Product pages are an extremely important part to any ecommerce site. Often they will be the only view and experience a potential customer has of a product. For high ticket items, such as furniture, it is even more important that a customer feels completely comfortable with the quality of an item before they will commit to purchase.
Product pages are often over looked and fall short of their purpose. They can make or break a sale so not letting your product pages fulfil their potential isn’t giving your products a fair chance.
The following post looks at what you should try and include in your product pages and examples of brands excelling at individual elements:
Product imagery
The quality of product images, and the way in which they are presented can have a big impact on conversions. It is important for images to impart a sense of contact with the product, giving the customer a stronger sense for product specifics and details. Great product imagery should include:
- Multiple angles and perspective views
- Close ups, showing details of material
- Product variations as separate images
- Controllable 360 views
- Products in isolation and in use
Made.com do this very well, offering a number of images from different angles and different zooms showing the items in use and on their own.
Product copy
Not everything about a product can be conveyed in pictures, for example the quality of craftsmanship and ethical production. If you want someone to commit to spending on a high ticket online, a reassuring, carefully constructed product description should be the least you can do. Great product copy should incorporate the following:
- Highlight the unique selling points of each product
- Include dimensions
- Care instructions
- Package measurements
- Offer samples where applicable e.g. fabric swatches for sofas
To aid readership, I also recommend using bullet points to structure copy.
Go Modern makes a great effort to talk about the product design and includes some history, important for high cost items. There is arguably too much copy as web users don’t tend to read large blocks of text; this could potentially be overcome through the use of read more expandable text.
Product videos
Short of touching and feeling a product, videos are one of the best ways to help a customer feel connected with a product. There are many examples of online retailers who have seen conversion rates increase dramatically as a result of incorporating videos into their product pages, for example Zappos.com saw an increase in conversions of between 6% and 30%.
It is important that product videos are of high enough quality and that they do the job of both showing the quality of craftsmanship and the product in detail that can’t be conveyed through imagery alone.
As a bonus, product videos can be optimised for search and potentially aid click through rates from search result pages.
Again, Made.com do a good job of including product videos that show the making of and the product in use. This really helps to tell the story behind the product.
Add ‘as featured in’
With home décor publications and TV programs continuing to increase in popularity, it is important to make the most of any coverage specific products receive. By displaying a well know publication logo this may well make people more inclined to make a purchase as it has a “seal of approval” from a trusted publication.
Logos should be added to the product description with links to copies of the publication. The frenchbedroomcompany.co.uk do an excellent job of this:
Made.com also employs this tactic on their product pages:
Cross selling
The art of cross-selling is offering a similar or complementary product to the one a potential customer is looking at. This is generally an alternative model, an item that would complement or is required for the product to function properly.
Using a well-executed cross-selling strategy will likely result in:
- Increased transactions as customers find what they want with greater ease
- Increased average order values as they add additional items to their basket
- Greater exposure of your product range
- Greater exposure to higher margin products
- Increased customer satisfaction as related products help complete their shopping process quickly
IKEA make nice use of tabs to include an array of cross selling opportunity, matching and complementary products, similar items and more products from the same range.
Whilst Amazon excel in offering complementary items and packages.
And John Lewis makes use of recently viewed across their site
The art to cross selling is relevancy. You will only increase basket values by presenting products that truly complement the core item being purchased. Presenting a list of random products in the hope one might be selected is not the right approach to be taking here.
Q&A Content
Question & Answer content takes FAQs a step further, by letting customers ask product specific questions. This level of interaction, especially where a real time element can be added, can significantly increase conversion rates as any doubts the customer has about a product can be allayed. Q&A content is becoming increasingly popular on more technical ecommerce sites; Wiggle.co.uk is a good example of this in action.
Don’t forget multichannel
Keeping multichannel in mind, Dwell link to the stores where you can go and see the product, helping drive footfall and potentially securing a sale.
A nice feature that few brands are currently employing.
The challenge of course is measuring the impact of online activity on store footfall and attributing sales accordingly.
Conclusion
The ultimate product page would be a hybrid of all these great examples. But the specific functionality you require for your website is likely to depend on your product, its complexity, the length of the consideration period and so on.
What is clear is that product pages need to work harder than ever if you are turn interested browsers into customers.
What great examples of product pages have you seen?