Product descriptions are incredibly important for ecommerce shops. The description is basically the online salesperson trying to convince the website visitor to buy the product. If you’ve ever sold to someone in person you know that can be tricky.
Obviously it helps if someone was referred to your site and product. They likely trust the person that referred them. That can take care of a lot of the cold selling. But even in these referral cases the potential buyer is going to read your product descriptions and use them to make a decision.
Here are some thoughts on how to write better descriptions.
What is it
Start with the basics and keep it simple. You don’t need to oversell what your product is. The person visiting your product page wants to first know that they are in the right spot for what they’ve looking for. If they were referred by someone to come to your page to find lawn mowers they want to know that they are looking at lawn mowers.
For the main heading. The biggest heading. Make sure you include the name of your product. In the same heading or in the next biggest heading, list what the product is. So if you’re selling lawn mowers you start with the name, ABC 2500. Then you say that it’s a lawn mower. Maybe a push mower or riding lawn mower or whatever.
Think of a store. Aisles have categories and tags within those aisles have specific names. People want organization so they’re not wasting time.
What will it do for the buyer
Next, the person is going to look for the benefits of the product. They want to see what will happen if they buy it and how it will make their life better, however they define that. You probably know intimately what the benefits of your product are. You probably know how it differs from the competition. This is what really makes up a good product description. You know what your customer is struggling with or needing and you describe how that will be solved with your product.
Let’s say someone wants to mow their lawn. You’re selling lawn mowers, but what you’re really selling is a way for someone to mow their lawn quickly, in a way that looks great and on a mower that doesn’t shake their bodies to the point of making their limbs feel like Jell-O.
How do they use it
I think it’s good to give the person instructions on how to use the product. You will probably include that in the manual with the product. But it’s also good to include it in the description. Maybe not as the highest priority aspect of the description, but definitely as part of it. People want to look ahead and see if they’re capable of using the product and how much effort they’re in for.
Customer stories
A huge key to ecommerce success is customer stories and reviews. People read these all the time trying to figure out if a product is right for them. Storytelling is as old as humans. We have evolved to figure out life through stories. Reading about someone else’s experience with a lawn mower provides all kinds of insight into whether that lawn mower will be good for us.
You can also use customer stories to tweak the earlier parts of a product description. You can learn the benefits. You can learn better ways to use the product. All kinds of things.
If you don’t have customer stories, use your product and write one yourself. Talk to customers that maybe didn’t write a review, but that are willing to talk on the phone so you can learn their story and use some of the insight in the description.
FAQs
Many ecommerce shops have a question function. This is where potential customers can ask questions and get answers from other customers or from the seller. It’s good to have this function. It’s also good to pay attention to the questions you’re getting most often regarding the product and turning it into the description. If people keep asking how big the gas tank is on your mower you better make sure it’s in the description and obvious enough so that people can see it.
Conclusion
Product descriptions are frustrating things. If you’re starting out I recommend doing your best and then taking the approach that you’re going to continuously tweak and improve them. Aim to learn as much about your products and how customers use it as possible. Use that insight over time to create better descriptions that will help sell more of the product.