Product cards: How to use them to increase conversion in your online shop

Getting thousands of visits would be useless if what visitors find does not convince them. A thousand visitors that make a purchase are worth more than a million that do not.

Do you know what the key factors to converting those visitors into sales are?

Descriptions or product cards.

But wait!

Uploading the generic product card from the manufacturer isn’t enough. You must differentiate yourself.

Here we will explain how you should write them step by step so your customers will fall in love with your products.  But not just that, your cards will also help your products get a higher positioning in Google searches.

Grab a pen and paper and get ready to write, or better yet, “describe” your product cards. 😉

👉 What is a product card and why is it so important?

Imagine that you shopping in a physical shop. An item grabs your attention and you stop to look at it in more detail. After a few seconds, you are able to get an idea of its features: its size, weight, colors, etc.

On the other hand, an online sale doesn’t give you that possibility.

Combatting the “solitude” of the eCommerce shopper is our trump card that transmits all of the information and details that we want—the product card.

Clear so far, right?

So then why should optimizing your product cards be one of your obsessions?

It’s always said that content is king, but that conversion is queen.

No matter how much work or how many resources you put into your eCommerce, if you don’t work on optimizing conversion, and therefore your product cards, it will never take off and reach its full potential.

A vague card without details is capable of ruining even the best of products; on the contrary, a clear explanation that is both concise and well thought out can help a product beat out the competition.

Now, the thing is… A vague and unspecified product listing will result in:

• Users not understanding whether the product will meet their expectations and, because of it, deciding not to buy it.
• Maybe they would buy it, but would eventually return it because it is not what they expected.

A clear, concise and insightful explanation can avoid such inconvenience and skyrocket a product against competitors.

Have you gotten an idea of their importance yet?

Well, then let’s take a look at what they need to include. 😉

👉 What is the ideal format for a product card?

Use this list as a checklist, but don’t obsess over any point in particular. Success lies in the sum of many small things.

In the end, like with everything in life, common sense rules—an excessively overloaded card will have the same negative affect as the opposite.

✅ Name or title

This doesn’t appear to need much explanation, but it’s not unfounded. You have to be careful with the name for several reasons:

• It’s the first thing the user sees.
• Using similar names could be harmful to your SEO (we’ll talk more about this later).
• It should be short, but 100% descriptive to attract clicks.
• It’s what appears on the categories pages, product detail page, and on the shop page.

Furthermore, many CMSs use these titles as the H1 Meta tag, making it incredibly importance with respect to SEO if we want to position the URL.

✅ Short description

The basic details and main reasons to purchase it told in just a few words.

It’s common to use lists or bullet points to make this part easier to read. If your product includes free shipping, this is a good place to point that out in addition to its delivery time.

Don’t get caught up here by putting text that nobody is going to read.

The goal of this short description is that upon knowing the essential details, the user continues reading the long description or viewing its photos.

For example, one of our clients (ITS —a hardware store for the construction sector) includes a brief description of the product on every product card.

For this particular electric drill, they have decided to feature its strong traits on a list:

• Its user-friendliness and ergonomic design.
• Its power or torque.
• Its improved performance.

By doing this, they try to catch users’ attention and have them keep on reading.

Which takes us to our next subject.

TIP

Don’t hide shipping costs or fees—that will only make many clients abandon their cards when they see the added cost.

If you want to see other strategies to minimize that, take a look at this post about improving your abandoned shopping cart rate.

✅ Long description

If the short version isn’t enough to convert, we move on to our next weapon in the arsenal—the long description.

Send in the infantry!

Before we were limited to just a few points in a list, while here we can expand much more. And, furthermore, we’ll do it by using a copywriting strategy (persuasive writing). Even without being a professional writer, classic and easy to apply structures like PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solve) or the 4Ps (Problem, Promise, Proof, Proposal) can work like magic on a product’s long description.

If you have noticed, based on opinions or reviews from clients, that one of your products has a negative feature, don’t run from it. If there is some obvious obstacle to users buying your product, don’t deny it. Users already know. Work on being natural and using reason, not passing the buck. 

All products have their pros and cons. A description should boast about the positive parts and use that to overcome the negative aspects… but without avoiding them.

A typical example is the price barrier with high-quality products.

A good description will talk about the implicit benefits of the high price:

• Durability
• Resistance
• Quality
• And more

And it does that until the mental block regarding its price loses importance compared to the advantages.

The reality is that it’s easier said than done. If you’ve written your own product cards, you probably already know the difficulties of writing to sell.

That’s why they are so important and why it’s so necessary to dedicate some time to them.

For you to have a more concrete idea, let’s have a look at this example:

FitnessDigital (another Doofinder’s clients) specializes on tech products for the fitness sector.

Because they sell products at medium-high prices, their product cards are neatly crafted and they include detailed descriptions with good copywriting.

For example, have a look at this multisport watch’s product card.

On it, you’ll find all the benefits it can offer the customer.

• It’s ideal for people who love to take on challenges because it tracks results, performance, etc. Therefore, it helps users enhance their training and break personal records.
• Besides, it contains specific settings for over 130 sports.
• It has a smart and modern design, so users can also wear it when they’re not training.

This is all presented with the aid of photos and videos. But let’s see that below.

✅ Images and videos

So far we’ve only talked about text, but the power of images is undeniable. Photos, along with the short description, make up the bare minimum duo that you absolutely must optimize on a product card.

More quality photos always means improving the buying experience.

Just think that images help us to give the user the sensation of seeing and touching a product as if they were in a physical shop. That’s why we should always use photos of the product being used to show how it would be to have the product.

And, of course, a good video also helps.

For example, home decor store Hannun’s  has high definition photos that display the product surrounded by decoration. That way, users can see what it’d look like in their homes.

Besides, they also include a video showcasing the product

.

But be careful because there can also be some limitations, especially regarding size. Dozens of high-quality images will slow down your page too much, so you should, again, find the right balance between quality and file size while making sure you still show all the details of the item.

Related articles:

• How to optimize your eCommerce images to have a website as fast as the wind
• How to use video marketing in your online shop to duplicate your sales and foster client loyalty

➡️ Increase your credibility; allow customers to upload their own photos of your products

An interesting point.

Research shows that 77% of buyers would rather see photos taken by other customers rather than professional images before making a purchase decision.

This way, they can make sure the images on the product card have not been edited and that the product is exactly as shown, strengthening its reliability.

This is one of the strategies used by fashion eCommerce SHEIN.

➡️ Make the best of new technologies to increase your conversion

The latest technological advancements are making the online shopping experience increasingly similar to shopping in a real store.

And the best part is, nowadays, these technologies are available to most eCommerces.

Some of them are:

• Augmented reality: this is becoming increasingly popular amongst trendy eCommerces (through virtual dressing rooms), cosmetics and decoration. With augmented reality, a person can ‘try on’ clothes using their smartphone or laptop’s built-in camera, as well as checking what some sofa would look like in their living room.
• 360º Photos: this kind of ‘3D’ images allow a person to visualize the product from a variety of angles.
• Step-by-step animation: through 3D animations, you can show users the steps they need to follow in order to, for example, put together a piece of furniture or a multi-piece toy.

For you to have an idea of how these technologies are being applied, check out Fashion Eyewear’s online site.

On the one hand, this eCommerce has implemented 360º images to showcase their glasses in detail. On top of it, they have an ‘eyewear dressing room’ that works with augmented reality.

✅ Reviews

It’s a fact that people love reading other purchasers’ opinions. We are social beings and we want to be sure that there have been other people like us that have bought it before.

It’s called social proof and it’s a crucial factor regarding conversion that we have to work on. “But my products don’t have any reviews.”

Don’t worry—that’s normal. What you should do is provide some incentives for writing them:

• Give away free products in exchange for product reviews.
• Include an invitation to write a review and a link in your follow-up email.
• Hold raffles among those who have left reviews.

If none of those techniques work, ask your most-trusted clients for a favor. In the world of reviews, it’s possible to run into the “empty bar syndrome”—it’s not easy to convince people to leave the first comment.

✅ Related products

The majority of the people who look at a product won’t end up buying it. However, instead of giving up there, we have one more card to play: related products.

If they don’t decide to buy after reading the short description, the long one, viewing the photos, and having all the information available, perhaps the product just isn’t for them—but others might be.

In order to explore those other interests, we can use the cross-selling or related products technique. We go more in depth in this article, but it’s basically about offering other products from similar categories to encourage more browsing.

Have a look at how Amazon does it by proposing other items that clients interested in this one have bought.

We never throw in the towel when it comes to keeping the possible conversion flame alive.

👉 Dropshipping and descriptions: the problems with generic products cards

When you create an online shop, especially when it is based on dropshipping, the supplier will send you all the products cards. 

You may think “ I don’t have time to re-write them, I’ll use these cards and I will change them later ”. 

Do you know what the problem is? 

You will end up leaving them the way they are and that could ruin your business. 

Why could it be ruined just because of the generic product cards? Here’s why:

1. Duplicate content: your supplier sends the same products and cards to more people. There could be 10 online shops using the same content and, for Google, you would be copying it. That would mean a painful penalty for your shop.
2. Indifference: your shop and that of your competition would be the same. The clients will not find any reason to choose you over them, unless you offer a lower price.
3. No SEO optimization: suppliers do not think about positioning. They do not use any SEO strategies to write the cards, therefore, getting your products to the first positions will be impossible.

To sum up, a generic product card will mean a sanction in the worst scenario, it will not allow you to differentiate your shop and it will destroy any chance of positioning your products well in SERPS. Have we convinced you that you must write your own product descriptions? We hope so, since now we are going to give you some advice about how to write them strategically.

👉 Guide to write an ideal card for your online shop

There are only five steps, but that does not mean that they are easy or quick ones. Writing a product description is a process that must be done patiently and every step must be carefully thought out to be able to make the best out of each one of them.

1. Use appropriate language for your audience : write the product card as if you were selling it to your ideal client. Imagine that they are in front of you and you are trying to convince them to buy it.
2. Do not leave any unanswered questions : answer any question that the client could possibly have before buying the product. If they do not have doubts, they will most likely buy the product. If you leave some unanswered questions, the client will start to think about it and will leave without buying.
3. Design a flashy CTA : when you go to Amazon’s website, what’s the element that grabs your attention? The ADD TO CART button. Remember that the main goal of the card is to make the client click there. Do not make it difficult for them to do so. Try to write a product card with an image so great that you cannot help but click to see an enlarged version.
4. Add amazing pictures : not just any picture is good enough and one that all the shops use is even less so.
5. Inform users of your available stock: it’s important that you specify how many units of each product you have left. In addition to optimizing user experience, you avoid having a user buying a product that’s out of stock, it can also work as a sales strategy. If a user sees you’re almost out of stock on a particular product when they see its product card, they’ll feel the urge to buy it before it runs out (thanks to scarcity mental trigger).
6. Do a deep keyword research: if your product is well positioned you will get hundreds or thousands of visits for free. If you do not have much competition, a good keyword research could be enough to get you into the first few positions. You can use tools such as Kwfinder, Ubersuggest or Keyword Shitter and add all types of variations of the main keyword.

👉 Product cards and SEO: basic guidelines

So your product card is ready and you want it to reach as many people as possible.

That means it’s time to work on the cards’ SEO so they show up on Google.

How do we do this?

The first thing you should have clear is what your shop’s SEO strategy is:

• Which pages are you interested in positioning?
• Are you going to try to rank the categories or the products?
• Which URLs or URL levels will you leave without indexing?

As a very general rule of thumb, here are some basic guidelines:

• Use friendly URLs and category hierarchies: Some CMSs like WordPress (WooCommerce) or PrestaShop make it a bit difficult to achieve an optimal URL structure. You may have to fiddle with the code a bit, but it’s worth it.
• Only index product cards with searches: This means that if nobody is looking for a product on Google, it’s not worth indexing it.
• Focus your SEO efforts only on indexed product cards: Use keywords in the Meta tags of the long description and in the alt descriptions of the images, among others.
• Create powerful content for the categories: This is the strategy that often works the best; attack powerful keywords within your categories and long tail keywords with your products.
• Use canonicals to fight the risk of cannibalization or duplicate content: If you have several products competing for the same keywords or duplicate content, you can tell Google which one you are interested in ranking with a canonical tag.

You also have a lot more information about eCommerce SEO in this mega-article.

👉 5 best practices on usability and navigability for product cards

To polish up your product card, it’s important you optimize its usability and navigability.

In other words, it’s about making the card user-friendly thus improving user experience and, as a consequence, conversion — a customer at ease is more likely to end up buying.

We’ll teach you how to do it.

✅ 1. Make sure it looks familiar

Do you know ‘Jakob’s law’?

This law explains that users feel more comfortable browsing sites with a structure they’re already familiar with. 

In other words,

• Product images must go on the left.
• The buy button goes on the right.
• Shipping costs should be near the buy button.

Be careful. This does not mean you cannot innovate and modify the distribution of these elements.

But if you do so, be careful and run A/B tests to verify whether it affects conversion.

✅ 2. Don’t forget about skimming

Surely, you already know this; users don’t read… they skim.

In other words, they quickly ‘read’ in order to get a general idea of a site’s content. If what they see gets their attention, then they’ll read the text more carefully.

This has been widely researched, there are even eye-tracking models that indicate which parts of a site users focus the most on.

Take this into account and  make sure your product card is ‘skimmable’. 

• Enlarge its title.
• Utilize an easily understandable and bold font to highlight the most relevant ideas (the products main features, benefits, shipping cost, etc.).
• Enlist the product’s main features so they stand out (do you remember the example of ITS we saw above?)
• Use blank spaces to highlight the elements you’re most interested in such as CTAs for buying.

However, because each eCommerce it’s a world of its own, you should analyze the way your users skim your cards. For this, we recommend you have a look at this post about eye tracking in which we explain how you can implement it to your store.

✅ 3. Implement UX copywriting

UX copywriting is all about creating texts that:

• It are clear and concise to guide users as they browse.
• Encourage them to carry out an action.

It’s usually used in call-to-actions (such as the ‘add to cart’ button) so that users understand what’ll happen if they click on that button or link.

There are other options.

For example, many stores display a small text whenever users add a product to the cart to let them know the product has been successfully added.

For instance, this is something Gato Preto does.

✅ 4. Allow device synchronization

It’s very common for a user to look up a product on their smartphone, even if they’d rather make the purchase from a laptop because it’s more user-friendly.

Here’s where synchronization becomes relevant.

If —when logging in from their laptop— a user finds the very same products they added on their smartphone, the purchase process will seem easier (and the possibilities of them buying increase).

This also applies to wishlists.

✅ 5. Optimize error page 404

You’ve saved a product card under your browser’s favorites, but when you try to visit its site again, you come across an error page 404 because the product no longer exists.

Although it’d be ideal that this page never come up at all —since it affects user experience— it is sometimes inevitable.

What you can do whenever this happens is to provide the user with alternatives so they keep on browsing your store.

Make the best of this error page to display:

• Your best-sellers.
• Your main product categories.
• The search bar (in case they have a specific product in mind).

This is all very similar to what we do when we want to redirect a user who has run an internal search and has come across a ‘no results found’ sign.

Fortunately enough, this last case is an easy fix.

If you have a smart search engine such as Doofinder, you can minimize the amount of no-result searches from 15% down to 1.3%.

Now, let’s say the problem comes from a user not being able to find a product card because its product has been removed from the catalog. If that’s the case, then you’ll surely be interested in what we have for you next.

👉 What should you do with the old product cards?

A common problem that we run into with online shops is how to proceed with the items that are no longer in your catalogue.

Let’s differentiate between two cases:

• The product card is indexed on Google: In this case, although Google says that deleting it and showing a 404 page isn’t a problem (we don’t completely believe that), the best thing to do is show a 301 redirect page to the category. An alternative is to put it in “noindex” and delete it once it is unindexed.
• The product card is not indexed: It’s not so important in terms of Google, but you should keep an eye out for internal links on your site to make sure that users don’t run into any errors. If you have external links, the best strategy is to use a 301 page.

Don’t worry about old product cards for the moment. It’s better to start working in the right order. Keep reading.

👉 How to start optimizing the product cards?

It is not necessary that you change all the product cards at once. If you have to write hundreds of descriptions, start by analyzing which products are the most visited and change them first. Analytics can help you determine the order you should follow. You can follow these steps:

1. Find the URLs with the most traffic in Google Analytics: As we said, focus your efforts where they are going to have the most impact.
2. Look at the Search Console if you have cannibalizations for your most important keywords: You may find that you have several product cards competing against each other.
3. Decide which strategy to use: If you run into cannibalizations, use canonicals with the category or product that receives the most organic traffic. If they are old products, use a 301 redirect.
4. Optimize your content: Make a list of product cards to improve and start working on the descriptions, images, and everything else we’ve seen in this article.
5. Be patient: Don’t think that anything is going to change overnight. Step by step you will achieve big results.

And that’s it. You don’t need anything else for the time being.

👉 Now it’s your turn

Analyze your shop, organize the cards you have to edit regarding their importance and start applying our 5-step guide to write the ideal product card. Once you have done this, you will see how your conversion rate rises and your shop starts getting better positioning in Google.