10 Product Page Must-Haves for Better Conversions

In this episode of the Product Powerhouse podcast, our host discusses the importance of having a well-designed product page and shares 10 essential elements for increasing conversions.

On this episode we cover …

The ten must have items you need to include on your product pages
Why you need each item and how they help conversions
Optional items you might want to have on your product pages depending on your product types

Optimizing your product pages with these 10 must-haves will not only increase your conversions but also create a more satisfying shopping experience for your customers.

Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the episode to post in your stories and tag me! And don’t forget to follow, rate and review the podcast and tell me your key takeaways!

Learn more about Erin and how I help product-based business owners at Product Powerhouse.

CONNECT WITH ERIN ALEXANDER:

UNFILTERED - New subscriber only podcast for $3/month

Product Powerhouse Website

- TRANSCRIPT -

Hello. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the product powerhouse podcast. I am so glad you are here today. Listening to this episode. We are talking about all the things you should have on your product pages. This is a question. I get asked a lot.

When I'm, having conversations with coaching students or people who have power hours. I think this is going to be a great episode. I have a long list of things that you should include and some optional items that can help, build out your product pages better. And I'm actually really excited about this because.

I know you guys are hearing me talk about Shopify 2.0 a lot, but because of this upgrade, we are able to really build out cool dynamic product pages. Which is doing so much when it comes to selling your products. So let's jump right in.

So we've all been there, staring at a blank product page, thinking what the heck do I need to put on this page? What goes on this page, or you've seen other product pages where you're shopping on someone else's site and their product pages are just sparse and you're like hello. I need information about the product. This actually happened to me recently. I was wanting to purchase a coloring book, like the cover and the idea behind it sounded so cute.

And totally my style. But when I went to the product listing, there was nothing included that gave me any idea of what the insights were going to look like. There was no product images of the inside of the coloring book. There was no description of the types of coloring pages that it would have.

Or the general style. And it was really frustrating because the outside of the coloring book look cute, but that really doesn't mean anything. I recently bought a coloring book for my daughter that she had asked for. And I didn't really look at it. I was just like, yeah, sure. And it ended up being $8. And the pages on the inside were so basic. Like I felt like I could have drawn them with my eyes closed. Like I was very frustrated.

And that was at a store where I could have looked at it. I just didn't. when you're talking about the online atmosphere, you have to be really diligent about creating product listings that fully describes your product. If I had ordered that online, I would have been really disappointed in the product. I'm still disappointed in the product, but we don't want that to happen. We want our customers to be really satisfied with what they purchase. And you have this information, it's just hard to know exactly what you should put on your pages.

So let's break that down. What should be on your product pages and maybe this is a good time to reevaluate your product pages and give them a little judging and a little update to encourage more sales.

So first let's think about why it's important to optimize your product pages.

It's not just about making sales. Sure, we all want sales. But it's not just about making sales it's about making sure your potential customer can truly understand your product and how it works, how it's going to meet their needs and helping them visualize what their life will look like if they purchase this product.

If I had purchased that coloring book, what would it have given me?

It's also important for your SEO, optimizing your product pages helps boost your searchability. If you're using really good product descriptions and titles. Optimizing your images, things like that. It's going to boost your SEO so that you're able to get found and actually get more sales.

It also makes the buyer's journey easier, more straightforward. And I mentioned this all the time, but if you clearly name your product, create good descriptions that are descriptive. Then, if someone sees you, showing sad coloring book online, we're going to run with this as an example today. Okay.

If they see you showing your coloring book on Instagram or Tik TOK, but they are not sure what the name was or they can't remember what the name was. If they are able to search using descriptive words. Then they will be able to find the product. It's a much easier for them to make a purchase, even if they don't know the exact name or they didn't click on a direct link to that product.

Which ultimately does lead to more conversions. And people buying your product. All of these things maybe are not just to make sales, but in the end they lead to sales, which is what we want.

So what goes on the product page? Alright, number one, you need a product title. Good descriptive product title.

This is going to be at the top of your page. This is going to be the first thing a customer see. Besides the images. So you really want to have a strong product name and you want to include key words. So that your products are searchable. This is going to be Words that people are using to find products like yours. So for example, if I was using the coloring book, I would want to say in their coloring book or adult coloring book, or

I want to say the coloring book I was looking at is like one with curse words in it, so you might say.

I don't even know what they call those.

But you would want to be really clear what the product is, and this is the same forward. If you sell jewelry, if you sell soap. A lot of times I see people create listings and they don't even use the word of the product. You gotta think about your titles as if someone wasn't looking at the picture when they are reading the title, you want the title to be clear enough that I can vaguely picture what the item is without ever seeing it.

Just based on the title. Those more creative, more, artsy names are better served in the product description. They are not meant to be displayed in the product title. I know a lot of artists and makers really hang on to those really creative names. And I completely understand, but they're not doing you any favors when it comes to having your products be able to be found on Google or by your customers who are searching on your website. So if you really want to hang on to those artistic names, put them in the description, but your product titles should be descriptive. That's important.

The next thing you need to have on your product is product images. This is another duh. But you want to have good quality? Product images that show your product. From all angles, like the 360 degree pictures to help customers see the product completely.

This helps them visualize it in their home, on their desk, on their body. If you have something that people where you want to show someone else wearing it. You need to have model shots. If your product is something that people put on their body. Like a purse, earrings, clothing.

There is a lot you can do with product images. You also want to make sure you are compressing your product images. A lot of people are asking me about site speed and the thing about e-commerce websites is that they have a lot of images in every image slows down your website. There's nothing you can do about that except to compress your images.

If you want to compress them before you upload them, which is recommended. If you upload them compressed, you're going to get the best results. You could use something like tiny P and G. It's a website where you just upload your images and it compresses them for you. If you didn't compress your images before you put them on your site, and you're just now hearing this and you're like, shoot, what do I do? You can install an app on your store, like bulk image edit that will go in and compress your images for you. I think two compress all of your images, you do have to pay for bulk image edit. I haven't found a photo compressor app that you can install on your Shopify store that doesn't have a fee associated with it, but honestly, the fee is worth it. It's going to speed up your site. So it loads faster, which it does help you when it comes to ranking on Google. Google and people like sites that load fast. Take that with a grain of salt, because like I said, there's not a lot you can do about some of these things where you have a lot of images, but if you can press them, that can help. The other thing you can do is add product videos. You can have a video in your product image area on Shopify. You can also have videos like further down on the page. If you want to show your product and use if you have a candle company, maybe you want to show someone lighting the candle, like setting the mood. What does it feel like when someone has a candle going in their home, or if you have a coloring book, maybe you show a woman coloring, like just chilling out from a stressful day.

There's lots you can do with product video that can really help to pull your customers into that emotion. And the benefits that they're going to get from purchasing your product and like pulling them in and really capturing that with video. His video required. Absolutely not, you can do it without video.

If you want to use video, I think it's a great idea. I think we are seeing video pop up on product pages more and more, and I don't think that is going to stop.

It's totally your choice. You don't have to have video to be successful, but I do think that there are fun ways to use it.

So the third thing you need to have on your product page, which is a non-negotiable is an SEO friendly product description. Focus on utilizing keywords that people are searching for in your product description, as well as talking about the products features and benefits and solutions.

The description is about the product and how people are going to use it. So you definitely need to include specifications, like technical details, dimensions, materials, weight, and all that information people might need to know about your product, but you can also include more about the emotion and the reasons people want it.

Don't be afraid to include more information. I like to have a couple of bullet points that lists out the details, the dimensions, the weight, the materials. And then I might have like maybe a couple of sentences where I've elaborated.

One thing you want to do is make sure you're using those keywords again. I like to repeat the name of the product or the title of the product inside the description. So sometimes I'll see listings where people are asking me for SEO advice. And one simple, quick tip would be like, you have a coloring book and it's called the

Untethered adult coloring book. Let's just go with it. So instead of saying this coloring book, I would say the untethered adult coloring book. I would repeat those exact same keywords from the title in the description. And you can do that anywhere within the description. I do like to put it at the top of the description because I really want Google to know this is what this is about.

If Google had a thought process, it doesn't imagine it's like a little checklist, but it's like, oh, she said this was a coloring book in the title. She has images that are coloring books. And in the description, it says it's a coloring book. So this must really be a coloring book because Google's job is to provide accurate information to its customers.

So people searching. And so it's looking for clues within your content. That's telling it that this page that, that you've said is a coloring book is in fact that, and it's not a human looking at it saying, oh, yep, this is correct. It's just using these, data points that you've told it.

So that's why you repeat the same information in multiple locations on a product page.

The fourth thing you need to have on the product page is the price. Always have the price listed out, never hide your price. Display it prominently, you can include discounts or promotions right next to it, if you want. I just did a card website and it was like, if you.

If you buy a card, it's $5, but if you buy five it's $20. So you get a little bit of a discount. Underneath that price, we could have a little banner that says, By five or more. And save, $5 or something like that. I don't know if that math is correct because it went through my head too fast.

But you get the idea, right? Have that price up there. If you have some kind of Promotion or discount or something that you do put that up there also don't hide that from your customers, unless it's meant to be something that's exclusive for people. Information that helps them make a purchase should be prominently displayed.

So then you'd also have like your add to cart button. Of course, this is like the call to action. In Shopify, you can also have Those express pay options, like pay with PayPal, pay with apple pay.

I typically prefer to have those on the cart page, because if a customer clicks on your product page where you have one product and they say pay with PayPal, They're not going to be prompted to add anything else to the cart. It's going to take them to directly to check out. But if we put those express checkout buttons on the cart page, instead of the product page,

Then they are encouraged to add more to their cart, either your product page has not redirected to the cart. Or your product page does redirect them to the cart so they can see all the things in their cart. And then on the cart page, you could have, something that says, oh, you might also like these.

Or on the product page, you could have a people often add this to this order, so if you sell coloring books, maybe you also have a set of really cool markers that you people to add to their coloring pages. And you could show that on the product page, or you could have a pop-up on the color page.

Or you could have some option to add that on the cart page. And if you have your express pay buttons on the product page directly. They bypass all of that. So you don't get that chance to upsell them. So that's why I like to put express, pay buttons on the checkout page, not the product page.

The other thing I highly recommend you have on a product page that I always include for every client I work with is reviews and ratings. So this could be, simply a section underneath your product that lists out some reviews from clients who have either purchased this product or purchase from your store in general.

If you don't have a lot of product specific reviews, it can be like sparse in some of your pages won't have reviews. In that case, I recommend just showing generalized reviews.

They've purchased something else from your store and had a great experience, those work well if you have a lot of reviews for individual products, you can have those showing up on your product page. You can also turn on the stars. Like almost every theme comes with the option to have stars with your products.

So that's like a rating. And then customers can see like What other customers have rated your product? Like four stars or five stars. And that can be helpful because it's visual. Reviews are really helpful for social proof. It's showing people like, Hey, other people purchase this and they liked it and they enjoyed it and they used the product.

So they feel more confident making that purchase themselves, which is the main purpose of the product page. We want them to feel confident that when they purchase from us, they are going to be getting a good quality product. They are going to be getting something that they will enjoy.

There's a couple of other things you could do. You could also include like user generated content and this would be like pictures or videos of people who have used your product. Some of those apps that request reviews like. My favorite is stamped IO, but you could also use judge.me.

They allow you to ask your customers for images of your product and if your product is something that, people are likely to take a picture of. That's awesome. That's something you could definitely do. I purchased from a nail company and she sent a review asking for a picture. So I was able to take like a picture of the manicure I had with the nails. And post that with my review saying, Hey, I loved these nail stickers. They really easy to use my nails look great. It's helping me stop biting my nails, that type of thing. And that's all user generated content and user generated content is huge right now in social media. You'll see big companies using this.

Where it's just like normal people who like the product are making, little videos or things like that. And you could even pay people to make that kind of content for you. There are people whose job it is to create content for other companies, which is really cool. It's a little different than influencers.

. But you can also just get those from the people who have already purchased from you. If someone tagged you on Instagram, ask, if you can save

that image and use it in your marketing, that type of thing. There's also social proof popups on one of my client's site, they have a little pop-up that says, oh, so-and-so just purchased this. And it has an image of the product and the title of the product. And if you click on that link, it will take you to the product that just purchased.

I think these can be cool. I also think they can be gimmicky. I'm testing one out on my store. Again, I go back and forth between turning it on and off because I just can't decide if it is. Good to have, or if it's just gimmicky, but I think they can help with social proof and they are good if you're getting a lot of sales.

Where they start to get gimmicky is if you're not getting a lot of sales, it's repeating those same people over and over, and anybody can spot. Sometimes they're lying there saying, oh, so-and-so bought this in the last 24 hours, but then you're like, oh, so-and-so just bought that in the last 24 hours, five minutes ago also. And it's like repeating things and I don't like that part. I prefer honest marketing. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It just means it has to be right for your company and your style of people. If you have products that sell out often, that could be a really great way to show like, Hey, these are going fast.

If you don't, then, maybe it's not a good fit for you, but it's something that you could try.

An absolute requirement on your product page is related products, showing other products that customers might like based on the product that they're looking at. So this might be something in the same collection. It might be something in a different collection that coordinates it's totally up to you.

There's a bunch of different ways to do this. Most of the themes have this built in where it's going to do it based on category of product or collection. If it's in the spring collection, it's going to show me five other items in the spring collection, which works just fine. If you want more specific selections, you can do that. There are some really great apps that do that. Frequently purchased together is a good one.

There's just a lot of different ways to make that happen. You just have to figure out what works best for your type of products and how you want to recommend them.

You absolutely need to have related products showing on product pages.

You also want to have shipping and delivery information, whether this is just like in a little pop-up tab, like an open and close tab, you can have it there so that people know what to expect when it comes to receiving their products. If I'm going to order from you, how long is it going to take?

I had to recently order a dress. And the date of the event is like a month away. So I needed to know, is the dress gonna get here in time? Is it made to order or is it sent right away? Always have your shipping and delivery information on your product pages. So you can have it a bunch of different ways. You could have it in a little accordion tab. Like I already mentioned, you could just have a link to your shipping policy. If you need to, you can have a banner at the top of your website that tells.

When things are shipped, one of my clients even says like orders that are shipped from this date are shipped out on Mondays, or, we always ship on Mondays.

Just letting people know what to expect from the beginning is a crucial part of running a successful business. Like when it comes to customer service. All they want to know is what to expect when it comes to getting the thing they paid for.

Another really important thing to have on your product page is a return policy.

You should also always have your return policy lake, LinkedIn, your footer, as well as your shipping information as a side note, but it's really good to have this on your product pages. If your product is something that often needs returned, like you don't know if it's going to fit, have that on your product pages.

What we want to do is provide that information upfront. So our customers don't have to work for it. The best thing you can do for your customers is provide them with information without them having to go find it. It just makes their buying decision so much easier because they know oh, this is what's going to happen if I need to return it, or this is how I will take care of this if I need to return it.

That's really important, especially if your product is one that often gets returned. Speaking of, if you have a product that has specific. Measurements or need some kind of information, like a size chart. It's absolutely critical that you display a size chart on your product page.

For a clothing, then you might even have how to take your measurements. Actually, when I was buying the dress for the wedding, I'm in, they had a video that showed you how to take measurements. And honestly, I didn't know that I needed to take measurements a certain way and I didn't take them that way.

And in fact the dress did not fit. Like around the chest, you were supposed to raise your arms up when you did the measurement. And then I didn't do that. I didn't know that. And I had already purchased. This was after I had gotten one to try on and I was like, it doesn't fit. And I'm trying to make sure that I measure again and I'm like, oh good thing. I watched this video.

So if your product is something that requires, them to find the right fit or find the one that fit best for them, like a ring or a bracelet that's sized, you need to provide that information for them. Show them how to figure out their ring size, show them how to figure out their bracelet size.

Provide that information so that they can order the one they need to their best of their knowledge. If you don't provide that, you're going to get a lot more returns and it's going to be a lot more work for you.

So then there's a couple other things you could have on your product pages that I really feel are optional, but really great. One could be a product comparison tool. There are a lot of tools that will allow you to put two products next to each other, or multiple products like you can say, compare to and choose another product.

Where customers can compare products side by side. And I think that this could be really important if you have products that are very similar and people need to know what's the difference between the two. I can't actually tell, allowing them to be able to compare and see the benefits side by side could be really helpful for making that buying decision.

Live chat support. So having some kind of live chat on your website is something that can be really helpful. It can also be optional. I don't think it's required to have a great website. But I think it can be really helpful, especially if you have a product for people to ask a lot of questions like that website for the dress shopping. They have a live chat and it is so helpful. And even when you jump on live chat, it says like 20 people are on because buying a dress is hard, especially buying a dress online. If I could have gone in person to try on that dress, even though I hate trying on clothes, I would have gladly done it because dress sizes can be weird.

It's really going to depend on your product. If you have something that people have questions about absolutely include a live chat or some way to get in contact with you on the product page. It's going to just make customers feel more confident purchasing from you. If they know that you're someone who answers questions, who can tell them the difference between products.

Another thing that can be really cool is product demos. So this could be a video or something people watch or see the product in action. This is again, something that's going to be really dependent on your product. Like it depends on what it is. How you use it? But those can help people see how they use your product.

A great example of this would be last summer. I had to buy a new pump for my stand-up paddleboard. Like I have an inflatable stand-up paddleboard and the pump I had purchased died relatively fast and I was pretty upset about it. So then I went through and I watched all of the product demos for the other ones, just to make sure I was getting one that was going to be easy to use.

Fast and not as loud because they are super loud. So I went through and I looked at all these different demos to find when that was going to fit my needs best. So again, it's going to depend on the type of product you have, but that's another way to help customers feel confident when it comes to making a purchase.

I think that there are other ways you can have fun with your product pages. There's a lot of different things you can add these days, especially with the addition of Shopify 2.0. Like you can have icons or bullet points that highlight, things about your company. If a company who gives back, you're a B Corp, or maybe use sustainable products.

If you created this product because of a specific reason or in memory of someone, you can incorporate that kind of thing on your product page.

And it can be a really great way to really pull people into what you are selling and why you are selling it. You also don't have to do too much. Sometimes I'll get ads for products that the product pages are just so gimmicky. They have a million different FOMO popups or hundreds of product reviews. You have to scroll through all of them to get the contact information or get to the product information.

To me, it feels like, wow, they're trying really hard to convince me to purchase this thing. That I'm not sure it's worth it. Like it feels gimmicky and you want to have a careful balance of that as a small business owner.

A lot of times when I see those ads, the other thing I noticed is that the rest of the website isn't fully built out. They won't have legal information listed or they won't have someplace to sign up for emails. They just have this really overstuffed product page where they're trying to sell you this one thing that they're driving traffic to it through Facebook ads or Instagram ads. And you want to have a careful balance of that. You want to show people that you're a legitimate business and over stuffing with all all of these different things that trying to create scarcity or even fake scarcity. Is not a good idea. I would really encourage you to think about the ones that are most important for your type of customer and your type of business?

Although I will say I didn't mention this earlier, but having your inventory listed, can be really helpful if you have a product that sells out quickly. Like the other day, my friend and I were booking hotels for the wedding we're going to, and it was like, there's only three rooms left, so we knew we needed to book quickly.

If you have a product that sells out fast, then having your inventory listed on your product pages can be beneficial so that customers know they need to take action. They don't have a lot of time to wait. I don't recommend fake scarcity when it comes to that people are going to know that you're lying to them.

If you have a product that sells out often is out of stock notifications.

If the product is out of stock, give them a space to say, Hey, notify me when this is back in stock. That's something I see so often when I'm looking at stores that are sending me Facebook ads, is that whatever they were promoting is now out of stock. And there's no way for me to get notified when it's back in stock.

And it's very frustrating. And I have heard this from a friend of mine. We had a conversation and we talked about that same thing. Like we'll get ads for things that are out of stock and we can't buy them and they don't have back in stock notifications. Make sure you have back in stock notifications for items that sell out quickly or that are.

Sold out, but you will be bringing back if you're not going to be bringing them back then you don't need out of stock notifications.

So I've given you a long list of things for your product pages. So now I want you to go look at your product pages with this conversation in your mind, and think about. Are there things that I need to add to my product pages? Are there things want to take away? Maybe I want to try some kind of app to either, provide better information

or to create some kind of urgency, like with that social proof or an inventory stock number. Just, look at your product pages with a critical eye. Knowing what you've just learned, are there ways that you can improve your product pages to perform better and, make a few tweaks and see how it goes over the next few months or weeks?

Are you finding you're having more sales? It's going to be hard to pinpoint that yes, sales are because I updated the product page. But making small tweaks all the time on your website is how you're going to keep growing and keep improving your store to get more sales.

So that's it. That's product pages. You can have fun on your product page thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next time.