How to write product descriptions that lead to sales

Search ‘how to write product descriptions’ on Google and you’ll find a bunch of advice.

The problem? Most of it sucks.

To save you the time and hassle of reading bad advice, We’ve written this post with useful, actionable tips for writing product descriptions that lead to sales.

Two reasons to write better product descriptions

• They’ll boost sales by giving prospective customers the information they need to make a purchase
• They’ll boost traffic by giving search engines a clear understanding of the products you sell

Five tips for better product descriptions

• BE RELEVANT – most people just need a product name, price, colour, size, and similar when deciding whether to buy. They’re checking the product fits their needs, not whether it can do a million things they don’t care about. 
• MAKE KEY INFO EASY TO FIND – people don’t read websites like they read books: they scan for what they need and leave if they can’t find it quickly. Assume people won’t read 80% of your product page, and make sure the most prominent 20% hits the most important bases.
• MINIMISE AMBIGUITY – ambiguity breaks attention, making it more likely that a prospective customer will leave your page.
• USE VISUAL MEDIA – often a picture or video will communicate far more efficiently than words can about product options and features. They’ll also stand out more when people are skimming, giving better odds they’ll be seen.
• WRITE FOR HUMANS – either read your product descriptions out loud or run them through text-to-speech software to make sure they sound natural. Unnatural marketing copy is a massive turn-off: avoid it at all costs.

If this blog post has felt unusually quick to get to the point and easy to digest, here’s why:

The secret to writing product descriptions that drive engagement and custom? Study how the pros do it

Amazon spends billions fine-tuning every aspect of their selling experience. Their goal is to make as much money as possible by maximising engagement and conversions.

Studying how they present products is instructive in doing it effectively yourself.

Take this dog lead as an example:

The full product page (on the left) has tons of sections giving granular information about every aspect of the product.

But the most important info – the stuff that’ll be enough to convince the vast majority of customers to buy – takes up less than 20%.

What’s included

If we ignore the trust signals (reviews, units sold, return policy, discounts etc) and focus only on the descriptive content, here’s what’s included:

• Name, with some descriptive elements
• Price
• Colour (with visual element)
• Pack size
• Brand
• Dimensions
• Pattern
• 5 bullet points of descriptive copy, each with a prominent benefit and a short paragraph of supplementary text

Combined, this is about 230 words. And the pattern holds true across all sorts of products: dog food, cat toys, reptile cages, hamster bedding, and so on.

The reason why is simple: this information will satisfy the vast majority of user intent. In other words: after skimming this stuff, most people will decide whether or not to buy.

And for those who don’t reach that decision, let’s look further down the Amazon page: 

What we’re looking at is tons of supplementary info, pretty visual content, technical details, and additional info. All of which is designed to do two things:

1. Reinforce a prospective buyer’s decision to buy
2. Provide granular information needed by a smaller number of users

When building product pages on your site, this is where you can include information about the product’s history, more detail around the functionality, technical points that will appeal to a minority of users, and so on.

Then right at the bottom of the page we have user reviews: as well as being strong trust signals, these give even more descriptive info about your products.

8 more tips for awesome product descriptions

Following the split between key info and supplementary info mentioned above, consider this part of the post to be supplementary info: it’ll be really useful to a smaller percentage of readers.

If you got this far, read on for recommendations to really strengthen your product descriptions.

1. Understand your audience

Our first piece of advice in this article was to BE RELEVANT, which implies a need to understand your audience. Knowing who they are and what they’re looking to do lets you:

• Decide which benefits and features to lead with, and which to mention later in the supplementary content
• Decide the most appropriate tone to use
• Decide how much jargon or technical language to use

Pitching your product descriptions correctly will have a huge impact on your site’s ability to convert prospects into customers.

2. Use visuals wherever you can

It goes without saying you should include images on your product pages. But visuals can help elsewhere, too. For instance: when choosing a product colour, which is easier? 

• Picking from this list: black, blue, green, grey, nautical navy blue, orange, pink, purple
• Or selecting the same colours from a neat grid of images:

Our third piece of advice was to MINIMISE AMBIGUITY: colour names are ambiguous, as there are tons of shades. Even naming shades can be ambiguous: what does ‘nautical’ mean in ‘nautical navy blue’?

This is one of many examples of how visuals can cut through complexity and make your product descriptions easier to engage with.

3. The best descriptions are written by people with experience

Outsourcing elements of your ecommerce store is a great way to free up time and get things moving more quickly. Just be aware: product descriptions written by people with no real-life experience of a product are much less effective. 

4. Tie effectiveness to real metrics

Performance of product pages should be measured over time so that their effectiveness can be measured and improvements made. Here are several key metrics for evaluating product descriptions:

• Conversion rate: how many visitors to your product page make a purchase?
• Click-through rate (CTR): how many visitors click through to a product page after reading the description elsewhere (on Google, perhaps, or on a category page)?
• Time on page: how long do people spend on the page?
• Bounce rate: what percentage of people leave the page right after viewing it?

5. Experiment

Product pages, including product descriptions, should be refined over time to maximise their value. With data collection and analysis in place you can evaluate the impact of changes.

We recommend A/B testing, i.e. conducting experiments with different product descriptions to see which elements perform best. 

6. If you keep getting asked the same questions, update your descriptions

Customer interaction should be an integral factor of what goes into your product descriptions. If prospective customers keep asking you the same question, update your product description to include it.

We’ve seen this time and again: people asking online about some feature of a product, and zero information about it on the product page.

7. Use tabs for non-priority content

Breaking from the ‘study Amazon and replicate how they do it’ advice above, putting supplementary information in tabs is a good way to make the product page as a whole less daunting and easier to skim. 

Bonus content: How not to write product descriptions, and why this approach doesn’t work

Some closing thoughts on what not to do, courtesy of questionable advice in some of the blog posts we read while researching this one:

• Don’t try to convince people their life was incomplete before this product: it’s rubbish and people see through it. Mention realistic benefits that people will actually care about.
• Don’t write according to a mathematical formula.
• Don’t have an obsessive focus on keyword distributions, and most importantly don’t include a load of information people don’t actually need just because you think it’ll hit more keywords.
• Don’t be boring, and just as importantly, don’t go too far and treat it as a creative writing exercise. Overly flowery language is just as much of a turnoff.

We can help you to get your online store off the ground

Getting your ecommerce store up and running can be simpler than you think. If you’ve got an idea, or an existing website you want help with, we can help you turn that into a reality:

• Get a free tech SEO audit for your ecommerce site 
• Book a call in our calendar to talk about your goals