Creating a great product page

Effective product pages immediately convey the value of your products. They show potential customers what a product looks like, tell them what it feels like, and give them a call to action to make sure they take out their credit card and act.

The product page is where potential consumers make up their mind on whether they want to purchase the featured product. In many cases, the product page is the first page on an eCommerce site that your prospective shopper might see – as they will have landed on the pages from an advertisement (more on digital advertising in Course 3). As a result, the job of the product page is to convey as much information as possible, educate shoppers and provide answers to the questions they may have.

The goal of any eCommerce site is to sell and there’s no way you’ll achieve that without a great product page.

The Baymard Institute write:

• The product page is where users make up their mind on whether or not they want to purchase your product.
• This makes the product page layout, product page design, and features, the centrepiece of the user’s eCommerce experience.
• At the same time, the product page layout and features are under a lot of strain as they’re largely a template reused for almost every single product on the site.

This last point is very important: product page layout and features are the template reused for almost every single product on the site. Creating lots of product pages on an eCommerce site requires a lot of work: the ideal is to create a great product page that a) works and b) is easily replicable across the entire product catalogue.

Let’s look at the constituent parts of a great product page before we dive into examples.

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Product title and overview

This should include:

• Product name/title or brand
• Product overview – the short description
• Price

Pay special attention to the product name and title. The product name or product title is the number one search driver on most eCommerce sites, so think of it as a make-or-break factor.

Product description

Product descriptions should be clear and straightforward, using natural language with the sentences and paragraphs written so that they are naturally scannable. They include:

• Material
• Style
• Design features
• Information about the brand or manufacturer and product origin
• Catalogue (SKU number)

Bullet points are great for shoppers as they use these for quick access to product information. We all prefer to read bullet points rather than long paragraphs. This content is best used to capture a shopper’s attention and entice them to read further.

Good product pages with great descriptions will improve your Google search engine rankings (more on the topic of Google Search later in this ExpertTrack).

Try to:

• create a unique product description – use bullet points and graphics to get information across
• include product videos if you have them
• keep the product descriptions short and to the point if you have multiple products
• include relevant, must-know info including specs, etc
• include ratings and review (more on this later in the course).

If your shopper has made it this far, things are looking good. Shoppers will read longer descriptions to get stuck into the detail of a product they’re interested in. To create a compelling description, we need to include a combination of: product end-benefits, education about the ingredients or size, information about how to use it, and other variants or flavours. We can also add essential legal, allergen or ingredient statements, and ‘goes well with’ recommendations.

Product photos

This includes images of the product and its features as well as a gallery with enough images to allow consumers to better visualise the details of products. Images must be prominent and load quickly. There must be a variety of different product shots and angles that can be zoomed in on with a click. There are two types – the feature image and the photo gallery (there is more on creating great imagery in the next section).

Feature image

• The feature image showcases your product to create a great first impression and helps customers decide whether to examine the product further. It is among the most important element of an eCommerce product page.
• Images must be professional photographs of the actual product – professional photography is worth the extra cost. If paying someone to take product photos simply isn’t in your current budget, then at least buy a small lightbox and work on improving your own shots.
• All imagery must work on a mobile, as well as a browser.

Photo gallery

• A gallery of images allows shoppers to better visualise your products – especially the details. Ideally you will have 8-10 images from all relevant angles.
• If you can, show the product in action or in context. If it’s a clothing item, for example, show the product being worn, not just in a studio but out and about too.

Similar product suggestions: These are photos/visuals which enable up-sell or cross-sell to related, complementary or just popular products. eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify and WooCommerce come with these tools. They are a great way to help shoppers discover similar products and improve the average order value.

Call to action (CTA)

Without a call to action (CTA), all your hard work is to no avail. Your product pages may be pretty and well-designed, but they won’t get shoppers pulling out their credit cards.

A CTA is a button, words (for example, ‘buy now’), or a link to show the shopper what the next best action is. Shoppers come to your eCommerce website looking for answers to their questions and products they want to buy. Unfortunately, too often, there is no decent call to action. A CTA such as ‘Buy now’ or ‘Add to basket’ executed at the right time is the next logical step in a buying process – a no-brainer that helps shoppers get what they want.

Expert tip – calls to action can vary from page to page.

Always give shoppers a reason to act NOW. Different CTAs serve different functions on an eCommerce store. Here are a few tips.

• Make the CTA stand out plainly so shopper aren’t confused about what to do next. For best results, use just one CTA per page.
• Use colour that stands out – red or orange catch the eye and are well known. No, your favourite colour does not count!
• When a visitor arrives on the homepage, for example, you will likely want them to subscribe to your newsletter.
• On a product page, you want them to add a product to their basket.
• On the checkout page, use ‘buy now’.
• After purchase, the ideal CTA is to get shoppers to click a social share button.
• Don’t use non-committal words like ‘submit’ or ‘next steps’.

Finally, experiment, test, learn: experiment with your CTA buttons or links to find out what works best for your particular customer segment and persona.