7 Tips for Writing Great Product Descriptions

Most of us will probably agree that great product descriptions help sell products. If you’re tempted to take a shortcut and just use the manufacturer’s descriptions, try these tips instead:

1. Strive for a consistent tone and wording choices that match your site’s image (formal, quirky, technical, youthful, modern – it all depends). It’s highly unlikely that the manufacturer’s description would be ideal for your site. Also, keep in the mind that copy that works perfectly for one eCommerce site might be a disaster for a different eCommerce site.
2. Know why your customer wants the product. If you understand what your customer is looking for, you can anticipate his or her questions, and include the information you know the customer is looking for.
3. Write descriptions that convince the customer to buy your product even without being able to see, touch, smell, or taste it. Be descriptive! But also make sure that you showcase the product’s benefits, usefulness, and all-around excellence.
4. The type of information you include should emphasize the most important features of the product. Even more crucial, the description should focus on whatever it is that would lead a customer to buy your product rather than a competitor’s product.
   1. For example, a customer who is shopping for a briefcase in which to carry a large laptop needs to know the exact dimensions of the briefcase. So you might want to emphasize the dimensions and any other features that make it ideal for carrying a laptop.
   2. Likewise, a customer shopping for chocolates might be most engaged by a decadent-sounding description of how the chocolates taste. So you might want to list the flavors, using imaginative, lush, rich adjectives.
5. Use both paragraphs and bullet points: paragraphs to describe the product, and bullet points to highlight key product details or benefits.
6. Avoid jargons, slang, and clichés, unless it’s language that your customers clearly understand and expect you to use. For example, if you’re selling rock-climbing equipment, it would be a mistake not to use rock climbers’ terminology.
7. Break the rules if that’s what your customers respond to.

Here are a couple examples of product descriptions that might work well for different types of products:

Fruit Preserves

Packed with beautiful, perfectly-ripened fruit, and sweetened with just the right amount of pure cane sugar, our fruit preserves capture the essence of summer fruit in a jar. They taste great in yogurt, served over ice cream, spread on toast or scones, and even spooned straight from the jar.

• Hand-picked fruit
• Hand-made, in small batches
• All organic
• No preservatives (so please refrigerate after opening)

Flirty Summer Dress

The best summer dress in our catalog: flirty and chic, in a beautiful retro design that flatters every body type.

With a shaped bodice and flaring skirt. Perfect for a summer afternoon tea, a promenade on the boardwalk, or a rendezvous in the rose garden.

• Classic navy or cerulean blue
• Pure, soft cotton
• Machine washable

Bonus tip: Your product descriptions can do a lot for your SEO performance, as they’re a great place to include keywords your customers may be searching for. If you’re using Amazon Webstore, you can set specific keywords to improve search results; putting those same keywords in the descriptions as well can help customers find your products even better.

Image credit: tnarik, “saturated writing” January 23, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

F-Commerce: The Real Deal, or Last Year’s Paperless Office?

Shanley Wright is the Marketing Manager for ShopTab, a popular Facebook Store application.  ShopTab is a Solution Provider for Amazon Webstore.

Beginning in 2011, Social Commerce and Facebook Store applications were the hot topics for every social marketing research study or E-commerce industry conference.  Twelve months later we’re hearing about the recent shuttering of a few large brand Facebook shops.  What is the future of social selling—is it an incremental channel opportunity, or a waste of time?

Our perspective is that the recent news is the typical bump in the road when technology delivery gets ahead of marketing strategy.   Didn’t we experience the same situation with eCommerce at the turn of the century?  According to Forrester, eCommerce will make up over $200 billion of revenues in the U.S in 2012—over 10% of all purchases (excluding groceries). I think we would all agree we’ve moved past the early road bumps and naysayers of online commerce.  It’s likely that the recent efforts by the industry vendors and their associated success stories will bear out the projections that Social Commerce will make up 10 to 20% of E-Commerce revenues.

So what does this mean for your business?  Let’s be clear—simply putting up a Facebook store and expecting immediate and significant revenues likely won’t work.   Retailers that have seen good success are tapping into the “social” elements of networks like Facebook and turning them in to opportunities to promote their existing products, launch new offerings and expand their base of clients.  And yes, they are getting hard dollar return on their social marketing efforts by selling products!  The magic isn’t in the Facebook store application; it is in the marketing plan and tactics that drives the users to know about your products, promotions and packaging that have been uniquely defined for their fans and followers.

Putting together a social marketing plans and following Facebook shop best practices is critical. Once those are in place, it is time to focus on the key tactics that will help you to meet your social commerce goals.  For example:

• Create a daily or weekly “deal” that is only available in Facebook, pin it to the top of your timeline
• Ask your users to post a picture with your product, provide a giveaway for the best post
• Give out a special coupon code to your Facebook users inside of your store or give them access to a printable coupon for in-store purchases
• Launch a product and make it available for a period of time only in Facebook

Imagine the impact of these tactics as they are shared with the friends of your fans and followers.

Social commerce can be the real deal for retailers that are committed to their social marketing plans. What do you think is the future of social commerce? Let us know in the comments!

Facebook for eCommerce: It’s About Customer Retention, Not Acquisition

Any social media pro can tell you that every business owner asks them the same question: “How can I get more Facebook fans?”

There are lots of answers. Post on your wall more often, or less often, or support your page with ads (hold on to that last thought). But from where I sit, many people running Facebook Pages are missing an easy answer:

The surest way to get more Facebook fans may be to get more customers.

It seems backward, right? Plenty of businesses are after more fans assuming they can turn them into new customers. What these enthusiastic business owners could be missing, though, is that Facebook is at its heart a retention and a loyalty platform—not an acquisition tool.

The harsh truth is that unless you’re Taylor Swift or MTV, it’s unlikely that huge numbers of people will find your Page. You’re another grain of sand on the vast beaches of Facebook—which now has between 35-40 million Pages—and unless you’re investing in ads there’s probably only one group that’s going to find your Page, and then care enough to Like it: Your customers. Your loyal, wonderful customers.

The numbers back it up, too. DDB’s 2010 social media survey found that, on average, 84% of a Page’s fans are existing customers. Trying to convert all your fans into customers might thus be a waste of your time (and theirs, too).

But that problem is just an opportunity to refocus your efforts. Instead of focusing on sales messages, try using Facebook the same way you run an email campaign. Post about new products. Get feedback from your most dedicated advocates about what features they’re looking for. Make your Facebook Page a focus group for everything about your brand, and you just might get more value than if you drum up a few thousand fans who never intend to buy from you.

The best candidates to buy from your store are likely those who have bought before—and even better are those who also decided they like you enough to, well, Like you. Using social media for retention lets you focus on generating repeat buys. For many businesses, a majority of sales (sometimes as much as 80%) come from repeat customers, and yet this group tends to be overlooked. It’s true in theory that repeat customers are cheaper to serve than new customers; it’s also true in real life.

In fact, your best bet for acquiring new customers via Facebook may be to post content that these loyal customers share with their friends—thus mobilizing your customers/fans as a team of brand advocates.

So before you go investing your whole marketing budget in Facebook ads to get new fans, consider reaching out to your customers first. Let them be the core of your Facebook fan base. Then decide if you have enough to offer to non-customers (good content from a blog, for example) to even try to get them on board. You might be happier talking to just your loyal, happy buyers and focusing on bringing them back to your store.

And while you’re at it, you should go Like Amazon Webstore on Facebook. We, uh, need more fans.

Image credit: Ed Yourdon, “Catching up on e-mail…” July 29, 2008 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Consumers Spending More Online in 2012? Depends Who You Ask

The up-and-down economy in recent years has affected different groups in different ways. That couldn’t be more clear than in a recent PriceGrabber survey (as reported by Internet Retailer), in which 28% of surveyed shoppers plan to spend less online this year, 21% plan to spend more, and 51% plan to spend the same amount.

The result is a pretty static bell curve of spending—the top quarter will spend more, the bottom quarter will spend less, and the middle will stay the same. It seems to reflect consumer uncertainty about the coming year; it also may include some negative halo effect as shoppers are still feeling the pinch from their holiday spending. The survey was conducted in January and February of this year, with 933 online shoppers.

The survey lends a few particular insights worth noting:

• It’s the discounts: The report indicates that those who plan to spend more online this year do so because they expect better discounts online. That’s a nugget worth storing away—while we all strive to deliver better experiences online, many shoppers are still simply seeking price advantages. 36% of respondents who said they’ll spend more in 2012 will do so because of discounts; 46% of all respondents plan to use daily deals more this year.
• It’s a gas: Gas prices are responsible for two different shifts. It was reported last year that rising gas prices are driving consumers to shop online to minimize extra driving, but the new survey suggests that spendy gas is also cutting into discretionary income. 40% of respondents that said they will spend less this year blame rising prices for gas, food, and other necessities.
• It’s all online: Regardless of whether spending goes up or not, the survey indicates that the average shopper will make 53% of their purchases online (more than half!) as opposed to 42% in physical stores. Surprisingly low is shopping from mobile devices, which accounts for only the remaining 5%.

The fact that the survey doesn’t point to a reliable future makes planning difficult for eCommerce store owners in the short-term, but doesn’t change the long-range outlook. Time Magazine suggests that when Internet prices are combined with free shipping, shoppers have even less reason to choose brick and mortar.

Ultimately, shopping continues to migrate online. And hopefully that’s not news to anyone.

Image credit: CarlosVanVegas, “Mexico City – Museum of Anthropology” April 8, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Driving Traffic to Your Online Store: Short-Term vs. Long-Term Solutions

It’s old news that driving traffic is at the top of the priority list for eCommerce professionals. It doesn’t matter if you’re driving hundreds of thousands of visitors or laser-targeting only the most relevant traffic—if nobody’s visiting your site you’re not selling anything, at least not in that channel.

Similarly, strategies for driving traffic come as varied as the people executing them. There’s no one-size-fits-all. In deciding where to put your time and money it can help to look at the different types of traffic drivers and how they fit with your business strategy. I’m talking about short-term vs. long-term traffic drivers.

Driving Short-Term eCommerce Traffic

It’s easy to think that “short-term” traffic would be inferior to “long-term” traffic, but the term isn’t pejorative at all. Short-term traffic drivers have potential to drive large amounts of traffic, but are so called because they’re generally backed by an ad spend and the traffic can be expected to drop off when the spending stops. The advantages and disadvantages are clear: you can get lots of traffic quickly, but it goes as quickly as it comes.

These are some common short-term traffic drivers for eCommerce sites:

• Comparison shopping engines. Having your products listed (and listed well) in comparison shopping aggregators like Amazon Product Ads, Google Product Search, Bing Shopping, and TheFind can drive high-quality traffic.
• Affiliate networks. If you’re having trouble bringing in traffic, consider having other people do it for you. Using affiliate networks like Link Share, Share a Sale, and Commission Junction, you can have third parties promoting your products on their sites—and you pay a commission for sales that they generate. These networks are available to any seller and Amazon Webstore makes integration easy.
• Online Advertising. You knew it was coming, right? There may not be a faster way to drive traffic now than to advertise online. You’ve got all sorts of options at your fingertips:
  • Display advertising – There’s no denying that the big ad networks can bring you visitors. You can spend a lifetime optimizing your campaigns, but people do it because it works.
  • Search Engine Marketing (a.k.a SEM) – SEM is a special brand of advertising and requires you to dive deep into keywords and keyword phrases. With paid search, you get well-qualified traffic because you capture people’s attention as they’re actively searching online.
  • Social media advertising – Ads on Facebook are a volume operation. They may not be the most impressive ad units, but the clicks are cheap enough to make it worth it. Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn have been improving their offerings as well.

Driving Long-Term eCommerce Traffic

Long-term traffic, on the other hand, is the traffic that comes on its own. It can be a slow grind to get these going, but they have the advantage of being free (generally) and driving more organic traffic.

Some popular long-term traffic drivers:

• Search Engine Optimization (a.k.a. SEO). This discussion really begins and ends with SEO. It can take a long time, be a painstaking effort, and require continual adaptation to changing algorithms, but it’s also some of the most reliable traffic you can get. Putting in the time almost always pays off.
• Email. Email can be a short-term driver if you’re blasting out to a lot of people, but careful curating and maintenance of an email list can make sure that your best customers are receiving relevant offers and coming back on a regular basis.
• Social media. Yep, this is where social media belongs. As businesses continue to flock to Facebook and Twitter, it has become extremely unlikely that customers will find you by chance (unless you’re doing something really compelling). Instead, social media is a way to build a base of fans and continually reach out to them over time… as long as you keep posting, you can keep them coming back.

Ultimately? Short-term traffic can be expensive, but it can also happen now. Long-term traffic is delayed gratification that requires building a based but then benefitting from it later. Many sites will need both, but the choice should be based on your business’s strategy, budget and customer. Do you do flash sales, or big events? You’ll need short-term traffic to support that. Do you opt for brand-building and consistent pricing? While short-term will help, long-term traffic is what will build your business.

Which type of traffic is a better fit for your business? Are you doing one or the other, or both?

WEBINAR: Introduction to Amazon Webstore

This week we’ve focused on how to get started with the Amazon Webstore interface. Check out this recorded webinar below (or at the Webstore Resources page) for tips from the Webstore team on how to get started, plus a helpful look at how the interface operates in real life. It’s 26 minutes well spent.

In Online Customer Service, Less is Much Much More

jon smith, “in the bank” November 6, 2010 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s no wonder that bad customer service offline is driving people to shop online.

For example, I went to the bank the other day. I’m a loyal customer at this bank, but my visit there made me realize that my bank does way, way too much customer service.

Let me clarify.

When I go to the bank, it’s always during my lunch hour. I intend to spend as few seconds as possible in the bank, and yet the bank’s efforts at customer service all keep me there longer. The chatty teller does not make my stay better; he makes it longer. And on this particular visit, the greeter asked me if I’d like a bottle of water or a cup of coffee—apparently unaware that I have no plans to stay at the bank long enough that I will require a beverage.

The best customer service that can be provided online, then, is to grease the buyer’s experience so that they can make their transaction as quickly as possible. In eCommerce, it’s likely that buyers have used sources other than your site to make their buying decision—and after that your checkout process only has the power to dissuade users from buying, not to persuade them to buy. The less you get in their way, the better.

Consider this elegant solution to my bank problem—one bank has introduced a system where you can deposit a check right from your couch by taking a photo of it with your phone.

As business owners and eCommerce professionals, we should get out of our customers’ way. Here are a few things that have helped businesses using Amazon Webstore:

• Make sure customers know their way back. If customers research a product somewhere else, make sure they know where to find you to buy it. That may be through a memorable brand experience while visiting your site, top rankings in search engines, or a timely email campaign.
• Keep your site simple and clear. Don’t clutter things up. You may offer content to educate visitors on your products and your brand, but don’t let it get in the way. Make sure that buying is always one obvious click away.
• Give buyers multiple checkout options. Let customers use a branded checkout, like Checkout by Amazon, to make their purchase. You’ll gain credibility by associating with a big brand, and the technology is reliable.

What have you done to simplify your buying process and make it easier for customers? Have you seen success because of it? Leave your experiences in the comments below.

And for me? I’m changing to a bank that doesn’t make me leave my couch.

SERPing for profits

In our personal lives, ego searching is the term for checking your name in Google or other search engines.  It can be productive fun.  Looking yourself up gives you an idea what friends or business associates will see when they search your name (and gives you time to come up with plausible stories for any other items they may unearth!)  It is like looking in the mirror to make sure you look presentable.

When we shift to our business lives, ego searching becomes the much more useful and professional sounding SERP – search engine results position.  The idea is the same: find out what people see when they search for you.  More importantly, SERP lets you see where your business ranks when buyers search for what you are selling.

Continue reading »

Hot pie and more business

When it comes to good business ideas, simple and elegant beats complicated every time.

Take this great post from Bob Phibbs.  I am very fond of vivid examples and how they get into your head.  I guarantee when you are done reading this post, you will be thinking of pie.

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Fresh ideas to build eCommerce traffic

From the fine minds at Practical eCommerce come some great ideas on how to use New-Media (it’s okay to call it social media and drop the hyphen – really!) to boost your eCommerce business.  You can find the article here.

We’ve seen several of these ideas before, but I haven’t seen the idea of turning your site into a game before.  That could be a lot of fun.

What it comes down to is making your site a worthwhile repeat destination.  Continue reading »