These 12 e-commerce product page design tips can grow your sales
Your e-commerce product pages make or break your sales. Although all the pages on your site have a role to play in the buying journey, the product page is the real moment of truth for your business. After all, you’ve worked hard and invested a lot of money to get visitors to your site and to this point in the process. Your product pages close the deal – don’t let them fail you.
Why is the design of your e-commerce product pages critical?
There are three main reasons to pay close attention to the design of your product pages:
Reason 1:
Although your product page is just one page on your website, it’s arguably the most important place to share the product-specific content that helps visitors decide whether to buy.
Reason 2:
Your product page is where you can convert a potential buyer into a life-long customer. Visitors landing on product pages are very often in the final stages of their buying journey and they’re ready to make a purchase. This is where you either win them over or lose them – very often forever.
Reason 3:
Sometimes businesses waste money trying to attract more traffic. Instead, they could optimise their product pages to convert more of the traffic they already have, saving on their marketing budget. If you focus on designing a product page that’s optimised for conversion, and you include trust elements to reassure your customers that their personal details and money are safe with you, you’ll most definitely increase your sales through existing traffic.
The minimum required elements of an e-commerce product page
When you design your product pages, you want to create an exceptional user experience. To achieve this, your product page needs to contain:
- Enough value-adding information;
- Assurances that create trust; and
- Motivation to buy the product.
This normally translates into having at least these ten elements on a product page:
- Informative product images and/or videos;
- A unique and descriptive product name;
- Exceptional product description, specifications and benefits;
- A stand-out call to action;
- Clear pricing;
- Social proof, such as product reviews or user generated photos and stories;
- Product choices like flavour, size, quantity, colour, etc;
- An area where you address questions or concerns like shipping, returns policy, guarantees and other frequently asked questions;
- Related or recommended products; and
- Any extra, helpful information that will pursuade the customer that this is the product for them, for example, uses of the product or maintenance guidelines to prolong the life of the product.
The product page depiction below is a shortened version of the real product page for Keto Collagen. Notice how very detailed and informative it is. Perhaps it could even inspire your own product pages.
According to OneSpace, the following forms of content are the most important to customers when making a purchase on a brand’s website or mobile app:
Any e-commerce website can include these elements. The trick is to present them in a way that resonates with your customers, and helps them make the best decision for themselves. Remember, it’s always about ‘helping’ to buy, rather than ‘pushing’ to buy.
12 Tips for e-commerce product page designs that sell more
These ideas will help you design your product page to do its job i.e. to sell more:
1. Design strategically
The goal is to showcase the product, so keep that in mind when designing.
Tips:
- Your branding should be visible on every page so it’s very clear whose site it is, without overshadowing the rest of the page.
- Simpler is almost always better.
- The main focus should be the product image and description.
- Put the important elements above the fold.
- Use white space to reduce clutter and to highlight important elements like the Add to Cart button.
- Ensure your product categorisation and navigation, including breadcrumbs, facets and filters, is intuitive and user-friendly.
2. Make sure the product page loads fast
Speed is of the essence and a slow-loading page will lose you customers before they’ve even seen your products.
Tips:
- Keep the design simple.
- Optimise all images.
- Be economical in the use of CSS styles for the background and borders.
- Ideally your page should load instantly, but if it’s slightly slow, pay attention to loading order so the customer sees the most important things first.
3. Display plenty of high-quality images
In the absence of the retail store experience, images are the best way to show a customer what they’ll be getting. They’re also the quickest as our brain processes images faster than text.
Tips:
- Display the main image prominently, with thumbnails of others nearby.
- Try to keep image size consistent, ideally square.
- Use a white background and keep all images clean, simple, beautiful and consistent.
- Show as many angles as possible.
- Make sure the image is high definition and provide a zoom tool to allow customers to examine the details, like trims, texture or components.
- Include lifestyle images showing the product in use wherever possible, so the customer can get a feel for them.
- Encourage customers to send in their own pictures of them using the product.
- Where possible, include videos too as these give you even more scope to describe the product.
- Consider dynamic images and 360-degree-spin features from software providers like Sirv (these also provide a zoom functionality).
This example of dynamic images shows several angles of the product:
This is another example of how to use great images and videos to show different perspectives (note the buttons that allow you to see the colour variants):
4. Use descriptive product names
This helps customers to quickly find what they want and it also boosts Search Engine Optimisation for your product page.
Tips:
- Make them descriptive and unique.
- A good formula to use when naming your products is:
Depending on the type and range of products this formula may change slightly and sometimes it is helpful to describe the product using common words too like in the example below.
- Use key attributes or product specs to make eCommerce product pages unique e.g. Polo Formal Shirt Green Stripe Extra Large.
- Use product names and keywords in urls, headings and anywhere else you can on the product page.
This succulent provider uses the above formula to derive very clear and descriptive names for their plants:
5. Provide detailed and compelling product descriptions
Product specs and product descriptions are two different things. Specs give facts about the product, like SKU, size, colour and fabric, while product descriptions tell the customer how they will benefit from owning the product and/or how it solves a problem for them.
Tips:
- Make your copy concise, friendly and very easy to read (bullets work well).
- Highlight the main benefits, rather than simply describing features.
- Cover all the data by answering these questions wherever relevant: who, what, where, when, why and how.
- Make sure shipping costs and timeframes are clear.
- Address objections in advance.
- If possible, create an emotional connection to the product.
- Provide any extra resources that might be useful e.g sizing charts, care instructions, videos or written guides on how to choose or maintain the product.
6. Emphasise your calls to action
No-one is going to hit the Buy or Checkout button if they can’t find it.
Tips:
- Make sure it’s a button (not a link).
- Highlight it by using a bright colour with plenty of white space around it.
- Keep it simple e.g “Add to Cart”, “Buy Now”
In this example, the visitor can quickly see where to focus their attention:
7. Make the price very clear
Price is often a deciding factor, so make sure there is no confusion there.
Tips:
- Display the price prominently.
- If you’re offering a discount, emphasise that for extra selling power.
- Display the price near the call-to-action (CTA) button.
- As far as possible, the product name, price and CTA button should form a clear unit that has a visual hierarchy.
8. Provide social proof
No matter how good your marketing is, people always feel safer buying something if they know other users are happy with it. It is now non-negotiable for brands to answer the question: “What do others think of this product?”
Tips:
- Make it easy for customers to submit ratings and reviews.
- Display these prominently for others to see.
- Encourage feedback via social media and include this on the product page.
- Ask experts to rate the product.
- Display ‘user proof’ on your product pages by inviting customers to send in photos of them using the product, and perhaps tell their story alongside the photo.
9. Give them choices
Expand the customer’s view of your product range so they can choose what really works for them.
Tips:
- Give them filters to view and select colours, styles, fabrics, sizes, quantities and more, depending on your products.
- Where applicable, provide an image that includes the choices made (this is very important for colour or type of fabric, for instance).
- Display cross-sells and upsells in a section called something like “You may also like…” or “Related products”.
10. Reassure customers and address their concerns
Help potential customers feel safe to buy from you by including trust and support elements wherever possible.
Tips:
- Use your About Us page to create a personal and emotional connection.
- Prominently display the main points of your shipping, guarantee and returns policies, and include links to pages with more detail.
- Show money-back guarantees.
- Highlight that your entire site (and especially the payment page) is secure and display all relevant security badges, for example, Comodo or VeriSign.
- Make it easy for them to get support by providing contact details, implementing live chat and including a FAQ page.
11. Extra resources and helpful information
Here you can really be creative and differentiate your product pages. To help your site stand out, use this section to connect with customers and assist them to make their purchase. Bear in mind though that not every product page needs extra resources. If your products are self-explanatory, resources on that page may actually detract from the actions you want your visitor to take.
Tips:
Use this section to do some of the following:
- Build trust in your product.
- Show how to assemble the product.
- Explain how it can be used, or how it helps when used in certain ways.
- Show proof that the product helps to take care of tricky problems.
- Open visitor’s eyes to other possible uses than the one they might have had in mind.
For example, to help customers shop for sunglasses, Nordstrom provides a ‘sunglass fit guide’ as well as helpful ‘looks’ the customer can wear with the sunglasses. This not only makes the sunglasses more desirable, it also encourages the customer to buy more.
12. Optimise for SEO
Help customers find you and encourage them to click on your link by paying attention to your meta data.
Tips:
Use this section to do some of the following:
- Include descriptive and compelling meta descriptions for each of your products. If you don’t, Google will create them for you (which can result in less-than-ideal search snippets). These should be designed to persuade visitors to click on your link in the search results.
- Label image files with a relevant file name that uses hyphens e.g. “Blue-chair-large”.
- Use descriptive words to fill in image alt tags so search engines can understand the image. Then it will appear in results when users do a reverse image search.
- Embed any PDFs in a PDF viewer on your site and add a canonical tag in the http header. Then that PDF page will be trackable in analytics and users will be taken to your site when they open the PDF, rather than opening it directly from Google search.
Once you have all the elements in place, watch your stats for patterns. Use these to fine-tune your product pages, for example, by tweaking the design or adding answers to questions that come up frequently. Also update photos and product information as new data becomes available, so your product pages are always interesting, useful and up to date.
The bottom line…
Your product pages are a critically important part of the sales process. They help your products show up in search engines, they create the first impression many visitors have of your site and they convince them to buy (or not). Make sure you’ve optimised them in every way possible, so you maximise the chances of potential customers hitting that Buy button, and handing over their cash.
