Creating great product pages

Each and every page of your ecommerce site is important. But when it comes to making sales, the majority of decisions are made on product pages. This is where customers decide whether or not they want what you’re selling.

Online retailers have to work even harder to display their products well because a customer can’t hold them in their hands before buying. With this in mind, you have to put in a lot of effort to give them the best possible impression of what you are selling. It must be attractive but most of all it must be honest.

Here are our top tips on creating the best possible product pages:

Great product photographs

A customer would like the opportunity to see a product as well as they would in a shop. This involves some good product photography. Investing is this is worth it. The lighting must be right, the colour grading and the resolution must be good. You need them to be as crystal clear as possible.

Make sure you how the product from a range of different angles. If there is a lot of detail on the product make sure the customer can zoom in and appreciate the features. If you are selling clothing make sure you show how it looks on a person by either using models or mannequins.

Well-written product descriptions

Obviously this is going to change depending on what kind of store you are but a general rule is to make sure you have well-written descriptions which give more than the average manufacturers’ descriptions.

Make sure the language is fitting for the audience, selling flip-flops to young adults and power drills to builders obviously need different styles. Give them everything they need to know, including dimensions and colour/sizing options. This doesn’t mean writing an essay however, the key is keeping them short, snappy and easy to digest.

Clear call-to-action buttons

Once a customer has made a decision to buy, don’t make it hard for them to see where the next step is. Call-to-action buttons should be clear as crystal and in a prominent position. You can use a number of different phrases on the buttons such as ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’ – don’t be afraid to test which phrase works best by trying a few out and monitoring the response over time.

Email and share buttons

Shopping online is becoming more of a social affair as time goes by. Brands are finding real value in having their products displayed on social media platforms and encouraging peer-to-peer recommendations is a cheap way and getting effective marketing. If your products have captured someone’s imagination or they want to recommend them to friends – give them plenty of options to do so.

Email a friend and social share buttons should be easy to find. You can add a call-to-action phrase to encourage people such as ‘Love it? Why not share it with your friends?’

Suggested additional products

Amazon has always been very clever at utilising this kind of feature. It offers the ‘what others who bought this also purchased’ listing which can be extremely effective at up-selling related accessories. You don’t necessarily have to mine your data to get these products you could simply chose the related items yourself and display those as ‘you might also want to buy’.

It might also be wise to have a section showing customers what they looked at last time they visited your store or show them items that you have retained in their shopping basket. It’s a personalised touch that often works in reminding people what they were interested in last time.

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are extremely effective when it comes to persuading someone to buy your products. Not only are these reviews important for helping customers to make the right decisions, they are also good for SEO as shoppers often search for reviews when making a decision about buying something.

Encourage people to leave reviews on the product page or follow up with people after their purchase and ask them to give their opinion. The occasional bad review isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it make your reviews seem more genuine which is a powerful marketing tool if the majority are good reviews.

Live chat and product demos

Are customers likely to have additional questions about your products and how to use them? This can be tackled by either offering live chat or a video demo. Having live chat replicates the ability to ask a shop assistant a question about something. It’s an option which can make a shoppers decision making process a lot easier.

Alternatively, if a product needs some explanation when it comes to how it is used – create a video to sit next to the product. It gives someone a well rounded experience of the product and seeing it in action can help to cement a customer decision.

Always keep an eye on page loading times

Creating full and great looking product pages is important in the selling process. However, if you pack your pages with too much rich content it can significantly show loading times. This is a major turn off for your users and something you should always consider.

If you are adding new elements to your pages, test the loading times to make sure they aren’t slowing them down too much. If they are, it might be best to remove them or try and condense them to make less of an impact. There are lots of great tools for testing this – Google Page Speed Insights is one such tool which analyses your page and makes suggestions for speeding them up if you need to.