Your home page, contact page, and other primary website pages are all important to give users a sense of what your brand is, and why it matters. But there are few pages more important to an online retailer than the specific pages showing off your core products. These are your opportunities to help users understand exactly what you offer and, if you use the right design, compel them to move forward with a purchase.
Why Product Pages Are So Important
So why are product pages so important in the first place?
- The final chance. People don’t get to product pages by accident. They either find them after a specific search for the product (or something like it), or find them after exploring the main content of your site. Either way, the product page is your final chance to convince a user to buy.
- Competitive differentiation. This may not be the first product page in this category your visitor has seen. If you want to make a better pitch, or distinguish yourself with better perks and promises, this is a perfect opportunity to do it.
- Customer expectations. Customer expectations. Because people have practically unlimited purchasing options online, they hold their online retailers to higher standards. Up to 82 percent of adults check online reviews at least sometimes before buying a product, so they’ve come to expect that information conveniently on a product page.
How to Make Them More Compelling
Now let’s focus on some strategies you can use to make those pages more compelling:
- Demonstrate the product. Make sure your visitors know exactly what the product is, and what it’s best used for. For example, you might be able to provide tips on how the product is used, or offer a video that demonstrates the live use of the product. You won’t convert anyone who doesn’t have a thorough understanding of what the product is meant for. Limoges Collector, for example, shows how their Limoges boxes can be used as decoration.
- Include high-resolution photos and video. Online consumers want to see what they’re going to get, and feel confident in that preview content. Include multiple high-resolution photos (and preferably videos too), showing the product from different angles. Take some still studio photos and photos of the product in use as well; being able to zoom in and see the detail will help users feel confident in your offer.
- Create ample descriptive content. It’s also a good idea to support those images with written descriptions; these are useful not only for giving your visitors more information to use when making the purchasing decision, but also in optimizing your pages for search. Be sure to include specific keywords your target demographics might use when searching for this product, and try to answer questions proactively; for some products, this may mean creating a specific FAQ section. Rocky Mountain Soap, for example, gives each of their soaps a full body of descriptive content, showing users a basic description, the ingredients, and how to use the product.
- Write bulleted highlights of the benefits. The core content may not be fast or accessible enough for some of your more impatient users. Given the average human attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s, that means you have only a few seconds to make an impression on someone. The photos and videos you use to demonstrate your product will be invaluable in this pursuit, but it’s also a good idea to write out the main bullet points—the biggest benefits or most important applications for this product—so people see its value immediately.
- Add user reviews. Your visitors won’t just take your word that your product is what they need—nor should they. In the internet age, people want to hear from their peers and fellow visitors that a product is worth buying. Offer user reviews on the product, including both a star rating and custom written text, to show users what others think about your product; if you don’t, they’ll simply look for those reviews elsewhere, and you might end up losing the sale.
- Introduce a comparison feature. Online consumers want transparency, and they want to see what competing products are on the market before they make a final decision. Adding a comparison feature, which highlights how your product compares to others in its class, is a way to demonstrate your confidence in your product and give visitors a preview of what they could find if they go with one of your competitors. Bellroy, for example, shows you a traditional wallet next to its signature “slim” wallet, displaying how each reacts to additional cards stored in the accessory.
- Make recommendations. On many modern online marketplaces, you’ll see a space for recommendations on each product page. They might recommend similar products, products frequently viewed alongside the product in question, or products designed to improve the use of the central product. In any case, you’ll give your visitors a fuller perspective of the options available, and you might end up making an additional sale because of it. If you can automate the process, it makes things even easier.
- Add a sense of urgency. Most users will delay their purchasing decision, given the chance. You can fight against this tendency by instilling a sense of urgency, disclosing that a specific deal is temporary or adding a ticking clock to put visitors on the spot. Amazon’s Gold Box deals are a perfect example of this, giving users a finite amount of time to cash in on their best available discounts.
These strategies should be able to improve the conversion rates of your individual product pages, but don’t think of them as a one-time fix to guarantee you more revenue. If you want to see better long-term results, you need to invest in long-term thinking, experimenting with new strategies and carefully measuring their impact on your bottom-line figures. Only through repeated attempts to improve those results will you be able to fully optimize your critical pages.