The product page is one of the most important parts of your online store. If it’s good you will sell more. If it sucks, customers will leave your website early looking for the information theey need somewhere else.

Ok, so you have a great homepage and optimized the checkout process for optimal performance? Then it’s about time to have a closer look at your product page as well. Don’t forget that probably a large number of visitors will never see your homepage, because they are landing from the search engines. Very often visitors are even landing on your product page immediately, for instance when traffic is brought by a product comparison website. So it better be good! Let’s see what we can learn from some of the major online stores. What is already good and what can be improved?

1. Product images
Yes, this is a no-brainer, but too often we still see images of a lower quality or simply just one image per product. Make as much as you can, and make them available in high quality! A good example is heels.com, where there are multiple images per product and a short video simply demonstrating the shoe by a model.

2. Kiss. Keep it simple
I don’t know how much you hate it when a product page is complicated as I do, but why not simply stick to what we all know and are familiar with? The product page is not the right place to use experimental lay-outs! Simply put your images on the left, the description, price and button on the right. Preferably put the ‘Add to cart’ button as close as possible to the price field. These are simple prove techniques that you can take advantage of as well. Oh and definitely make sure that price and ‘Add to cart’ button are not positioned ‘below the fold’.

3. Speed it up
The performance of your website is getting more and more important. Product pages might sometimes become slow because of the large number of images that need to be loaded. Also checking for stock availability in colours and sizes might slow down your page way too much. Also here, keep it simple and use the functionality that your e-commerce software is offering. We sometimes see complex calculations of stock availabilty affecting the load times of the product page. Another possible performance killer are the Facebook like, Google plus one and other social media buttons. We don’t say that you shouldn’t use this, but make sure that you know what things do and do not slow down your product page.

4. Think about your product content!
This should be clear for everybody, but in practice it isn’t. There are lots and lots of online stores using exactly the same descriptions as their competitors! And where search engines are looking for unique content that’s not a wise decision. Besides, writing your own descriptions, you should offer your visitors a clear overview: a short introduction to the product and an easy possibility to read more about its features and specifications. Ikea is doing a good job offering a read more link for instance. Besides that the description is short and clear.

5. The call to action
The example of Ikea above is missing an important thing when we’re looking at conversion: the call to action isn’t clear enough. Ok, there is a blue button, but it’s rather small and too far away from the product price. The button hardly receives any attention if your eyes are scanning the page (try it ). Compared to Ikea the great website of Asos.com is offering something better. Can’t miss that button.

6. It’s all about trust
Before even thinking about putting something in the basket, your visitor must have a certain level of trust. A visitor that doesn’t trust what he/she sees will never turn into a customer. How to influence the level of trust on the product page? There are multiple possibilities! Just a few to get you started:

• Product reviews. Better than product ratings. And when using product ratings then also show the number of people that voted.
• Best seller? Show it!
• What’s also working is showing the number of people that liked the product (Facebook) or tweeted about it.
• Received any awards or are you a member of a consumer/quality organisation? Don’t forget to mention that somewhere clearly in the header, footer or sidebar.

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