An ecommerce retailer’s product detail page is arguably one of the most important pages on your site. In an article for Shopify, Rosara Joseph, content strategist at VentureWeb explained, “The paramount goal for your product pages should be to build user confidence by providing all the information necessary for a purchasing decision and making the process as intuitive and straightforward as possible.”
Online shoppers have become savvy and require certain non-negotiable pieces of information in a product detail page. Without said information, you’ll likely see your bounce rates increase with every new visit. What information must all ecommerce stores include?
- Call-to-action (CTA) button
- Product photos
- Copy, including keywords
- Social proof
Without these four elements, you risk losing sales. So, how do you optimize your product detail page to ensure you not only include these four elements, but make them work for you?
1. Call-to-action (CTA) buttons
Starting with the end because oftentimes, a CTA button has a big burden to bear on a product detail page. When the customer is ready to hit that button, it needs to be as follows:
- A clickable button (not hyperlinked text)
- Clear, understandable, and specific language (in the first person)
- Placed in a logical spot on the page, usually next to the previous action item
The best part about CTA buttons is the ease of A/B testing them. If you’re unsure of the location, the wording, the colors, etc, it’s easy to test these against each other. But remember, only test one aspect at a time to get a clear sense of which is performing better.
2. Photos for your product detail page
When you are selling products online, photos are possibly one of the most important aspects required on your product detail page. Videos are great too, and gaining in importance, but if all you have are photos, that’s enough to get started.
Having said that, it’s important to have more than one, high-quality image of each product. For instance, an analysis of top 25 brands shows an average of eight product photos for clothing items specifically. So when planning product photoshoots, keep that in mind.
However, with many large image files, your site’s speed can slow down by seconds ‒ which in the ecommerce world is an eternity to visitors. In fact, a 2018 Google report shows “53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.”
Think with Google Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2018.
The solution is to reduce the image file size without losing the quality of the resolution. If you don’t have an in-house designer who can do this for you in Photoshop, there are several online apps that are available, such as TinyJPG (or TinyPNG).
