Why Accurate Product Content Matters in E-Commerce

Being accurate matters. For many customers, accuracy means honesty, which means trust.
Published on
August 19, 2024

Precise product content and descriptions help customers believe in your brand as an honest business. This encourages them to choose your products over competitors and return to you when they need new ones.

Of course, creating consistent and accurate product content is easier said than done, especially with so many products across various channels. Given that 85% of customers say that product descriptions and images significantly influence their buying decisions, ensuring detailed and accurate product descriptions should be a top priority for any eCommerce business.

The difference between a sale and an empty shopping cart comes down to knowing how to craft the perfect, most accurate product descriptions.

The Importance of Accurate Product Descriptions

Making a product description accurate is one thing, but making it accurate and effective is another. Crafting a product description that has it all is the key to gaining customer trust and improving your conversion rates.

But what should this look like?

An accurate, detailed, and practical product description should:

  • Include comprehensive and precise information about the product’s specifications, features, and uses.
  • Use clear, concise, and easy-to-understand language to ensure the target audience can quickly grasp the key product features.
  • Be in line with a consistent brand voice, style, and tone used across all other products and content.
  • Answer potential questions or concerns customers may have about the product.
  • Highlight the product's most essential and valuable features, alongside any other urgent product information.
  • Be optimized for search engines, but still read naturally.

Including these critical features in your product descriptions will help ensure they remain relevant and accurate, building trust with potential customers.

This will set clear expectations of what your products will deliver. As long as your products match or even exceed your descriptions, this will drastically reduce return rates and increase customer satisfaction.

Key Elements of Effective Product Descriptions

Answering potential questions and using concise language is undoubtedly important, but the number one thing customers are looking for is clear, easily understood details. This means your first and most important action should be to include detailed product specifications.

These should include:

  • Precise measurements such as dimensions, weight, and capacity
  • Which materials were used in manufacturing
  • Color options with digital assets that accurately reflect these options
  • Any applicable compatibility information, i.e., compatible with iPhone

Using Clear Language

Using clear, uncomplicated language is often universal advice when communicating with customers, but it’s also easier said than done.

To do this, try to focus on using simple language and finding synonyms for complicated words where possible. Similarly, avoid jargon wherever possible unless it’s widely known to your target audience or necessary for accuracy.

You can also break information down into bullet point lists or short paragraphs to make scanning the text easier and use the active voice to help make descriptions more engaging.

Highlight Key Features

Highlighting key features is an excellent and straightforward way to draw customers to the best bits of your products.

Be careful not to just list the features; instead, explain how each feature benefits the customer.

  • Address common pain points and explain clearly how the product solves them
  • Demonstrate how each feature is a benefit, such as a more advanced processing core means a faster phone
  • Provide examples to help the customer clearly understand why the feature is useful

Completing Keyword Optimization

Optimizing your descriptions for search engines is also important as long as it doesn’t detract from speaking naturally to your actual customers.

The first step is to use keywords naturally throughout the text. Fitting in occasional long-tail keywords is also an excellent way to capture more specific search queries and make your product page more discoverable.

Remember to include keywords in product titles, headings, and even alternative text for images, alongside your product descriptions.

The Impact of Accurate Product Descriptions on E-Commerce Success

You’d be surprised just how impactful cleaning up your product descriptions can be. Beyond providing a consistent tone and enhancing your brand, creating more accurate product descriptions helps elevate your business with many different benefits, from happier customers to increased sales and profits.

Enhanced Customer Experience

By providing all the necessary information directly to the customer immediately, you eliminate the need for them to contact you for additional information. This helps reduce the number of steps between them and a purchase, simplifying the process and increasing satisfaction.

And that’s not all.

More accurate information helps customers more rapidly decide if the product is right for them, which is a win-win for everyone involved. If it is, you’ve just decreased the time it takes to sell. If the product isn’t right for them, they can more quickly move on to your other products, resulting in a less frustrating and smoother experience for them,

All of this combines to give customers more confidence in both your business and your products, reducing any post-purchase cognitive dissonance and improving the customer experience.

Improved Search Engine Rankings and Visibility

Even before carrying out SEO steps, more accurate product descriptions naturally improve your website’s search engine rankings and online visibility.

By transforming descriptions into keyword-rich SEO beacons you can quickly help each individual product page rank much higher for any relevant search queries in search engines like Google or Bing. Detailed, engaging product descriptions naturally provide more opportunities to add long-tail keywords, while crafting unique, high-quality content also helps search engines favor your page.

This is especially true if you compete against generic, duplicated manufacturer descriptions on competitor sites.

Boosted Conversion Rates and Sales

Your newly evolved, detail-packed, and engaging product descriptions will help convert visitors into customers more effectively. Highlighted key benefits and addressed concerns will help overcome any purchasing hesitation.

With more confidence and more certainty in your product, visitors are more likely to buy and less likely to wait to find out more.

Reduced Complaints and Returns

It’s highly likely that any complaints, inquiries, or returns you receive stem largely from a misunderstanding between you and the customer. Whether it’s finding out more about the product, or returning items because it’s not what they expected, maintaining detailed and accurate product information can help massively reduce the rate of returns, complaints, and questions.

By anticipating and answering upfront any possible questions, you reduce the need for customers to contact you (and ultimately put-off buying). Not only this, more accurate information on how to care for products and use them correctly can prevent any issues arising from the product being misused, and then returned.

How Trustana Supports Accurate Product Descriptions

Making sure your product descriptions and other digital asset information are accurate is extremely beneficial, that much is clear. But manually updating and upgrading this information can be an immense challenge in of itself, especially if your product information management system isn’t centralized, or even you need to complete edits and updates manually.

Luckily, there is a solution: Trustana.

Helping Harmonize and Enrich Your Data

Using AI-powered solutions, Trustana can quickly and efficiently consolidate your product information from various sources into a single, centralized location and format. This allows us to harness AI to automatically enrich your product data no matter how larger your product range. By using an automated AI system you can be sure of consistency in style, tone, and overall product information across multiple categories.

Our tools are also capable of automatically generating and editing SEO-friendly product descriptions without losing accuracy or engagement.

Unifying Product Data For Consistency Across Platforms

By centralizing all your various product data onto one system, you can much more easily roll out updates, and add new products or product information to keep things consistent. 

Enabling automated updates helps ensure that a change to a product description on one platform automatically refreshes the same product’s information hosted on other platforms. Alongside version control, this makes product information management much easier.

Seamlessly Integrate With Existing E-Commerce Systems

Trustana is specifically designed to integrate with any relevant product data tool across the E-Commerce chain. This means whether you need to extract specifications from a manufacturer’s PIM system, or integrate into major E-Commerce hosting platforms such as Shopify, Trustana can do so automatically.

All of these different solutions combine to help you not only make your product information more accurate, but also maintain this accuracy as you scale, without sinking thousands of hours into admin work.

Conclusion

Maintaining accurate, engaging product descriptions can be the crucial key to unlocking higher conversions and sales in E-Commerce.

Increasing customer trust and confidence to buy solves many common problems (such as returns or queries) before they arise. Even better, they allow your business to scale confidently into a reputable online brand.

But ensuring your product content remains of high quality doesn’t just happen. Businesses need careful strategies to create accurate and engaging product descriptions and maintain them across hundreds or thousands of different products.

This is where Trustana can help. Book a demo today to explore how Trustana’s product information management solutions can help you stay on top of your product descriptions.

Back

Why Accurate Product Content Matters in E-Commerce

August 19, 2024

Precise product content and descriptions help customers believe in your brand as an honest business. This encourages them to choose your products over competitors and return to you when they need new ones.

Of course, creating consistent and accurate product content is easier said than done, especially with so many products across various channels. Given that 85% of customers say that product descriptions and images significantly influence their buying decisions, ensuring detailed and accurate product descriptions should be a top priority for any eCommerce business.

The difference between a sale and an empty shopping cart comes down to knowing how to craft the perfect, most accurate product descriptions.

The Importance of Accurate Product Descriptions

Making a product description accurate is one thing, but making it accurate and effective is another. Crafting a product description that has it all is the key to gaining customer trust and improving your conversion rates.

But what should this look like?

An accurate, detailed, and practical product description should:

  • Include comprehensive and precise information about the product’s specifications, features, and uses.
  • Use clear, concise, and easy-to-understand language to ensure the target audience can quickly grasp the key product features.
  • Be in line with a consistent brand voice, style, and tone used across all other products and content.
  • Answer potential questions or concerns customers may have about the product.
  • Highlight the product's most essential and valuable features, alongside any other urgent product information.
  • Be optimized for search engines, but still read naturally.

Including these critical features in your product descriptions will help ensure they remain relevant and accurate, building trust with potential customers.

This will set clear expectations of what your products will deliver. As long as your products match or even exceed your descriptions, this will drastically reduce return rates and increase customer satisfaction.

Key Elements of Effective Product Descriptions

Answering potential questions and using concise language is undoubtedly important, but the number one thing customers are looking for is clear, easily understood details. This means your first and most important action should be to include detailed product specifications.

These should include:

  • Precise measurements such as dimensions, weight, and capacity
  • Which materials were used in manufacturing
  • Color options with digital assets that accurately reflect these options
  • Any applicable compatibility information, i.e., compatible with iPhone

Using Clear Language

Using clear, uncomplicated language is often universal advice when communicating with customers, but it’s also easier said than done.

To do this, try to focus on using simple language and finding synonyms for complicated words where possible. Similarly, avoid jargon wherever possible unless it’s widely known to your target audience or necessary for accuracy.

You can also break information down into bullet point lists or short paragraphs to make scanning the text easier and use the active voice to help make descriptions more engaging.

Highlight Key Features

Highlighting key features is an excellent and straightforward way to draw customers to the best bits of your products.

Be careful not to just list the features; instead, explain how each feature benefits the customer.

  • Address common pain points and explain clearly how the product solves them
  • Demonstrate how each feature is a benefit, such as a more advanced processing core means a faster phone
  • Provide examples to help the customer clearly understand why the feature is useful

Completing Keyword Optimization

Optimizing your descriptions for search engines is also important as long as it doesn’t detract from speaking naturally to your actual customers.

The first step is to use keywords naturally throughout the text. Fitting in occasional long-tail keywords is also an excellent way to capture more specific search queries and make your product page more discoverable.

Remember to include keywords in product titles, headings, and even alternative text for images, alongside your product descriptions.

The Impact of Accurate Product Descriptions on E-Commerce Success

You’d be surprised just how impactful cleaning up your product descriptions can be. Beyond providing a consistent tone and enhancing your brand, creating more accurate product descriptions helps elevate your business with many different benefits, from happier customers to increased sales and profits.

Enhanced Customer Experience

By providing all the necessary information directly to the customer immediately, you eliminate the need for them to contact you for additional information. This helps reduce the number of steps between them and a purchase, simplifying the process and increasing satisfaction.

And that’s not all.

More accurate information helps customers more rapidly decide if the product is right for them, which is a win-win for everyone involved. If it is, you’ve just decreased the time it takes to sell. If the product isn’t right for them, they can more quickly move on to your other products, resulting in a less frustrating and smoother experience for them,

All of this combines to give customers more confidence in both your business and your products, reducing any post-purchase cognitive dissonance and improving the customer experience.

Improved Search Engine Rankings and Visibility

Even before carrying out SEO steps, more accurate product descriptions naturally improve your website’s search engine rankings and online visibility.

By transforming descriptions into keyword-rich SEO beacons you can quickly help each individual product page rank much higher for any relevant search queries in search engines like Google or Bing. Detailed, engaging product descriptions naturally provide more opportunities to add long-tail keywords, while crafting unique, high-quality content also helps search engines favor your page.

This is especially true if you compete against generic, duplicated manufacturer descriptions on competitor sites.

Boosted Conversion Rates and Sales

Your newly evolved, detail-packed, and engaging product descriptions will help convert visitors into customers more effectively. Highlighted key benefits and addressed concerns will help overcome any purchasing hesitation.

With more confidence and more certainty in your product, visitors are more likely to buy and less likely to wait to find out more.

Reduced Complaints and Returns

It’s highly likely that any complaints, inquiries, or returns you receive stem largely from a misunderstanding between you and the customer. Whether it’s finding out more about the product, or returning items because it’s not what they expected, maintaining detailed and accurate product information can help massively reduce the rate of returns, complaints, and questions.

By anticipating and answering upfront any possible questions, you reduce the need for customers to contact you (and ultimately put-off buying). Not only this, more accurate information on how to care for products and use them correctly can prevent any issues arising from the product being misused, and then returned.

How Trustana Supports Accurate Product Descriptions

Making sure your product descriptions and other digital asset information are accurate is extremely beneficial, that much is clear. But manually updating and upgrading this information can be an immense challenge in of itself, especially if your product information management system isn’t centralized, or even you need to complete edits and updates manually.

Luckily, there is a solution: Trustana.

Helping Harmonize and Enrich Your Data

Using AI-powered solutions, Trustana can quickly and efficiently consolidate your product information from various sources into a single, centralized location and format. This allows us to harness AI to automatically enrich your product data no matter how larger your product range. By using an automated AI system you can be sure of consistency in style, tone, and overall product information across multiple categories.

Our tools are also capable of automatically generating and editing SEO-friendly product descriptions without losing accuracy or engagement.

Unifying Product Data For Consistency Across Platforms

By centralizing all your various product data onto one system, you can much more easily roll out updates, and add new products or product information to keep things consistent. 

Enabling automated updates helps ensure that a change to a product description on one platform automatically refreshes the same product’s information hosted on other platforms. Alongside version control, this makes product information management much easier.

Seamlessly Integrate With Existing E-Commerce Systems

Trustana is specifically designed to integrate with any relevant product data tool across the E-Commerce chain. This means whether you need to extract specifications from a manufacturer’s PIM system, or integrate into major E-Commerce hosting platforms such as Shopify, Trustana can do so automatically.

All of these different solutions combine to help you not only make your product information more accurate, but also maintain this accuracy as you scale, without sinking thousands of hours into admin work.

Conclusion

Maintaining accurate, engaging product descriptions can be the crucial key to unlocking higher conversions and sales in E-Commerce.

Increasing customer trust and confidence to buy solves many common problems (such as returns or queries) before they arise. Even better, they allow your business to scale confidently into a reputable online brand.

But ensuring your product content remains of high quality doesn’t just happen. Businesses need careful strategies to create accurate and engaging product descriptions and maintain them across hundreds or thousands of different products.

This is where Trustana can help. Book a demo today to explore how Trustana’s product information management solutions can help you stay on top of your product descriptions.