Create compelling product listings in your ecommerce store
When it comes to crafting product listings, how do you create compelling product listings in your e-commerce store?
Make sure that you have the right digital asset management and product information tools to help you create high-quality images and well-written product descriptions. Effectively handling product attributes is another way to ensure that you are creating compelling product listings.
How quality product descriptions can help drive sales
Unique and clear product descriptions are an essential part of a well performing ecommerce website. Marketers have long known the importance of emotive language in selling, so you have to make every word count in your product descriptions. Effective and engaging product descriptions enable you to get into the minds of your potential customer, address their concerns or tug at their heartstrings.
If you sell highly specialised parts, components, or products, it is important to include clear information with the details of what each piece does. Otherwise, there is a real risk of content becoming repetitive across multiple pages and products. The more detailed and rich text you can add to product descriptions, the more likely customers will come across your website through organic search. Include as much technical information as possible within the metadata or within tabs in product listings.
You’ll also want each listing to have clear and specific language and descriptions explaining how to use your products.
Establish your brand and tone of voice
If you are writing many product descriptions, you’ll also want to develop your own style guide that outlines your brand and tone of voice. Using your own tone and writing style will boost engagement and set your pages apart from your competitors.
If you stock a lot of products, it may be tempting to take the easy way out and keep product descriptions quite generalised. But clever, engaging, rich, descriptive text can also help drive sales, by connecting a person to a product on an emotional level. Product listings with no creativity, no emotion and bland words are unlikely to motivate a customer to buy.
Click-through rates have also been proven to drop when descriptions are bland and generic. Search engines also rate popular content, with more engagement, much more highly. Google can assess and recognise content that has had genuine user engagement.
Should I use AI product descriptions?
If you have an extensive product catalogue, it can be tempting to use AI to help you get all of your product descriptions done in an efficient way. There certainly are some benefits in using AI for product descriptions. You may find that AI content generation saves you a bunch of time and makes it easier for you to get a high degree of accuracy in spelling and grammar. AI will produce technically sound and grammatically correct product descriptions for you.
On the other hand, AI generated content can impact search engine ratings and can leave customers uninspired or disinterested. If you do choose to use AI, it is often best done in collaboration with a real human writer. Adding depth, checking for inaccuracies and adding your tone of voice might need to be tasks left for your writers, content editors and marketing gurus.
Search engines will not automatically penalise AI-generated content. Search engines can’t tell, for sure, if a person or AI has written your content. Google is looking for content that is helpful, clear and original. Google has made it clear that AI-generated content will not impact your site, however, it does run assessments of the content on your site. Google is assessing expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E.A.T) on your site. To determine rankings, Google also looks at author information, where it is available, and checks where the website itself is hosted, ensuring that it is authentic.
Digital asset management for product images
High-quality images are another important part of your product listings, and can convey much more than words alone. When customers can access images of your products, they can examine the offering and get a better idea of the product before buying. An effective Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool and approach are essential for the enterprise e-commerce business.
Offering a variety of images on a product listing—with the product in use, in attractive settings, on a model, or in close-up—can all help inform a customer’s decision to buy. Many customers want clear pictures to eliminate concerns about or need for a return.
A DAM tool can help you manage even very large collections and catalogues of images and assets. With an effective DAM system in place, you can apply tags and metadata to images and batches of images so that you can quickly find what you need and upload it to your site. Read more about AI in DAM.
Managing product attributes
Product attributes provide information to your customers which equip them to make informed purchase choices. Customers consider a number of attributes to get a sense of what they might purchase. When shopping online, customers obviously can’t hold, smell, taste or try on your products, so they are looking to get as much information as they can. Attributes can include:
- Brand
- Colour
- Scent/ flavour
- Weight
- Scale and size
- Country of origin information
- Components or ingredients
How to use product attributes effectively
Product attributes form the foundation of compelling product listings. To help ensure efficiency and effective use of product attributes:
- Create product families – through which products with commonalities can be linked and grouped for easy updating and management
- Use an overarching attribute list – identify key attributes and categorise them for thorough coverage
- Enable automation for attribute management – by using a Master Data Management (MDM) or Product Information Management (PIM) tool, you can automate updates and remove the need for tedious manual data entry
How to save time updating product descriptions
To bulk update product descriptions, you can use a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to make the changes more efficiently. First, export the product data into a spreadsheet, then make the necessary updates to the descriptions in the spreadsheet. Finally, import the updated spreadsheet back into your e-commerce platform or product database to apply the changes to the product descriptions in bulk.
Or, employ the services of a Product Information Management (PIM) tool, like Pimcore, which makes handling and updating product description quick and easy.
Product description handling in Pimcore
Pimcore is a Product information (PIM), Master Data Management (MDM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool that can store hundreds of thousands of records, related to products and their variations. Pimcore is a great choice for building a website that showcases your products in an intuitive and engaging way. Investing in Pimcore gives you a powerful resource in your ecommerce tech stack.
Pimcore can handle all of your product data and website pages on one platform. Pimcore is also fully customisable, so that you can modify setup and settings to suit your particular needs. Pimcore has batch editing capabilities, which makes it easier to update a lot of records at once, and dynamic, intelligent attribute customisation options.
Other benefits of Pimcore for product descriptions include:
- Inbuilt flexibility – enabling you to customise product settings, and modify products in response to market trends and changes
- Global formula attributes – that enable you to modify settings across multiple channels, pages, sites and platforms and create consistency throughout your network
- Pricing settings that can be applied across the board – which is beneficial when you want to offer site-wide product discounts, which can be automatically calculated
- Streamlining of product relationships – this feature is handy when you have products that share some sets of attributes, through a process called automated product family creation
- Scalability and powerful management of every very large collections of products – which enables you to manage product listings effectively, even as your catalogue expands
Get in touch to learn more about how Pimcore can help you enhance your online store and bring your product catalogue to life. As a one-stop-shop for all your business needs, we can provide you with end-to-end solutions that will help your business thrive in today's ever-changing digital landscape.
Related Questions
How to manage stock availability in an ecommerce store?
Ensuring you have centralised stock control systems in critical when you operate more than one website or are active on more than one sales platform, such as eBay, or Amazon. Customers need access to accurate information about stock availability. Refunding an order you can’t fill is a problem, not only because you have lost a sale but because of the genuine risk to your reputation.
Ensuring that you have up-to-date product availability details is so important. A PIM/ MDM tool creates a master record to help you manage data syndication. In this process, a master record enables you to send accurate product availability information through various global shopping networks. Read more about automated ecommerce marketing.
Other research suggests that leaving sold-out items on your website can drive sales through the motivator of scarcity. Customers may be more likely to buy when they realise there is a chance the product they are interested in might sell out, as they notice the others in your catalogue marked as sold out.