5 Ecommerce Product Page Best Practices to Boost Conversions
What makes a great product page so great?
Sometimes ecommerce can feel like throwing darts at the wall, desperately trying to get something to stick. The truth is, you can A/B test until the cows come home, but a whole lot’s been tried and tested before. And while some things never work, there are lots of dependable best practices out there that, once implemented, can completely transform your product traffic.
So, without further ado, here are 5 of the Ocula team’s favourite product page best practices for ecommerce:
Product Page Best Practice #1: Get Your Technical Stuff Right (Even When It's Boring)
It takes a rare person to get excited about metadata, but, for better or for worse, AI and search engines heavily rely on it.
When your product data is clean and well-structured, Google, Bing and other search engines have the best chance of finding and understanding what you're selling.
Similarly, ChatGPT and other AI tools won’t recommend your products to customers if your competitors’ products have better-structured, more relevant product data.
Make sure to implement proper tagging for product attributes like colour, size, material and brand, with consistent naming conventions across your collection. Standardised schemas like Schema.org markup also help keep your dataset consistent, so AI chatbots can reliably extract information and recommend your products to new customers.
Product Page Best Practice #2: Stay True to Your Brand
Inconsistent brand voice is a massive threat to customer trust and loyalty.
As businesses scale, it’s common for overall brand cohesion to start to drift. Where product copy was once hyper-focused, written with a crystal-clear picture of the customer in mind, suddenly that picture starts to fuzz and blur around the edges. One minute you’re marketing to a health-conscious career woman in her 30s… The next, your copy sounds more like it’s targeted at Gen Z university students.
This drift is a problem as common as it is insidious, with an impact that can reverberate across your entire business. Off-brand copy can make once-loyal customers question whether your products are still right for them. Fundamentally, your career woman and your university student don’t think the same way and don’t want the same things: and all of a sudden, your brand doesn’t hit quite so close to home as it used to.
Maintaining your brand voice across every single product page takes work, especially as you grow, but it's one product page best practice that’s definitely worth it. Customers notice when things feel cohesive, and they definitely notice when they don't.
Product Page Best Practice #3: Show Real People Using Your Products
When someone can see how your product actually looks on a real person or in a real home, it bridges the gap between what they're imagining and what they'll actually get.
Stock photos are fine, but they’re not authentic like a customer’s iPhone photo. People trust strangers reviewing stuff on the internet, even when they don’t trust brands. It’s always a good time to invest in UGC, build up reviews, and flex other forms of social proof.
Product Page Best Practice #4: Know Your Platform
Selling on Amazon is nothing like selling on your own website, which, equally, is nothing like getting your products into Superdrug, Boots, or any other retailer. Each platform has its own rules, its own audience, and its own best practice.
A quirky, personality-driven description on your website might fall flat on a retail platform with more features-oriented guidelines. Brands should adjust tone and formatting to fit where they're selling, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. Failure to abide by platform guidelines could even lead to restrictions or cannibalised traffic.
Product Page Best Practice #5: Keep It Simple, Stupid
The best product pages tell you what matters most about a product, right in the title and up front in the description.
Ideally, you should be able to quickly scan the product page and understand exactly what you’re buying and why you should want it. Don’t make shoppers scour a wall of text to find vital sizing, dimension or material information– that’s what bullet points are for.
Make sure to hit the key points – like features, benefits and any use cases – keep them clear, and let people make their decision.
The Bottom Line
Building great product pages comes down to paying attention to the details that actually matter. Make sure search engines and AI tools can find you, keep consistent with your branding, show real social proof, adapt based on the platform you’re selling on, and keep your messaging clear.
Deep breath… Got all that? Writing a great product description can be a lot to juggle, but putting the work in upfront to get it right is worth it in the long term. Hopefully this list should help you get started – but if you need some more concrete examples, check out our deep dive into the best-of-the-best PDPs out there right now.
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