10 hot tips to improve your e-commerce product pages

There’s a fine line between giving your customers enough information and over-doing it completely when it comes to designing you product pages. It’s a fine art and below are some tips from  Econsultancy's newly-released E-commerce Best Practice Compendium, that explain the essential features for successful product pages. 

User Reviews 

Customers love hearing from other customers, simple. They want to hear from the real people, that are just like them, that are using your product. 

If your product page doesn’t already include user review, make it a priority. According to stats from iPerceptions 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision, while 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site which has user reviews.

Reviews are a great sales driver, and are successful even if your customers are buying offline, with shoppers more and more frequently using their mobiles to compare prices and read product reviews while out shopping. 

Product images 

Most e-commerce sites have moved on over the past couple of years and learnt how to use product images effectively. 

Don’t use single, tiny images for your products. 

Do use lots of different views, have a 360 degree viewer if appropriate and don’t forget the zoom feature!

Use video

Video is effective as it gives the consumer a better understanding of what the product’s full functions are. This is sometimes hard to communicate using only copy or still images. 

Incorporating videos can also lead to reduction in the number of returns as the buyer will be able to gain a clear understanding of products and see them in use almost as if they have walked into a store. 

Show in-store stock levels

According to econsultancy.com’s recent Multichannel Retail Survey, 96% of respondents always or sometimes check online before buying in store, while 80% have reserved an item for in store collection in the past 12 months. 

It is more effective to show this information, through the customers locality, on the product page rather than leaving it until they get to checkout.

Show me the delivery/returns info

If you can’t offer free delivery and returns, don’t make it too hard for your customers find what your policy is. How easy it will be to return something and how much delivery will cost them is a big part of the purchase decision. Have the delivery price clearly next to all products so that your customers don’t feel as if there are hidden costs.

Improve your product page copywriting

Good sales copy not only has SEO benefits, but will also add more of a personal touch to your product. This will make your product pages standout in an area that is often neglected, so instead of just copying and pasting the manufacturer’s product description you can set your own tone of voice which will help you sell. 

Urgency 

One effective tool in pushing your customer to checkout is creating a sense of urgency about buying your product. If you show countdown timers, for example, that show if the customer buys in the next few hours they will receive the item by the next day. Showing when an item has nearly run out of stock is also another way of creating this urgency and pushing people into buying. 

Live chat

Your customers want to feel like they are dealing with real people when they are shopping online and just like when in a store, want someone there to ask for help if they need it. 

Also easing pressure on call centres recent stat show that 63% of consumers in the US and 53% in the UK have used  live chat. 

Consider using price match

This may not always be the best product page feature as it can sometimes prompt customers to leave your site and head elsewhere. Though depending on the right product, it may save you from losing sales to competitors, and the cheapened price may be offset if customers buy other items for the site, or are more inclined to return for future purchases

Make sure they’re quick

If you were to follow all of the tips here and start adding things like video and live chat, pages can become full and slow to load. 

The average page takes 3.50 seconds to load with product pages being the slowest, usually taking twice as long as a homepage to load. 

So make sure your page doesn’t fall victim to slow loading times or you will lose customers before they’ve even had a chance to have a look at what you’re selling.