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)