How to Improve Product Descriptions

If you publish the description your supplier gave you, so does everyone else selling that product. The page has nothing to distinguish it, search engines have no reason to prefer it, and the customer still does not know whether the thing fits their situation.

Rewriting descriptions is unglamorous work with an unusually direct effect on sales.

Answer the questions people actually ask

Before writing anything, list the questions your staff answer on the phone about that product. That list is the description.

For most products it is some version of:

• What is it, in plain words?
• Will it fit / work with what I already have?
• What is in the box?
• How long does it last, and what happens if it breaks?
• Why this one rather than the cheaper one next to it?

Specifications answer none of those on their own. They belong on the page, below the part that does.

A structure that works

1. One sentence saying what it is and who it is for.
2. Three to five lines on what it does well, in the customer’s terms.
3. The specifications, complete and accurate, as a list.
4. What is included, explicitly.
5. The practical detail — delivery, warranty, compatibility.

This structure works on your own store and on marketplaces, where the reader scans rather than reads.

Write for the words customers use

“Modular luminaire system” is what the manufacturer calls it. “Ceiling light for an office” is what the customer types. Use theirs in the title and the first sentence; the manufacturer’s term can appear in the specifications, where the specialist who wants it will look.

Doing it at volume

Four hundred products is not a writing project you can do by hand in a week.

• AI product descriptions — €100, drafted from your product data, then reviewed
• Product description writing — €2 per product, written properly
• Marketplace product description — €2 per product, to that platform’s rules
• Description translation — €1 per product

The practical approach for a large catalog: AI drafts everything, a person reviews and corrects the top-selling twenty per cent carefully and the rest quickly. The review step is what stops an invented feature reaching a customer.

Do not forget the images

A description competes with the photograph for attention and usually loses. Clean studio photos (€10 per product) and image editing to marketplace rules (€2 per product) change conversion more than the adjectives do.

How to know it worked

Watch two numbers per product: how many people reach the page, and how many of them buy. A better description usually moves the second one within weeks. If the first one is near zero, the description is not your problem — visibility is.