How to structure a product page to increase customer retention?
8% of websites don’t actually have a product page highlighting features, according to the Baymard Institute. This leads to an obvious missed opportunity when trying to turn a prospect into a customer because you simply haven’t given the product its due diligence!
And how does this data synchronisation lead to better user experience?
Table of Contents
1. DESIGNING PAGES FOR PRODUCT STRUCTURES
– Featuring a product on your ecommerce website and highlighting some of its features is a sure-fire way to advertise the product to the customer correctly. It’s great that this desk fan has a nice picture but showing that it has 5 different settings could be the difference between buying it and not buying it.
– In accompaniment with traditional images, bullets-lists and informative text paragraphs, feature highlights are a way that can strongly suggest the user take a moment to slow down and look at the details more closely.
– Include a video amongst the stock images and you’ll likely find that the user will be even more engaged in the product offering and will make the decision far easier.
- FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS: Feature highlights can showcase an item’s unique selling points (USPs) and should be used wherever possible. If you’re selling a product like a smartphone, people will want to know how good the camera is, probably what colours it comes in, how big the screen is, and how much RAM the phone has.
Tip: Highlight some things that the majority of people will glance at quickly before you start getting into the nitty-gritty of all the details such as the technical specifications and the processor speed. More information can obviously follow in a “Read More” section.
- ICONS: Should your ecommerce site focus on a particular type of product, you could also use well-placed icons to represent certain qualities that you’re trying to display. You see this quite often with televisions and icons such as “UHD” or “4K”.
- TEXT BLOCKS: Having well-written text blocks in your product description, whether long-winded or not, will help with your on-page search engine optimisation. As long as the text is grammatically correct, interesting to read and not stuffed to the brim with keywords and keyword phrases, it never hurts. Have an opening paragraph or two, outlining the product, but keep the rest of that information for later, and allow the user to access it when they’d like to. People don’t necessarily want to read through all of it though. When users have too much, they aren’t able to consume it productively, so they end of speed-reading and skimming through the content, which can lead to potentially reducing traction, not engaging the user, and upsets later on in the customer journey.
- TO BULLET OR NOT TO BULLET: A smart way to reduce text clutter and focus on product features without using highlighting is to create a bullet-point list for a product. This plain block of information can have short, punchy sentences that will give the most pertinent information to the user. These are designed to be consumed quickly and even skimmed.Tip: The challenge with bullet lists is that they take up some prime real estate on the page itself. So, if you have a list of bullets, depending on how your page is structured, it could push more vital, easily consumable information further down the page.
- THE FLOW OF THE PRODUCTION DESCRIPTION
- An image illustrating the feature;
- Its benefit (to draw attention);
- A short headline (to confirm what the image suggests);
- One paragraph of text explaining the feature.
2. DATA SYNCHRONISATION
Not having properly synchronised data that will interlink different types of products across the platform can lead to:
- The lack of coherency when browsing products on an e-commerce site;
- The lack of connectivity in product variations.
Either way, it will affect user engagement and experience.
Users will often do comparative purchasing, and not having this type of data available is a big cause of abandoning a product or site. E.g. if you are looking at a particular robot vacuum, you should want to see other similar robot vacuums in the same field. Some of the more expensive with greater features, but also others that are cheaper and more “budget” models with similarities.
A further, 28% of the major ecommerce sites out there simply fail at this practice, according to The Baymard Research. In this practice, you’ll need to ensure that the core product information permeates all similar products, rather than just comparing like for like products. If you’re in the ecommerce market as a shoe store, when people look at trainers, you’re unlikely to suggest beach sandals to them.
If a customer is browsing soccer cleats, then your site should be showing different kinds of shoes that can be used for soccer, or at the very least, sports. Marrying the intent of the buyer with the selection of the products is what will ultimately win at the end of the day:
- Interlink the product variations and make comparisons between the most likely ones. It can also be seen as a soft-form of product recommendation;
- Comparing products in a side-by-side format can show customers the differences at a glance and highlight common features between the different products;
- Represent the product visually with images and videos, usually 2-4 variation-specific ones, with different angles.
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