As ex-eBay traders, both in a professional and a personal capacity, and as online shop owners we have seen thousands of online product listings.
Some listings were impressive; they had plenty of high quality images of the product combined with well-written descriptions. Others, however, looked less than professional. Poorly lit or blurred images, mis-spelt or factually inaccurate product descriptions all amounted to shoddy presentation of the product.
When you list a product on your web site from Q Internet, the following may seem like no-brainers but you may like to bear in mind:
The product description
- Is the description factually accurate and correctly spelt? It can be disconcerting to potential buyers to read a product listing littered with grammatical, factual and/or spelling errors. Confidence in a product or seller can easily be dented by typos and inaccuracies, so if you’re unsure use a spell checker
- Is the text of a reasonable size for viewers to read? If a viewer can’t easily read your description they will likely use this as an excuse to move on to another site
- Does the product’s title accurately reflect the nature of the goods? For example, are you advertising a “Dunlop Golf Umbrella” or a “Dunlope Golf Brolly”? This is a critical stage of the product listing process for shop owners wishing to make use of Google Shopping! Remember the old rule…garbage in = garbage out.
Image size and clarity
- Does the image display the product in its best light? If you are unable to take a decent photo can you obtain stock images from the manufacturer? Manufacturers are often happy to offer access to high resolution images of their products for their dealers to use
- Is the image of a reasonable size and clarity so visitors can see it? Images can at times be too large for the screen and, when selected by the user, go off the end of the page! As a rule of thumb, images of 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high is a sensible size for product images
- Do you have permission to use the image? Or have you “borrowed” it from another online store? We shall leave the sermon on the use of copyrighted images for another day…
If you are competing with a major store for the customer’s business, how does the major store display and describe the same product you are selling? There is no reason why your listing shouldn’t look as good and offer as much information as that of the major store.
Make use of the tools your site offers you in terms of formatting text. A nicely formatted product description contributes to the overall listing.
The same principle can be applied to use of your blog. Blogging allows the site owner to generate their own content e.g. product reviews, news, how to find us etc. Well presented articles speak volumes about a company, but not nearly as much as bad ones.
