Copywriting Fundamentals for Ecommerce: Quick Template
I had a question today about copywriting fundamentals in terms of ecommerce stores and dropshipping operations.
Here’s my answer in a little more detail, because I’ve already done a lot of thinking today and my brain is too small for more.
Background: It’s Not Too Difficult And You’re Competing With Amateurs
Most guys who try don’t know how to put together a simple ecommerce store.
Most guys who try can’t write ecommerce copy to save their lives.
You only have to go and check the various website auction sites to see how sloppy guys are with not only their ecommerce copywriting but also their ecommerce store building skills in general.
A whole ton of people literally just copy the AliExpress descriptions, images and everything else into their stores without checking it.
Good luck with getting sales when you’re charging 5x mark-up with a broken English description.
But in a wider sense, here’s the deal: until your store and particular products are successful, “good enough” is better than “good.”
Why?
Because if it takes you five minutes to write a product description from a template that’s good enough i.e. it hits all the buttons in a few sentences, and fifteen minutes or more to write a good description that takes the reader on spellbinding journey into their new life…
… you want to go with the former because you don’t want to spend three times more time writing a description for a product that’s dead on arrival in terms of potential.
Save the storytelling until you get a hit.
When you’re testing five products and five ad variations, you can easily get swamped with all the things you’re creating. Keep it simple to start and you can concentrate later.
Let’s move on.
Jamie’s Simple Ecommerce Copywriting Fundamentals List
If you get the copywriting fundamentals down – and you can do this in a couple of hundred words – then you don’t have to worry about 99% of stuff that I ever talk about so far as copywriting is concerned.
The whole conversion rate complexities collection of articles is designed to turn 2% conversions into 5% conversions across funnels and in multimillion dollar campaigns.
You don’t need that sort of thing for a $10 ecommerce product.
Instead, you need to do a few things:
- Get the audience in mind and keep them there. You’re speaking directly to them.
- Get their biggest (related) fears and their deepest (related) dreams
- Tie your product into the former and latter
- Compare and contrast the two
- Add a clear call to action
- Make it better with the basics: scarcity/urgency/social proof.
This won’t give you the perfect ecommerce description, but it’ll certainly give you a good enough framework to test for ads and the like, and you can literally put a 200+ word product description together using just that.
What About The Tech Specs Etc.?
You can integrate those into the product copy in the form of bullets. Absolutely and when you have more time, maybe do that.
But most ecommerce platforms give you a tabbed description option, where you have the description in one tab (where your copy goes) your specifications (where you put the detail) and finally I put in a third tab which covers returns, guarantees, shipping and other stuff.
That’s all you need to do.
Remember, we’re getting these things up quickly. Don’t worry about trying to work out how a minor feature ties into the massive benefit of your product when you’re starting out.
Final Thoughts
This guide is put together so that you can quickly test products on your ecommerce store using product descriptions which aren’t totally rubbish, yet without relying on the crap product descriptions you’ll get if you import them from AliExpress or hire a freelance muppet to spin you some text.
The structure will hold, the descriptions will work and this’ll give you two things:
- The ability to test new products quickly
- The ability to go back and add/tweak product descriptions when the product does well
So now you have no excuses.