How to Write eCommerce Product Description: Best Practices

In the world of online sales, your customers can’t see or touch the products. Hence the good virtual product presentation is your only weapon. Product descriptions are essentials for your online shop. They give information to the customers about your products – their features, advantages or guidelines on how to use them.

Apart from helping your customers out, product descriptions work for your SEO and rank your online shop higher. If you describe your products in a creative and unique way, your website won’t stay unseen from Google.

Related: 10 Easy E-commerce Strategies to Help You Reach More Customers

1. Create a Communication Strategy for Your Perfect Buyer Persona

When you have goods for sale, you should know your target audience like you know your best friend. You have gathered the following basic information about your buyer personas:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests and hobbies
• Language
• Education
• Occupation
• What problems your buyer persona is facing and how you solve them with your products.

Based on all this information you can create your product descriptions. The key is to address your customer’s pains and show them your solution, featuring your product’s specific features.

When creating product descriptions, you should decide what type of content you will use. Imagine you are selling a backpack to an 18-year old college student and another backpack for his father, a 50-year old lawyer. Would you write the same product descriptions for both types of customers? Probably not.

Deciding about what type of content you could use for product description, you may choose among the following formats:

• Videos
• Nice photos
• Creative design
• Original and detailed product descriptions

If your target groups are millennials this article describes the best practices for attracting millennials to your eCommerce website.

2. The Anatomy of the Product Description

Your product descriptions should have the following components:

Shipping information is usually common for all products. Make sure it is visible and easily accessible on your site. If any of the products have any specifics related to shipping, include that in their descriptions.

3. Highlight the top features and benefits of your products

Think about the most important features of your product that will sell it. Don’t list exactly everything and don’t be too obvious. Some products don’t need a long-winded description. Keep the balance between saying too much or too little.

For instance, if you sell women’s black T-shirts there is not much you can describe.

Check the above screenshot from Uniqlo – the photos speak for themselves. As well it has basic information – material, care instructors, description and shipping information. The description is short as it has to be for a T-shirt, it highlights the most important features and is readable because of the bullet points.

Don’t use cliches like “this is the best quality”. Instead point out why your product is the best one, list the benefits it will bring to your customers and they will realize by themselves that your product is good.

Crocs list their best qualities. But focus your attention on the way they do it. As we can see from the above screenshot, Crocs are water-proof, comfortable, quick to dry and easy to clean.

But do you see the humor they use when listing all these good features? Instead of the boring “water-proof”, they say “water-friendly”. You don’t just like them, you “fall deeper in love”. And a cute addition is that it’s “fun to wear” them.

4. Keep Your Brand Voice and Style

While creating your product descriptions, make sure they don’t sound fake. The descriptions should sound like your brand’s voice. The product content you are creating should follow all your brand philosophy, design and style.

Use your own brand words. Thus the customers will recognize and “hear” you easily. Does your brand use humor or not? Is your brand casual or business-oriented? Can you describe your product in a creative way or you should follow strong rules?

Asos is famous for describing its products in a humorous and creative way. This is their style. As you can see from the above example the boots are “worth making plans for”.

Another good example by Asos – the fluffy cropped top “it’s already got your attention” and all you need to do is “just select your usual size”.

Armani, on the other hand, emphasizes the elegance, classy look and high-quality materials.

If you sell luxurious products, this is an article that might help you out on how to make your business look luxurious with WordPress.

5. Make Your Text More Readable by Creating Lists or Tabs

Have you noticed something common in the examples so far? Yes, the bullet points in the product descriptions. Always use bullet points or lists when describing your product’s features. It makes the text more readable.

Another good idea that will make your descriptions more readable is to create tabs with different information regarding the product. You can separate the shipping information or the technical information. Hence your customers can l check out the information they want or need.

Sports Direct separates the product info from the delivery and the return sections.

Nike, for instance, has a small description of its products which can be enough for some customers who aren’t interested in a lot of product information.

For others, who would like to learn more or check something in particular, they have a button “Read more” where detailed information pops up. Once again, the detailed description is easy to read because has paragraphs and bullet points, so you can scan and find what you are looking for.

6. Use Words That Will Sell

What are the power words? Power words are strong words that can provoke emotions or invite customers to take action. In the context of product descriptions online where we need to convince the customers to buy from our shop, it is important to use words that sell.

There are 20 most influential words according to the father of advertising David Ogilvy.

Try to use some of the above-listed words in order to make your product descriptions more influential. Just be careful and don’t go too far. Customers don’t like to feel pushed to buy.

Where can you use the power words in your online shop?

• Product titles
• Sales pages
• Bullet points and lists
• Videos
• Call to action buttons
• Testimonials

Related: How to Grow Ecommerce Sales [Expert Roundup]

7. Provoke Your Customers’ Imagination

Apart from informing your customers the product features the next level is to make them imagine how they would feel owning the product.

The description of these pair of sneakers is impressive. It makes you dream and feel like you are part of a fairytale. “Dancing flowers”, “electric sunsets” and the sneakers are so soft that they “take you into the clouds”.

8. Don’t Forget to Optimize for SEO

As you know the optimization for search engines is crucial to your online store. If all your text is optimized, your website will rank higher, more customers will visit it. After they read your super cool descriptions they will want to buy from you. Well, this sounds perfect in theory, but in practice, it requires lots of work and dedication.

Let’s check some important aspects of the SEO in the context of product descriptions:

• Product titles: try to create interesting, catchy titles including your brand and adding some powerful words (if possible). If you offer free shipping the title is the best place to announce it.
• Create worthy product content and upgrade your old descriptions. Once you describe your products, keep updating the texts frequently. Or delete the content that doesn’t make sense anymore. Trends change, so you need to adapt to the new ones.
• Add meta descriptions to the product pages and ALT text to all images.

Related post: How to Optimize Meta Descriptions for SEO

• Keep the site structure. Once you have created your website, based on your product groups, follow its structure. Keep the patterns of all your category or product pages.
• Internal linking. When interlinking products,you’re killing two birds with one stone:you can sell more products by suggestive selling and your website ranks higher because of the internal links.. Classical example of Amazon is “Customers who bought this also bought…”.

• Make sure your shop is mobile friendly. We live in mobile-first era. According to Google in 2017, 40% of the online transactions were done on mobile. And this percentage is growing.
• Optimize category pages. Categories are part of the site taxonomy and help search engine robots understand what you sell. The category pages are something that lots of websites forget but it’s as important as the product descriptions. The category description content helps to rank your website higher.

If you have just started your online shop on WordPress, check out this useful website SEO checklist for new WordPress online store.

9. Include Social Proof

Social proof works based on the phenomenon that people tend to behave the same way. The logic is that if more people buy a certain product, maybe this is good.

In terms of product descriptions, social proofs are all these signs showing that other people have bought or are buying at the moment your products. The social proof marks build trust in your customers and prove that your products worth the money.

Check the below social proof examples and incorporate the ones suitable for your online shop.

List popular products and similar products

Amazon is the king of social proof. If you check the Amazon website you will see lots of examples of social proof. “Popular products”, “Best-sellers”, “People who bought this also bought…”, “Frequently bought together” – all different ways to link your products (which helps for the SEO as we mentioned earlier) and to sell more products at once.

Do you see the orange tag “Best Seller”? This can be useful for customers who are not searching for a particular item or who are undecided on two items. In that case, the customers will probably go for the best seller.

List complementary items

You can help your customers by giving them ideas about what other items customers buy after viewing this item.

Another way to sell more at once is to offer complementary products and direct your customers to items frequently bought together.

Include reviews from customers about your products

If your customers not only share with the world that they love your product but actually show it, this is the perfect way to prove that the product is great and other people trust your shop.

Create urgency by sharing some real-time data

Show your customers that there are real people, at this particular moment, shopping from your online shop. All these real-time interactions influence people’s decisions. By creating a little urgency and impression that the product is desired and maybe will be sold out soon, causes clients to act quickly.

Related: More examples and ideas for your business read in the article about 14 quick steps to building social proof for growing businesses.

10. Use More Pictures and Videos

Use good, high-quality pictures presenting your products in the best possible way and respond to all future customer’s questions.

Shopify has created an amazing product photography guide. It contains 14 chapters and you can learn the most important aspects of product photography such as light, editing, equipment, and more.

If you can include videos in your product descriptions – do it. Statistics show that 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product after watching a video about it.

11. Don’t Be Afraid to Be Creative and Different

.Think about what your target audience would like. You can be as creative as you want. Experiment and try new things. This way you will distinguish yourself from your competitors.

“Ex-Boyfriend Trucker Jacket” is a pretty cool product name, isn’t it?

Greats produce sneakers from recycled ocean and single-use plastics. They choose to show it with a nice infographic which also gives additional facts to the customers.

The famous Blendtec videos “Will it blend?” What a blender does? It blends. But this campaign is a bit different. The story behind it is that the team experimented with posting a video showing how the blender is so powerful that it can blend rocks. It became such a big thing that company created a website and youtube channel dedicated to blending weird stuff. As you can see from the screenshot – even an iPhone.

To Conclude

As you can see, product descriptions are a pretty important part of online shops. Product information is the only way your customers can be informed about your products. A combination of nice photos and optimized product descriptions can do wonders for your sales.

Think of your target audience and their problems. Then provide a solution and present it in a creative and useful way.