Writing Descriptions That Are Not the Supplier's

Where the text came from

A supplier provides a data file with names, codes, specifications, and a paragraph of description.

It is accurate, it is free, and it loads in minutes, which is why almost every retailer selling that product uses it unchanged.

So the same paragraph now appears on your page and on two hundred others, word for word.

A search engine choosing which of those to show has no reason to pick yours, and generally picks the largest or the most established.

This is not a penalty

Worth clearing up, because the fear is usually misplaced and leads to the wrong response.

Nobody is marking your site down for using supplier copy. There is no punishment being applied.

What happens is simpler and just as costly: given many identical pages, one gets shown and the rest do not, and yours is competing on authority alone against retailers who have far more of it.

The page is not damaged. It is invisible, which for a product page is the same outcome.

What you know that the supplier does not

The reason your version can be better rather than merely different.

• Who actually buys it, and what for.
• The questions customers ask before ordering.
• What it is not suitable for, which prevents returns.
• How it compares with the alternative you also stock.
• What comes back, and why.
• What people call it, as opposed to its catalogue name.

None of that is in a manufacturer's file, because the manufacturer does not serve your customers and does not take your phone calls.

Start with the ones that matter

Rewriting eight hundred descriptions is a project that will not be finished.

Rewriting forty is an afternoon a week for a month, and it captures most of the value.

Choose them from data rather than by working alphabetically: your best sellers, your highest margin items, anything with steady search traffic that converts poorly, and anything generating pre-sale questions.

Leave the long tail on supplier copy indefinitely. Those pages are not competing for anything and the effort is better spent elsewhere.

This also makes the work sustainable, since the alternative is a rewriting project that stalls at item ninety and leaves the catalogue in two inconsistent halves.

Keep the specifications, rewrite the prose

An important distinction that saves a great deal of unnecessary work.

Dimensions, materials, part numbers, capacities, and compliance information should be reproduced exactly. They are facts, accuracy matters more than originality, and inventing variation in them is actively harmful.

Present those as a structured list rather than buried in a paragraph, which is easier to scan and easier to filter on.

The prose around them is what needs to be yours: what it is for, who it suits, what to consider, and what you would tell somebody who phoned to ask.

That division also makes the work faster, because the hard part is already done and you are adding rather than replacing.

A worked example

A trade supplier listed about twelve hundred products, all on manufacturer copy.

Almost no product page received any search traffic at all, despite the catalogue being substantial and the business being long established.

They rewrote sixty pages over two months, chosen by sales volume and margin.

Each kept the supplier's specification table and added three or four paragraphs: the typical application, the question the counter staff were asked most about that item, what it did not suit, and how it compared with the cheaper alternative they also stocked.

Within about four months those sixty pages were receiving search traffic and the rest were not.

The most useful finding was in the questions: writing down what customers asked about each product surfaced four cases where the supplier's description was actively misleading, which had been causing returns.

Where the words come from

The material already exists and is not being written down.

Your counter staff and whoever answers the phone have the questions. Ask them to note, for two weeks, what people ask about specific products.

Your returns records have the failures: what came back and what the customer said, which tells you exactly what the description should have made clear.

Your own search terms report has the vocabulary, since customers type what they call the thing rather than what the catalogue calls it.

Between those three, most of a description writes itself, and the result contains information no competitor running the same supplier file can match.

What good looks like

Not long. Specific.

Two or three hundred words of genuine content beats eight hundred words of padding, and padding is what happens when somebody is told to make it unique without being given anything to say.

Lead with what it is and who it is for. Then the specifications. Then the considerations: what to check, what it does not fit, what people usually buy alongside it.

Write it as though answering somebody standing in front of you, because that is exactly the conversation you are replacing.

The counter-case

There are catalogues where this is not worth doing.

A parts business with tens of thousands of lines, where customers search by part number and the page exists to confirm you stock it, does not need prose. It needs accurate data, working search, and correct specifications.

Rewriting descriptions there would consume years and improve nothing, because nobody is reading them.

Some suppliers also provide genuinely good copy, particularly for technical products, and rewriting it for the sake of difference produces a worse page.

The question is whether anybody would read the description before deciding. Where they would, yours should be yours. Where they would not, spend the time on data quality instead.

Doing it

1. Rank products by sales, margin, and traffic.
2. Take the top forty and ignore the rest for now.
3. Keep the specifications exactly as supplied.
4. Ask staff what customers ask about each one.
5. Check returns for what was misunderstood.
6. Write two or three hundred words of your own.
7. Do the next forty next quarter.

Step five frequently finds descriptions that were causing the returns, which pays for the exercise on its own.

The competing-pages problem is covered in two pages competing for the same search.

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.