Selling your products online isn’t as simple as putting up an image and title, and then slapping on a price. If you want to actually sell your products online, you need to think strategically about the role your product page plays on the customer journey.
Your product page has a lot of work to do. It needs to help you stand out from the competition. It needs to help consumers research your category and understand your products. It has to reinforce your brand. And it needs to convert visitors into customers.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through how to create the perfect product page. We’ll cover everything you need to create and execute each piece well, including:
- Product titles
- Image and video carousels
- Product descriptions
- Ratings and reviews
- Enhanced content
- Pricing
- Testing and optimization
Each piece serves an important purpose in the shopping experience, and together, they shape how consumers perceive your product and your brand. Your product detail page is a key component of the digital shelf.
Here’s the recipe for making yours perfect.
Choose strategic product titles
Product titles are one of the biggest factors that determine which products rank for search terms on a retailer’s website. So you don’t just want your product title to be a branded name for your product—it needs to include anything consumers might use that should lead them to your product.
Prioritize keywords
When your customers search for products like yours, they use specific keywords. If you want them to find your products, your product titles should include those keywords. A good product title should have broad terms like your product category as well as some common ways your customers refer to your products. Prioritize the keywords that are most important to each product, and make sure these are explicitly mentioned in your titles.
Highlight key features
Customers may also search for products with specific features or benefits. While your descriptions will talk about them, including important features and benefits in your title, immediately confirms your product has what someone is looking for when they see it in search results. This will help you rank higher for those searches and increase the likelihood that consumers will choose your products when they encounter them in search results.
Be descriptive
Your product titles should always make it clear what your product actually is. If a consumer isn’t sure what they’re looking at, they’re probably going to leave your page. Make sure your product title also describes things like size, quantity, and other product configurations that help your customers make the right selection.
Tell a story with the image and video carousel
The image carousel is one of the most underutilized product page features. Some brands think they’re doing “enough” if they’ve covered their products from a variety of angles. But your image and video carousel is an opportunity to tell a story about your product—or more accurately, a story about your customers, where your product makes them the hero.
You want your customers to see themselves using your product to accomplish a goal or solve a problem. That starts with your images.
Invest in design
You can’t just photoshop your products onto some stock images and call it good. If you want your product pages to stand out, you need to give your team the resources you need to succeed. Work with a designer who can tell a story with images. Take original photoshoots for each product, and optimize the images for product pages. Choose actors who represent your key demographics.
Create 8–12 images
Your product will determine the ideal number of images you should use, but in general, you’ll want 8–12 images showing your products from a variety of angles and in a range of contexts. Choose images that clearly communicate benefits and highlight key features. Your image carousel should support the work your product description is doing to drive and influence purchases.
Keep in mind: this is also an opportunity to reinforce your brand. Include your logo in each image, use templates when appropriate, and if it makes sense, include an image that shows your product as part of a product family.
Use video in relevant ways
Just because you have a video that features your product doesn’t mean it belongs on your product page. This isn’t the place for a commercial. Think about how you can use video to help potential customers quickly understand something about your product. You could create videos that summarize (and showcase) key features and benefits, or that teach people how to use your product. These should be 30 to 60 seconds long.
Write thorough (but concise) product descriptions
Your product description does several key things:
- It contributes to how your product ranks for various search terms
- It helps customers confirm that your product is what they’re looking for
- It teaches people more about what your product is capable of
A good product description needs to be comprehensive, clear, and concise. Here’s what yours should include.
Prioritize features
When people hit your product page, they’re often hunting for particular features. Your description needs to make it easy for people to confirm your product has key features and functionality. Prioritize the features people are looking for, and put these front-and-center in your description, along with features that set your product apart from the competition.
Include target keywords
If you want your product to rank for particular keywords, those should appear in your product description in addition to the product title. Since you have more room to work with, you could also include keywords you didn’t have space to include in your title. Just make sure that you use these keywords in natural, relevant ways. If your description feels stilted or poorly written because you tried to force words to fit, it reflects poorly on your brand and can leave people feeling less confident in the quality of your products.
Highlight awards and accolades
Any time your product wins an award or earns an accolade, that should make its way into your product description (and probably your images, too). You can’t assume people know about your awards, and you should probably assume they don’t. But this can be a huge differentiating factor, even if people have never heard of the award before.
Close information gaps
Your product description should provide all the key information consumers need to know about your product. A lot of brands leave information gaps that force customers to work hard to find out if their products have particular features or specifications. As people ask questions on your product pages (or your competitor’s product pages), that will often reveal information you should elevate in your descriptions. Remember: for every person who asks these questions, there are often many more who aren’t willing to work as hard to find an answer.
Be proactive about ratings and reviews
Consumers use ratings and reviews to gauge the credibility and quality of a product. When it comes to the ratings and reviews on your pages, you need to think about three things:
- Volume
- Score
- Recency
A single five-star review (or one-star review) from a stranger doesn’t mean much. But hundreds or thousands of them clearly signal a product’s quality or lack thereof. At the same time, more recent reviews give a better picture of what customers are currently experiencing.
There are several things you can do to accumulate more reviews and lessen the impact of negative ones.
Use sampling programs
Some online retailers offer sampling programs to help their customers find new products they’ll love. These can quickly increase the number of people who can give reliable reviews of your products, and some of these programs specifically offer products in exchange for reviews. Either way, these programs can drastically increase the number of ratings and reviews your products receive, so you can accelerate the process of accumulating them over time and start to look like a more credible, quality brand.
Respond to reviews
Sometimes people leave negative reviews based on a misunderstanding, or even something that had nothing to do with your product. You may be able to remedy someone’s frustration simply by explaining what happened, apologizing for their experience, or offering to make it up to them. When you respond to negative reviews, a couple things could happen:
- The reviewer may change or remove their review
- The reviewer may not change or remove their review
But either way, it’s worth responding. You might be able to win back a customer who had a negative experience and change their mind. But even if you don’t, your public response can reduce the damage of their negative review by re-establishing consumers’ confidence and showing that you care about quality and service.
Follow-up with customers
If you want more ratings and reviews, you’ve got to talk to your customers. Ideally, you should have a request for a review built into your packaging materials, so your customers get a reminder to leave a review the moment they receive your product. But you should also have a strategy for following up with customers after the sale, such as through an email campaign. Depending on the retailer, you may be able to include a review request in a transactional email people receive after purchasing your product.
Creating an automated follow-up campaign is a great way to passively generate more reviews, but you should also solicit reviews through separate marketing efforts.
Leverage your customer service
If you want to reduce the volume and damage of negative reviews, it helps to be proactive about your customers’ frustrations. Be sure to emphasize your customer service, and include a reminder to call you if they have any concerns. If there are common themes in your negative reviews (such as missing parts or lack of knowledge), you may want to call out these problems specifically and present your customer service team as the solution.
When your customers feel like you’re listening and they have somewhere to turn when there’s a problem, they’re more likely to find a solution and less likely to leave a negative review.
Use enhanced content
Enhanced content empowers you to tell more of your product’s story. This isn’t just a chance to show your product in more interesting ways (like you can do with a 360-degree photo), but rather an opportunity to provide a more complete picture of what your product can do for people. You can add comparison charts, before and after photos, and other types of content that help potential customers make an informed choice.
These features do more than just give consumers more information. They make your brand stand out and improve the shopping experience.
Pay attention to retailer-specific requirements
Every retailer is a little different. So your product pages will be a little different from retailer to retailer, too. You can’t just copy-paste and hope for the best. Make sure you’re optimizing your product titles and descriptions based on each retailer’s length restrictions. You may need to choose alternative ways to highlight some features or present less important information. And keep in mind that some retailers may have additional requirements. Selling your products on Target.com, for example, will require you to meet their accessibility requirements to serve customers who are blind.
Test and optimize everything
If you want your product pages to be as successful as possible, you’ve got to test them. Find out which features and benefits make the biggest impact on sales. Play with different types of enhanced content. Experiment with various arrangements of photos and videos. The more you test, the more you’ll understand which components are driving conversions and influencing purchase decisions.
As you make adjustments to your product pages, it’s also important to think about how seasonality can affect the keywords people may use to find products in your category. Is your product well-suited to make a particular kind of gift? Is there a holiday coming up that makes sense to mention in your copy? Do people use your product for different purposes, depending on the time of year? These insights can help you continually optimize your product pages, maximize discoverability, and increase sales.
Keep quality consistent
Obviously, the quality of your product pages is extremely important. If it looks like your description was written in Google Translate, your images were made in MS Paint, or your page was thoughtlessly thrown together at the last minute, that cheapens your brand, reduces confidence in the quality of your products, and means your products are less likely to get noticed.
It’s not good enough to simply have “all the right pieces.” If your assets look bad, people aren’t going to buy. And when your copy is poorly written, or your design assets are poorly designed, remember: you’re making it easy for your competition to look good!
