How To Write Product Descriptions – A Quick Guide
A lot of people who get the entrepreneurship bug want to go into dropshipping.
Many copywriters will get their start in copywriting by writing product descriptions for e-commerce websites.
With those two things in mind, it’s a wonder I’ve never written about how to write product descriptions for an ecommerce store. In this article, I’m going to rectify that by giving a quick guide on how to write product descriptions.
In this article, I’ll go over the key factors in how to write product descriptions. I’ll also talk about what not to do and how to word your product descriptions.
How To Write Product Descriptions; What Not To Do
Most e-commerce stores have terrible product descriptions. You can tell a bad dropshipping store from a fully-fledged business almost immediately based on product descriptions. (That and they all use exactly the same bland theme, same page structure and are all the same in every way.)
How can you tell?
Because a dropshipper gets all his products from a supplier – who ships it directly to the customer. It’s hands off.
That’s nothing illegal, nor immoral.
However, what is stupid is that often guys who start dropship stores will simply paste the product descriptions from the manufacturer into their website’s editor.
As copywriting experts and readers of this blog will know, you need to know your audience to sell anything. What the dropship guy doesn’t understand is that a manufacturer’s website is a business-to-business storefront and a business-to-consumer storefront needs to be written completely differently.
Well… that’s one thing they don’t know or care about.
Another thing that loads of websites – even big company websites – don’t seem to realise is that nobody buys a product based on a list of specifications.
That’s especially true if you’ve got a little e-commerce operation where you sell the exact same product that every other store in your niche sells.
In short, if you are just copy-pasting the manufacturer descriptions into your store, your store is going to go to the e-commerce graveyard with the millions of other competitor websites that have exactly the same products, prices and words you do.
If that doesn’t convince you to learn how to write product descriptions, then nothing will. Let’s move on to that.
Key Factors When Learning How To Write Product Descriptions
Product descriptions are an interesting copywriting experiment. They have a few factors which are different from the traditional sales pitch or article. Some of these factors are:
- They have to be short – you’re not going to write a 1000 word sales letter for most e-commerce products
- They have to get the specifications in somewhere but still build desire in the product
- Your client will usually want you to write with an emphasis on solid SEO.
- There’s no relationship building – you’re just getting them to hit BUY
- That said, like any other copywriting, you need to guide them through the process.
Those are the factors we need to take into account. We’ve also got to follow good copywriting practice (i.e. sell the product) and wrap it all up in about a hundred words.
Let’s learn how we’re going to do that.
How To Write Product Descriptions
The backbone of copywriting is AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
When you’re writing product descriptions, you don’t have much space and you know some things about your audience already. For instance, a guy searching for “Buy Dewalt Screwdriver” obviously wants to perform a DIY action and wants to buy the Dewalt Screwdriver. With that in mind, we know that we can do the following:
Keep your headline simple. Something like, “Buy the Dewalt Screwdriver at the Best Price Here” is fine.
Your customer is an [insert here] person. For a screwdriver… it’s probably a no-nonsense male. You don’t have to make deliberate reference to this, but you’re going to use some adjectives in the product description. They need to fit with a general target market. This is obvious, so don’t think too hard.
You know they have a general problem. Nobody is buying a screwdriver because they want to go on holiday to the Bahamas. They need to fix something or build something. Again, this is obvious.
You must pick the most obvious solution. You need to solve the problem within copy. Normally, you can build a perfect-life scenario. “Imagine when you can walk arm-in-arm with a beautiful woman,” and so on. Not with a product description. The solution is obvious and simple: “This product will help you fix your cupboard or build a new one.”
Terms, Conditions and What Happens Next? In any copywriting, you’ve got to talk the customer through the steps that occur when they’re buying. Tiny little things can cause a person to get spooked. Even if the site has a big banner that says, “Next day shipping” you need to re-iterate. Again… keep it simple. “Click below to buy the product and you’ll have a choice of shipping options on our secure checkout on the next page.”
Benefits. Obviously, the key part of selling any product is listing the benefits. Most e-commerce software comes with the option to have a specification table. If that’s the case, then use that. Either way, you want two or three key benefits from that specification to put in your description:
- The battery lasts for 20 hours on a single charge so you won’t have to leave your work for another day.
- The new safety feature means you don’t have to worry about slippages.
- The high RPM means it goes through tough materials like a hot knife through butter.
You get the picture.
One final thing: don’t use all the worst words in the world. This is something that many stores do wrong as well.
In a product description, never use the words “cheap,” “value” or “expensive.” Probably don’t use the words, “best,” or “cost-efficient” either. You can use a thesaurus here. People associate certain words with salesmanship, cheapness and low-quality. Avoid those words.
Final Thoughts
Whether you have your own store or you’re writing product descriptions for someone else, the above is basically an overview of all the elements you should add.
If you add all those things in, you’ll get a short product description that works, isn’t fussy and doesn’t take long to write. It’ll be targeted to a wide audience, the adjectives can be changed depending on the market and it’ll still speak to the individual reader.
If you use the product name a couple of times in the benefit sentences, it’ll also fill the SEO requirements.
Following this basic process will mean that the store you’re working on will be more successful than the millions of other competitor sites out there.