 percent increase in revenue per visit, as well as a 3 percent increase in average order value.

Search engine optimization is all about keywords, so it’s important to do your research and use unique keywords, preferably long-tail ones (i.e. those including three or more words). Implement them in both on page product descriptions and Meta descriptions. Each product page needs to have a unique Meta description that highlights the properties of the product, as well as its price. Many ready-made templates are not designed with SEO in mind, which is another reason you shouldn’t rely on them too much.

Social media integration is an all-important feature that can help increase your website’s ranking, and it’s yet another one that many generic eCommerce themes are not equipped to support. Every product description page should include a row of social media buttons that allow users to share them on popular social networks. These include, but are not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Tumblr. This also helps raise your site’s popularity, as some of your customers are likely to have a large following.

Using unique and simple URLs that incorporate product-specific keywords plays a significant role in your product description page’s high web ranking. World-renowned online retailers like Amazon can allow themselves to have long and complicated URLs, but smaller eCommerce websites should put a lot of thought into their page address structure. You must also enhance the internal search function on your website: enable predictive searches, product name misspelling, and category-specific product search.

Modify Your Product Page to Maximize Its Conversion Rate

We live in a world where things have a tendency to change faster than we can get to grips with them. As soon as we think we’ve mastered a certain topic, its properties evolve and we have to expand our knowledge in order to stay on top of our game. All eCommerce websites work in a similar fashion: you can’t just set up a product page, leave it unattended, and expect it to continue to bring in large sales. You have to constantly tweak the page and modify its contents to make sure it’s up to the latest standards.

There are many options available to eCommerce website owners, and it’s up to you to test them and see what works best for your business. Give your customers a choice between adding the product to their shopping cart that allows them to continue browsing the website and a one-click purchase that takes them straight to the checkout. You can then decide whether you want the checkout process to be divided into multiple pages or have all the forms and information displayed across a single page.

Utilizing a good metrics tool will help you see which of these options drives in more sales. This allows you to make an informed decision on whether you want to leave all of them available for user convenience or stick to those that result in higher conversion rates. Some eCommerce themes come with multiple checkout options implemented, so if you opt for a ready-made template, be sure it’s one of those.

Like any other business, the eCommerce market is highly competitive. It’s tremendously important to always keep a close eye on your competitors. Track their prices and match them whenever it’s feasible. In most cases, customers will ultimately go for the option that provides more bang for their buck, so if your price is comparable or even lower than what other retailers are asking for the specific product, don’t hesitate to let your buyers know how good of a deal they’ll get if they shop on your website.