Writing a Product Description Somebody Reads

The problem with supplied text

If you stock something you did not make, the description came with it, and every other retailer has the same paragraph.

That creates two problems. Search engines see identical text across dozens of sites and have no reason to prefer yours. And the customer learns nothing they could not have learned anywhere else.

Rewriting it is work, and it is the only part of a product page you control that a competitor cannot copy from the same source.

What the description is actually for

Answering what the images cannot, and what a customer would ask if you were in the room.

How heavy it is in practice. Whether it does the specific thing they want. What is in the box. How it compares with the other one you sell. What it will not do.

Those are the questions that arrive by email, which is the best available source of material for what the page is missing.

The structure that works

1. One sentence saying what it is and who it suits.
2. The two or three things that make somebody choose it.
3. What it will not do, or who it is wrong for.
4. Practical details: dimensions, weight, materials, what is included.
5. Anything you know from selling it, which is the part nobody else has.

The third is unusual and effective. Saying who a product is wrong for builds trust and prevents returns, and no manufacturer description ever does it.

The fifth is the differentiator. "Most people buying this also need the smaller size" is knowledge that only comes from selling the thing, and it is the sentence a competitor cannot copy from the supplier.

A worked example

A shop selling garden tools, using the manufacturer's description for a particular pruning saw.

The supplied text listed blade length, tooth count and steel grade. Accurate and identical to every other listing online.

The rewrite kept the specifications and added four sentences from experience: that it cuts on the pull stroke, which surprises people used to the other kind; that it is too aggressive for anything under about two centimetres; that the sheath fits a belt but not a thick one; and that the replacement blades are worth buying at the same time because they are hard to find separately.

None of that was in the manufacturer's copy and all of it came from customer emails.

The page began ranking for the specific questions people asked about that saw, and the return rate fell, because the people it was wrong for now knew before ordering.

The counter-case

Where the supplied description is fine.

Commodity items bought by part number, where the customer knows exactly what they want and the specification is the whole decision.

Very large catalogues, where rewriting ten thousand descriptions is not realistic and the effort belongs on the hundred that sell.

And regulated products where the description is prescribed and altering it creates a compliance problem.

For a small catalogue of things you chose to stock, the supplied text is a starting point rather than an answer.

Length

Depends on the price and the unfamiliarity, as it does everywhere.

A cheap, obvious item needs a sentence and a specification. Something expensive or unfamiliar supports several paragraphs, because the customer is genuinely researching.

The structure that serves both: a short summary at the top, the specifications in a list, and the longer explanation below for anybody still reading.

Nobody has to read all of it, and the person who wants to, can. That layering matters more on a product page than anywhere else, because the buyer in a hurry and the buyer researching arrive at the same page.

Words that do nothing

The vocabulary that fills product descriptions and conveys no information.

Premium, quality, versatile, innovative, perfect for any occasion, must-have, and anything described as a solution.

Each is a claim no competitor contradicts, which means it distinguishes nothing. Replacing one of them with a specific fact improves the page every time.

The test is whether the sentence would be equally true of a competing product. If it would, it is filler, however well it reads.

Variants and options

Where descriptions most often fail practically.

If a product comes in sizes, colours or configurations, the description has to make choosing between them possible.

That means saying what the difference actually means: which size suits which use, which finish is more durable, what the more expensive version does that the cheaper one does not.

A dropdown listing three options with no guidance leaves the customer guessing, and a guess is where returns come from.

The first two lines

Worth treating separately, because they are what most people read.

On a phone, the description is usually below the images, the price and the buy button. Somebody who scrolls to it has already seen everything above and is looking for one more piece of information.

The first two lines should therefore carry the most useful thing you know, not a general statement about the category.

They also appear in other places: search results, shopping listings, and the preview when somebody shares the link. A description opening with a generic sentence wastes all of those positions.

The test is to read only the first two lines and ask whether somebody could decide from them. If not, the useful sentence is buried further down and should be moved up.

Where the material comes from

You already have most of it.

Customer emails asking questions before buying. Questions asked in person if you also sell face to face. Reviews, which name the things people cared about. Returns, which name the things that went wrong.

An hour reading those for your ten best-selling products produces better descriptions than any amount of writing from scratch.

And it identifies which products need the work, which is usually far fewer than all of them. Ten good descriptions on your ten best sellers is a better afternoon than a hundred rushed ones.

Rewrite one product a week rather than attempting the catalogue. Ten weeks produces ten pages that no competitor can copy, which is better than a hundred rushed ones that read like everybody else.

What the photographs alongside should be doing is covered in photographs that sell a physical thing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.