Product pages
The four questions that stop a purchase
In a shop, a customer asks. Online they close the tab instead — and nothing in your figures tells you which question it was.
Stand behind a counter for an afternoon and you hear the same four questions. Every trade has its own version, and every good assistant answers them before being asked.
Online, nobody asks. They look, they do not find, and they leave. The purchase does not fail loudly — it simply never happens, and the analytics report a bounce with no reason attached to it.
An unanswered question does not look like an objection. It looks like nothing at all.
That is what makes this expensive. A price that is too high produces a complaint. A missing answer produces silence, and silence is not something anyone puts on a list of problems to fix.
One: how long will this last me?
The single most useful sentence on most product pages, and the one that is almost never there. Sixty capsules is a number. Two months at one a day is an answer.
It applies far beyond supplements. How many washes, how many square metres, how many cups, how many prints. Anything a customer will use up and buy again has a duration, and the customer is calculating it whether or not you help them.
Doing that calculation for them costs one line of text. Making them do it costs some of them entirely.
Two: what does it actually cost?
Not the price. The price per use. This is the question that decides the comparison against a cheaper competitor, and it very often decides it in favour of the more expensive product.
The comparison, as a customer makes it
- 2.00per day — 60 capsules at AED 120
- 3.00per day — 30 capsules at AED 90
- +50%what the cheaper pack really costs
Example figures, but the shape of it is real and it repeats in almost every range we have worked on. The pack that looks expensive on the shelf is regularly the cheaper one to own, and the only thing standing between that fact and the customer is one division nobody has done.
If you sell the larger pack, this sentence is worth more than any discount. If you sell the smaller one, it is worth knowing that your competitor is about to write it.
Three: when will it arrive?
Not the shipping cost, which everybody shows eventually. The date.
“Ships within two to three working days” asks the customer to fetch a calendar. “With you on Thursday” does not. The second one is the same information, already processed, and it belongs above the button rather than in a tab labelled Delivery.
This one has a second effect that is easy to miss: a specific date is a small commitment, and a shop that commits to something looks like a shop that is being run by somebody.
Four: is there a better way to buy this?
Three packs for the price of two and a half. A subscription that saves ten percent. A bundle that includes the thing they were going to search for next anyway.
Most shops have these and hide them one click away, in a tab or further down the page, where they are found by the customers who were going to buy anyway and missed by everyone else.
The offer is not the problem. The position is.
Where the answers belong
All four are useless in an accordion. The rule we work to is simple: if it changes the decision, it goes above the button.
Above the button
Duration, cost per use, delivery date, the better way to buy. Four short lines. Everything a customer needs in order to say yes.
Immediately below
What it is, what is in it, how it is used. The description most shops start with — which is fine, as long as it starts second.
Further down
Specifications, documents, comparisons with the neighbouring product. For the small number of people who read that far, and worth having for them.
Almost every shop has this order the other way around: description first, decision second. Turning it over costs an afternoon per template and is the cheapest change on this page.
Why this is the most copied work we do
We built twenty-five product pages this way for a pharmacy, and within a year we could see other shops in the same field carrying the same four lines. Not our text — the same idea, which is the sincerer compliment.
It spreads because it is not a trick. Nobody has to be persuaded that answering a customer’s question is a good idea. The reason it is rare is that it takes work per product rather than a setting that applies to all of them.
Nobody has to be persuaded that answering a question is a good idea.
Where to start
Not with every product. Take the five that sell most, write the four lines for each, and leave everything else alone for a month. Five products, an afternoon, and a comparison you can actually read afterwards.
If the numbers move, the rest of the range is a known quantity rather than a gamble. If they do not, you have spent an afternoon and learned that the problem is somewhere else — which is worth knowing too, and usually points at how long the page takes to load before it points anywhere else.
What this looks like when it is done properly, with examples, is on our product pages page.
Send us one product page.
Any one. We will write the four lines for it and send them back, so you can see what the page would say instead of reading about it. In writing, and yours to use whether or not you hire us.