Products successfully sell online for a variety of reasons.  It’s not always the site with the cheapest price that gets the sale: being at the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Response Pages), having a snazzy website, and convincing the customer are all factors.  How do you convince the customer to buy your product once you’ve gotten them to your website?  With a great product description.  If you don’t know how to write strong product descriptions, than you need to learn.

Three reasons why writing your own product descriptions is a necessity:

First: Most descriptions can’t be copied directly from source due to copyright restrictions (even if you can copy the image, the description is usually protected).

Second: A copied description doesn’t help your SEO. Search Engine crawlers can usually flag duplicate content.

Third: You can write a better description yourself anyway.  Product descriptions should be tailored to fit your target market.  Whoever wrote the description originally wasn’t fitting it to your website and your market.

Note: Product descriptions are also integral to eBay sales.

Important factors of a great product description:

1.Specific Marketing: Know who your intended market is before you begin writing your product description.  If you are marketing to teenage girls, your tone may be quite different than a pitch aimed at 50-year old businessmen.  The rare product can be marketed to almost anyone (e.g. cell phones), but that’s a very rare product indeed.  Obviously you don’t want to be too extreme with targeting, because you may catch other demographics in your net.  If you’re selling glitter lip-gloss, you don’t necessarily want to say, “’Sup girls, want 2 look hot at prom?” because there may be other people interested in your glitter lipgloss who would be turned off by this tone.  Subtle angling to your target market is preferable.

photo credit: @bdthomas
photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography
2.Title: The title of your product description should effectively describe the product and include searchable keywords, but it should be as short as possible.  For example, here’s the title of a product off the Daily Deals: “Red Garnet and Honey Citrine Journey Pendant Necklace in 10 K Gold”.  This is a pretty good product description title.  It includes keywords like garnet, Journey, pendant necklace, and gold.  It has attractive descriptors like “honey citrine” instead of just “citrine” and states the brand name “Journey”.  I might have made it a little shorter: “Garnet, Honey Citrine, and Gold Journey Pendant Necklace”.  Garnet is usually some shade of red, so I wouldn’t bother to mention its color in the title unless it was one of the black, brown, purple, etc. shades.  Also, 10 K gold isn’t as impressive as 18 or 24 K gold, so I would put that descriptor in the body, not the title.

3.Keywords: Searchable keywords should be sprinkled in the title and body of your product description.  Don’t keyword-stuff, though.  Make sure your description remains concise, exciting, and relevant.

4.Photos: A picture is worth a thousand sales.  The more attractive the photo, the more sales.  It’s important for the photo to show the entire product, and if a portion of the product has fine detail, an additional close-up photo can be used to display this.  Photos from all sides are often used on eBay (360 degree view), and another object used to show the scale of the product can be useful.  For instance, on Etsy jewelry is often posed with common household items, like a pair of earrings dangling from a pencil.  Everyone knows how large a pencil is, so the scale of the earrings is immediately apparent.  (Just make sure it doesn’t appear that the two items are being sold together).

photo credit: knitsteel

5.Brand: If the product has a recognizable brand-name, that should always be featured prominently in the description.  For products like electronics, the brand should always be disclosed, but for other items like jewelry or clothing, it’s not necessary to mention it if it doesn’t help the sale.  If I told you my shirt was “Blue Kitten” that wouldn’t mean anything to you – it’s not relevant unless it’s Calvin Klein, Ed Hardy, Roxy, etc.

6.Size and Measurements: It’s not enough to show the size of the item in the photo, it should also be clearly indicated in your product description.  This is not important for items like books or standard-size objects like DVD players, but is very important for home décor items, TVs, clothing, etc.

7.Colors and Patterns: For clarity’s sake and also to enhance your description, a verbal explanation of colors and patterns is often useful.  A computer screen may not show the exact shade of a blue dress; adjectives like “royal blue”, “sky blue”, or “turquoise blue” not only clarify the actual color, but aid in the attractive and desirable image you are building with your words.  Make sure you understand what “royal blue” means, though.  If the dress shows up and it’s actually pastel, it may be returned.

photo credit: Mario Pleitez

8.Small Details: Again, you want to describe your product as accurately as possible and also make it sound attractive.  Describing the small details of the product like “anti-shock capability”, “distressed finish”, “antique pearl buttons”, etc., make the product more real for the customer, building an image of solidity and value.  It also helps ensure that your customer won’t be unpleasantly surprised when the product arrives.

photo credit: ☂CharlotteSpeaks

9.Uses and Features: Research your product before writing your description.  Besides including all the basic features like “Surround speakers and subwoofer”, include suggestions for use like “can be easily installed in any size car” or “a necessary component of any home theater system”.  Don’t be cheesy about this however: while researching this blog post I found some use suggestions like “wow your friends with this sleek and stylish attaché case”.  The phrase “wow your friends” only worked on twelve-year old boys buying x-ray glasses off the back page of Reader’s Digest in 1952.  You don’t want to come off like a snake-oil salesman.

10.Price: Your price should always be clear and easy to find.  You don’t have to put it in flashing red numbers (in fact, that’s probably a bad idea).  Simple bold black type at the top or bottom of your description is sufficient.  I’m not against the crossed-out original price and the sale price in red, but this should be used sparingly on your website, not on every single item.

11.Call To Action: End your product description with a call to action.  “Buy it now price: $19.95”, or “Free shipping for Memorial Day weekend only”.  You want to motivate people to buy immediately whenever possible.  You can also use up-sell offers as a call to action: “Buy the Victoria’s Secret silk pajamas and get the fluffy bunny slippers $10 off”.

eBay, internet marketing, selling products online, website design / help