The seven questions a product page must answer

A product page has one job: to answer every question that would stop somebody ordering, in the order they ask them. Most pages instead answer the questions the shop finds easy, then stop.

The questions, in order

1. 01What is it. A plain name and a photograph on a plain background, visible without scrolling.
2. 02What does it look like in reality. Several photographs: in use, in a hand or a room for scale, and the detail somebody would want to inspect in a shop.
3. 03Will it fit, suit, or work for me. Dimensions in numbers, materials, compatibility, weight. This is the question that produces the most returns when it is answered badly and the fewest sales when it is not answered at all.
4. 04How much, including delivery. A price with delivery unknown is not a price, and finding out at checkout is the most common reason a basket is abandoned.
5. 05When will it arrive. A date or a range, not in stock.
6. 06What if it is wrong. Returns, plainly, at the point of decision rather than in the footer.
7. 07Why should I believe you. Whatever is honestly available: real reviews if you have them, the material facts if you do not.

Pages that convert badly almost always fail at three, four or six, and almost never at one.

Write the description for somebody who cannot pick it up

This is the whole discipline. In a shop the customer resolves texture, weight, size and finish in two seconds by touching it. Online, every one of those has to be a sentence. A description that says premium quality has replaced information with an adjective; a description that says the strap is 4cm wide, the leather stiffens in the first month, and it will not fit a 15 inch laptop has done the job.

Saying what the product is not suitable for is the most under-used sentence in retail. It costs a small number of sales that would have come back anyway and it buys trust on everything else on the page.

The mechanical things that cost sales

• Images that load slowly or shift the layout as they arrive, so somebody taps the wrong thing.
• A variant selector that silently changes the price, or that lets you add an out-of-stock option.
• Delivery cost revealed only at checkout.
• A page where the add-to-basket control is below several screens of marketing copy on a phone.
• Zoom that does not work on touch, on a product whose detail is the selling point.
• A gallery whose first image is a lifestyle shot in which the product is hard to identify.

Test it on somebody who has not seen it

Hand your phone to somebody who does not know the product and ask them to decide whether to buy it, out loud, without help. Watch where they scroll back, what they search for and where they give up. Five people will tell you more about the page than a month of guessing, and the same two problems will come up every time.

How the page appears elsewhere

A product page is read in three places before anyone sees the page: in search results, in a shared link, and in an advert. Each takes its content from markup you control, and shops routinely leave all three to chance.

1. 01Add product structured data with the fields you can state truthfully: name, image, description, price, currency and availability. Prices and availability shown in a search result have to match the page, so this has to come from the same data the page uses, never from a hand-typed copy.
2. 02Do not add review or rating markup you do not have. Invented ratings are the clearest way to get a manual penalty, and the absence of a star rating costs less than the removal of your listings.
3. 03Set the sharing image and title deliberately. The default is often a logo or the first image on the page, which in a messaging app is what represents your product.
4. 04Keep availability current. A result that promises in stock and lands on a sold-out page wastes the click and trains people not to trust the next one.

This is a half-hour on a template rather than per product, and it changes how every listing in the shop appears from then on.