Product page

A product page is the page for one thing you sell. It carries the photographs, the specifics, the price and the button, and it is the page on which somebody either decides or leaves. Everything else in a shop exists to deliver people here.

In short

• One page for one product, holding everything needed to decide.
• Photographs do more of the selling than the description does.
• It has to answer the objections nobody types into a search box.
• It is not a landing page, and treating it as one weakens both.

What the page has to answer

A shopper on a product page is running through a short list of questions, and the page either answers them or loses to the tab beside it.

• What exactly is this? Material, size, contents, what is included and what is not.
• Will it fit or suit me? Dimensions in a form somebody can picture, a scale reference in the photographs, a size guide that is specific to your items.
• What will it cost to get here, and when? Delivery cost and timing, stated before checkout rather than revealed inside it.
• What if it is wrong? Returns, in plain sentences, near the decision rather than buried in a policy page.
• Can I trust this shop? Reviews, a real address, a way of asking a question and getting an answer.

Anything left unanswered becomes a message you have to reply to, or more often a visitor you never hear from.

The photographs do most of the selling

Nobody can touch the item, so the photographs are carrying the entire physical experience of the product. This is the part of the page where effort pays most and where small shops most often stop early.

One image on a white background is not a set. The set that works shows the item alone, the item in use, the material close enough to judge, and something in frame that establishes how big the thing actually is. Scale is the single most common gap, and it is the reason a proportion of returns happen at all.

The same images travel further than the page. They are what appears in shopping adverts, in social posts, and in the product feed that supplies both. A page with weak photographs produces weak adverts as a side effect, which is a reason to fix the images before increasing the spend that puts them in front of people.

Words you will hear

• PDP. Product detail page, the same thing in shorter form.
• Variant. A version of the same product, such as a colour or a size.
• SKU. The code identifying one specific variant in your stock records.
• Above the fold. What is visible before scrolling, discussed under above the fold.
• Add to cart rate. The share of people viewing the page who add the item.
• Cross-sell. A related item shown beside the one being viewed, and the usual lever on average order value.
• Size guide. The measurements table specific to your products rather than a generic one.

Why it is not a landing page

The two get confused, and the confusion produces bad versions of both.

A landing page exists for one campaign and one action, and it deliberately removes routes out. A product page is permanent, sits inside the shop’s navigation, and has to serve somebody who arrived from a search, from a category listing, from an advert and from a link a friend sent, all with different amounts of context. Stripping the navigation out of it to make it behave like a landing page removes the browsing that produces larger baskets.

The reverse mistake is sending advertising traffic for a specific promotion straight to a product page and hoping the offer is obvious. It rarely is, because the page was written for the product rather than for the promotion.

Fix the top twenty first

Most shops have far more product pages than they can improve at once, and improving them alphabetically is a way of never finishing.

Sort by page views and take the top twenty. For each one, read it as somebody who has never seen the item, and write down the questions you cannot answer from what is there. That list is the work. In practice it comes back the same way almost every time: the photographs are too few, the description skips a specification the buyer actually cares about, and the delivery terms are not on the page at all.