When selling online your product information has to do the job of the shop assistant. The copy and images have to convince the customers to buy. To encourage the customer to want the product, and answer all the customers’ questions in order to remove the barriers to purchase.
37% of shoppers in Western Europe say they’ve left a brand’s website or app without making a purchase because there was not enough information about the product according to research by Episerver. Investing in getting the content right on your product pages is clearly a must-do activity.
The importance of getting this right on a marketplace is even greater than it is on your own site. When a customer visits your site they are entering your world, only seeing your products, and they probably know something about your brand before they get to you. When a customer views your product on a marketplace, especially in one outside your domestic market, they are surrounded by alternative products and have probably never heard of your brand before.
If your product page descriptions and images don’t do a great job of selling to the marketplace customer, they’re going to buy a different product from someone else on the same site.
There’s no perfect template for the copy you should have on your product page because the information needed to sell a pair of yoga leggings is very different from the information needed to sell a high end hi-fi system, or a kids toy. Whilst there isn’t a template there are a series of principles and guidelines which when followed will enable you to work out what product information you need to create for each product to maximise the sales potential.
International Product Description Translations
A huge barrier to selling overseas is translating the copy into the right language for each country. It’s expensive, time-consuming, and never-ending — it has to be done every time you put a new product live or improve the original copy.
When selling on Fruugo you don’t have to worry about translations because they are all done for you. Whilst you’re welcome to provide content in multiple languages the majority of merchants send Fruugo content only in their own language, and Fruugo translates it all into all languages necessary to sell in every country the platform reaches.
That’s right, selling on Fruugo means you don’t have to do any translations — even customer service messages are translated for you.
Writing Great Marketplace Product Descriptions
“I believe that copywriting is one of the most undervalued aspects of e-commerce. Century-old wisdom from the founders of direct marketing continues to apply as consumers increasingly use search to find products and rely on product descriptions to make their purchase decisions.”
Tony Preedy, CCO Fruugo and former Director of Marketing and International Development, Lakeland
It’s so tempting to just bash out a couple of sentences about each product and be done with it, but spending a bit more time making sure your copy covers the information the customer wants will increase your sales.
The copy needs to strike a balance between encouraging the customer to want the product, and anticipating and answering all their questions in order to remove all the barriers to purchase. To write it you need to understand what it is that will make the customer fall in love with the product, and what they need to know before they’ll commit to purchase.
Research
The absolute best way to do this is to run a customer panel, get a group of customers together show them the product and find what they love about it, and what they want to know about it. But that’s a very expensive way to do it, especially if you have 100s of products to write about.
A quicker and easier method is to see what customers are saying about your products and similar products online. Look at the reviews on your website and communications with customer services, other retailers’ websites, and consumer forums.
Diving into this user-generated content will help you understand what you should include in the copy to both romance the product and remove the barriers to purchase.
This will also help you understand how customers talk about the product, the words and phrases they use. The more you can reflect their voice in the copy the more they’ll connect to the product and want to buy.
The Sales Copy
Within the product description it is beneficial to provide as many details as possible about the product and (where applicable) to discuss the features and benefits of it.
Often search engines will ignore the meta description that is set against a product and instead they will show the first sentence or so from the product description. However, as the meta description is limited to around 154 characters this is often truncated meaning if the first sentences don’t include valuable product information then the meta description displayed in the search results is unlikely to be appealing to customers meaning they may be less inclined to click on it.
As a result of this we would recommend writing an introductory sentence that includes the product name and a brief outline of what the product is.
Following this, a bullet point list of features and/or benefits and finally a longer description that explains the product in full, why you would recommend it, and how the product meets the customer needs e.g. down insulation to keep the customer warm.
Within the example below the product description tells a customer nothing about the product and is just a replication of the product title.
As a customer you would want to know what the product is made from, any special features it has and sizing information. These details become more and more important the higher the price tag of an item. Would you spend $129.00 on this product? If not, why expect someone else to.
As the product description is so brief, the web crawler has very little information to understand the page. The meta description is surfacing results that don’t necessarily look appealing for a customer to click on and the jacket wouldn’t be shown in google shopping for a variety of queries that it is likely to be relevant for e.g. Lonsdale down jacket.
Compare this with the example below:
The description is comprehensive and you know exactly what you’re buying so you can make an informed choice. If you landed on the first product example the chances are you would go to another site to find out more information and then purchase on the other site.
Equally if you don’t have product information available consider if the product should be launched online. The following information being left on a product description again means a customer is likely to bounce off the page as they don’t want to wait to receive the product information:
Product descriptions should be easy for a customer to read so ensure that paragraphs are used and if required bullet points.
Google shopping allows up to 5,000 characters for product descriptions however the optimal length is generally thought to be between 500 and 1,000 characters. It’s important to have key information in the first 180 characters though as this is what google displays in the extended shopping results. This can vary, for example the item below displays 280 characters but 180 is cited as the general rule:
Customers are time poor and want answers quickly — so make sure your product descriptions are easy to read.
In layout terms, short sentences, short paragraphs, and bullet points all help.
The way you write your copy can also improve readability. Avoid cliché’s and jargon and try to use short words rather than long ones. This is especially true when serving overseas markets because your clever words might get lost in translation, so don’t write anything that’s too colloquial.
Guidelines for Specific Google Shopping Areas:
· Supplements & Healthcare — There are a number of restrictions on supplements and healthcare products. These restrictions may be different in different countries or may apply in all locations. Restrictions include over the counter medication, prescription drugs, unapproved pharmaceuticals and supplements, pregnancy and fertility-related products and sexual enhancement treatments.
We would recommend that if supplements are being sold that a full list of ingredients is supplied within the product description. We would also suggest that any unsubstantiated claims are removed from the description.
Three Excellent copywriting books:
If you want some copywriting inspiration these 3 books come recommended from established copywriters:
- Scientific Advertising: 21 advertising, headline and copywriting techniques by Claude C Hopkins
- Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy by Herschell Gordon Lewis
- Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing by Drayton Bird
Anything Else?
It is worth remembering that although a good description is important there are other areas that need to be given serious thought.
Titles — one of the first things a potential customer reads. These need to be concise and informative. Find out more in our article ‘How to Effectively Use Keywords in Product Titles and Descriptions’
Images — conversion rate has been shown to increase if you have more than one image. Find out more in our article ‘How to Optimise Images for Websites and Google Shopping’
Keywords — using keywords helps users and search engines find your product so careful consideration should be given to them. Find out more in our article ‘How to Find and Create Longtail Keywords’
To find out more about getting your products selling in multiple countries with Fruugo contact us today.
