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Creating eCommerce Product Pages

eCommerce Product page

Knowing what to put on your eCommerce product pages is crucial for sales, customer retention and SEO. Below is the information you need to add:

Product page title

This is the name you give to your eCommerce product page. Your title should be maximized for SEO. You can have more than one title on your page by separating it with a dash or vertical line.

For example:

Blue Silk Shirt | Designer Shirts for Men

Or

Blue Silk Shirt – Designer Shirts for Men

Here, you have created two keyword search terms, doubling the chances of your product being found by a potential consumer.

Product Name

This will be the manufacturer product name, e.g. “Silk Print Dress in Green”.

URL SEO search engine friendly names

For search engines to crawl your website effectively, you will need to use text. You do not need to have stop words in your URL (stop words are the simple words used to connect a sentence such as “and”, “in”, “how”, and “the”). Your content management system (CMS) will automatically generate a search engine friendly name when you add the product title and will even omit the stop words for you. Remember to include your keyword(s) and to avoid long search engine friendly names.

An example of a good search engine friendly product name is:

brett-mann-silk-sweater-large

This is because it is human-readable.

An example of a bad search engine friendly name would be:

btt-n-ma-142256-sk-12452

Do not use shorthand or cryptic code that only you understand. Do not include SKUs, barcode numbers and currency symbols.

Short description

Not all shopping carts have this section. If you have it, write a caption to draw your website visitors’ attention e.g. “Limited Offer. Buy one get one free!”

Full description

Write a unique description and make it sound as natural as possible. You can repeat keyword phrases three or four times – max – in your product information page, inclusive of your meta title, short description, image names, alt descriptions, headlines, and captions. This means that you should not repeat the keyword phrase four times in your full description, if you have included it in the product name, meta title, and your image alt description. This is known as “keyword stuffing” which will devalue your website.

Here is a description for a product called “Portable Pet Pen”, with an average character count of 600:

Portable Pet Pen is ideal for small dogs and cats.

This outdoor animal pen will protect them from the outside environment. It has a zipper at the front for easy access. It can be neatly compacted into a bag for travel and storage. Store it away in your cupboard. Pack it in your car.

The portable animal pen has an open top design so that you can interact with your pet at regular intervals. It contains storage pouches for your pet’s things. It comes fitted with a strong steel frame and pop up mechanism, which makes it easy to put up or down.

The Portable Pet Pen also has a removable fleece-pad and an easy to clean waterproof liner.

Notice that I have only used the keyword phrase “Portable Pet Pen” twice in the description. However, I have also used the keyword variants, “Portable Animal Pen” and “Outdoor Animal Pen”.

Product page meta description

The meta description should be the first 255-300 characters of your full description. Note that the keyword you want to rank for should be in the first paragraph of your full description. Use a call-to-action to prompt users to click when they see it in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Product variants

You will use product variants to distinguish between roughly identical items which may vary in color, size, weight, and dimension.

Adding product attributes

Attributes are characteristics specific to your product. Set up attributes to save time repeating the same information throughout your site. Your product attributes may include size, color, ingredients, file size (for downloadable products), etc.

Your specification attributes will show on your product page.

For example, you may have a size attribute for sweaters named “Small”. You may have more than one size specification for “Small” because sizes vary between different manufacturers.

For example, below is a list of size attributes for small t-shirts made by two different manufacturers:

Chest: 49 cm (19.3 inches) Neck: 30.7 cm (12.1 inches)

Chest: 50 cm (13.3 inches) Neck: 31.7 cm (13.1 inches)

Do not forget to list your size attributes in both cm and inches.

A checkout attribute may be gift wrapping or a choice of delivery service, e.g. standard, or next day delivery.

Number of items to display on a product page

There is nothing wrong with allowing your customers to choose the number of products displayed. The temptation, however, is to restrict the number of products shown, if you do not have many products in a category. I would not recommend doing this. Potential customers do not want to trawl through product page after product page on your website, if they can help it. They will get fed up and leave if you have twenty pages of products in one category, but only display four of them at a time. Make things easy for your customers by displaying the maximum number of products per page that your content management system (CMS) allows, which may be anything from 12 to 16 products at a time.

Order displays

I would utilize the order displays to list your categories and attributes in alphabetical or logical order. Correct order displays make it easier for your visitors to find their way around your website.

If you have added all your attributes in numerical order to a product and have missed one out, or simply want to add an additional one, use negative numbers to reorder the display.

For example, I forgot to add the attribute for “Small” to this item. To make it appear at the top of my page, I have used a negative number: -1.  Also, note that I have listed the sizes in a logical order, starting with the smallest first.

Attribute           Size   Order Display
Extra Small 0-2  0
Small                  4-6           -1
Medium            8-10            1
Large                 12-14          2
Extra Large        163

Weights and measurements

There are two groups of unit systems: Metric (inches, pounds and ounces) and Imperial (centimeters and kilograms). Your CMS will have a default setting for the weight and dimensions to display to your customers. In the US, the imperial system is favored; in Europe, it is the metric system. If in doubt, stick with the default settings.