The Anatomy of a Perfect Product Page

The everlasting quest to keep e-commerce buyers buying boils down to just one simple question: How do you wring every last drop of value out of your product pages?

A poorly optimized product detail page (PDP) is pretty much like a financial black hole, devouring your time, effort, and resources as it fails to achieve its primary objective -- pulling your visitors down the sales funnel.

Between 80 and 97 percent of eCommerce businesses fail.

And to help you avoid becoming part of that statistic, we will teach you what makes a perfect product page and how to turn your eCommerce store into a money-making juggernaut.

Getting Started

For those short on time, here’s a condensed summary of this in-depth tutorial: Based on what we have learned from our clients -- and also what Google tells us -- a perfect product page is made up of 24 separate elements:

Clear, logical navigation
Breadcrumbs
High-quality product images
Product photos from multiple angles
Product demo videos
Descriptive, bold main header
Review summary above the fold
Product availability information
Well-written, customer-centric copy
Multiple payment options
Multiple payment methods
Customer guarantee
Shipping information
Featured in-depth reviews
All product colors and variations
Comprehensive product information
Personalized product recommendations
A section containing all of the customer reviews
Customer questions & answers
Detailed product specifications
Shipping & return policy information
Easily accessible footer navigation menus
Brand authority & social proof elements
Email signup form

In other words, here’s the deal: miss any of those, and you are willingly letting potential buyers walk out the door.

Having laid the groundwork, let’s take a deeper dive and zoom in to each building block one by one to help you understand how you should go about mapping out your product pages.

‍1. Clear, Logical Navigation

A typical eCommerce store is relatively large, ranging from a few hundred to a few million pages.

With that in mind, clearly structured, logical navigation menus are an absolute must to retain visitors on your site and help them quickly browse the categories.

What’s more, it makes the job of crawling and indexing your e-commerce store easier for search engine bots, saving your crawl budget, and speeding up the process of getting your new pages listed in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Best apps for Shopify: Smart Mega Menu & Navigation, Buddha Mega Menu, and Meteor Mega Menu.

Best plugins for WordPress: Max Mega Menu, WP Responsive Menu, and WP Mega Menu.

2. Breadcrumbs

When visitors get lost on a website, they leave within seconds -- and you only get one shot at trying to engage a random passer-by, no second chances.

And that’s where breadcrumbs come into play.

A breadcrumb trail is a small menu showing the complete path from the current page to the homepage, helping your visitors instantly understand where, exactly, they are at any point of surfing through your e-store.

This seemingly minor element does a pretty important job: breadcrumbs make it easier for visitors to navigate through thousands -- or even millions -- of pages and circle back to where they just were if they want to.

To top it off, search engines love breadcrumbs on massive websites since, just like the clear navigation, they neatly map out the structure of your website.

So if you’re not using breadcrumbs yet, you’re missing out on a ton of value from a UX and SEO perspective.

Best apps for Shopify: Category Breadcrumbs and Schema & Breadcrumbs.

Best plugins for WordPress: Breadcrumb NavXT, Flexy Breadcrumb, and WooCommerce Breadcrumbs.

3. High-Quality Product Images

Even if you've never ever been catfished, you know how the utter disappointment of falling for a bait-and-switch scheme feels like.

To avoid that from happening to visitors, search engines prioritize pages with large, high-quality product images that help visitors get a better idea of the item they are about to buy.

The problem is, high-resolution illustrations are pretty heavy.

And in the world of graphics, size does matter because it directly impacts the page load speed as conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time.

The solution? Implement the WebP image format. Developed by Google, it can reduce image file size up to 34% without sacrificing the quality compared to JPEG and PNG.

Here are a few helpful tools to optimize image file size:

4. Do More with Your Product Images

In e-commerce, trust is more crucial than price.

To get your customers to take that leap of faith needed for a transaction to take place, your product images should help your potential buyers learn everything they want to know about the item listed on the page without ever having to check the product description.

Creatively using images to tell the story behind your product builds more confidence in visitors to trust you with their money and dramatically improves the likelihood of a passer-by turning into a paying customer.

Your customers should feel as if they are holding your product in their hands.

5. Product Demo Videos

In 2021, video marketing is quickly becoming the top priority across all industries.

In fact, visitors who watch product demo videos are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-viewers.

Savvy eCommerce store owners have jumped on the train early and have been reaping a ton of value from including short demo videos featuring their products.

Best apps for Shopify: Easy Video ‑ Product Videos and Vimotia ‑ Shoppable Videos.

Best plugins for WordPress: Product Video for WooCommerce and YITH WooCommerce Featured Audio and Video Content.

6. Descriptive, Bold Main Header

80% of people only read the headline -- so if you’ve made it to this section, you’re in the minority.

When a user lands on your product page, they should understand what they are looking at right away.

A clear, bold header is critical for both visitors and search engines to understand the main purpose of the page.

If that isn’t the case on your website, this should be your top priority to make this as clear as possible, as quickly as possible.

7. Review Snippet at the Top

82% of online shoppers study products before making a purchase.

A review snippet provides a quick overview of all of the reviews related to a given product, namely the number of reviews and the average rating.

This small feature is incredibly important to, again, help build trust, the ultimate commodity in the realm of e-commerce.

Adding reviews to your pages has been proven over and over to have massive results.

Best apps for Shopify: Fera Product Reviews, Judge.me, and Loox.

Best plugins for WordPress: Site Reviews, WP Customer Reviews, and WP Product Review.

8. Product Availability Information

Picking a product and finding out that it’s out of stock is extremely frustrating for visitors – and it turns out, search engines hate it too.

Google (and you, hopefully) want people visiting your site to have the best experience possible.

Getting them excited about a product and letting them down is far from a positive experience and dramatically increases the odds of that potential customer leaving and never coming back.

To avoid that from ever happening, your product page should contain a section, block, or snippet that informs your visitors and search engines about whether that particular product is available.

Best apps for Shopify: Product Inventory Information, Low Stock ‑ Back in Stock Pro, and Back in stock‑Restock Alerts.

Best plugins for WordPress: WISDM Scheduler, WPC Product Timer for WooCommerce, and Product Availability Slots for WooCommerce.

9. Well-written, Customer-centric Copy

You know your customer better than anyone. You need to write as if you are speaking to him or her directly.

What do they want? How will this product make their life better? How will using or wearing this thing makes them feel?

Copy is so often overlooked in eCommerce, but it is critical to get this right if you want to connect with potential buyers and turn them into loyal customers.

10. Multiple Payment Options

Giving your customers more options to buy from you – either in full or multiple installments – opens the door to more potential loyal customers that may not have the cash reserves on hand at this very moment.

If being more inclusive (and making more money) is important to your brand, having flexibility around payments is a great way to do that.

Our favorite services for this: Afterpay, Sezzle, and Klarna.

11. Multiple Payment Methods

By the same token, the more ways your customer can go about paying you, the higher the likelihood they will.

Try to add a number of payment options that make the checkout process as seamless as possible:

American Express
Apple Pay
Google Pay
Visa Checkout

Additionally, make sure you remove any obstacles obstructing the path of your visitors towards a purchase:

Visualize payment methods
Offer secure checkout
Optimize the checkout

12. Customer Satisfaction Guarantees

Have you noticed a theme yet - trust? Nobody likes to part with their money and risk being stuck with something they don’t want.

When you are making a product you are proud of, and that will truly make your customer’s lives better in some way - then you should be confident giving a satisfaction guarantee.

If you are worried that you may lose too much money, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board and make your product even better.

13. Shipping Information

Please, don’t make your visitors spend ten minutes looking for your shipping terms once they decide to buy from you.

Not only is it a potentially negative experience, but also search engines are going to push your website down the SERP if this information is readily available.

Small changes can make a big difference in the way visitors and search engines view your e-store.

14. Featured In-depth, High-quality Reviews

72% of online shoppers will not purchase anything from anyone unless they have spent some time sifting through customer reviews. And your e-store is not an exception.

All reviews are good, but great reviews are gold. If you have a stellar, thorough review of one of your products, make it stand out by featuring it prominently on your PDP.

Bonus Tip: If you can, try to get a review from your customers that speaks directly to a potential objection and how your product overcame their initial fear. Something like this:

Before switching over to product XYZ, the price tag made me a bit apprehensive about buying it. But since it’s a much faster way to do X, Y, and Z, I’m happy as a clam!

Some of our favorite apps to help you get great reviews from your customers are: Stamped.io Product Reviews UGC and Product Reviews.

15. All Product Colors, Sizes, and Variations Easily Accessible

Every single color, size, or variety of a product should be readily available for visitors to find directly on the page.

The more options you give your customers, the higher the likelihood they can find exactly what they are looking for.

Best apps for Shopify: Advanced Product Options and Product Options Variant Option

Best plugins for WordPress: YITH WooCommerce Color and Label Variations and WooCommerce Variation Master.

16. Comprehensive Product Information

That's a lot of copy, right... well, despite what many believe about eCommerce - it works.

Get your creative juices flowing and spend some time crafting copy that will connect with your audience.

That alone would help you stand out from the competition that sticks to the boring, auto-generated product descriptions.

Don’t be afraid to go deep: Studies have shown that copy up to 600 words actually improves the search and conversion performance of web pages.

17. Personalized Product Recommendations

Can you guess what I was thinking about purchasing based on the screenshot above?

Helping your customers find other products that would be a good fit for them is a fool-proof way to seamlessly boost the average order value without coming across as too “salesy.”

Having “similar products” is a start, but if possible, add recommendations that are personalized to the actual visitor on the page.

Best apps for Shopify: Personalized Recommendations and Personalization App.

Best plugins for WordPress: Personalization and CM Context Related Product Recommendations Plugin.

18. A Section Containing All of the Customer Reviews

Having 50 or more customer reviews on a product page can boost its conversion rate by 4.6%.

With that in mind, your product page must have a section storing all of the customer reviews related to your product.

We already know that reviews are widely known to be one of the most important factors influencing conversions, so having as many as possible is beneficial to your visitors -- and your bottom line.

We, personally, like to use a collapsible section to keep the look of the page clean while giving visitors the option to dig deeper if they want.

That actually goes for numbers 19, 20, and 21 on this list as well.

19. Customer Questions & Answers (FAQ's)

Instead of overwhelming your customer support team, spend some time thinking through the most common customer questions and place the answers to them in a separate section on your product page.

Doing that helps you kill multiple birds with one stone:

Streamlining your customer service process
Providing a richer user experience
Improving the SEO value and performance of your product pages
Having some of the main sales objections addressed.

20. Detailed Product Specifications

In SEO, long-term keywords account for up to 80% of all organic traffic!

If you’ve been thinking about getting a slice of the organic search pie, writing detailed, SEO-friendly product specifications is a great way to rank for a whole host of long-tail keywords, helping you drive additional organic search traffic with high buyer intent.

Set some time aside and brainstorm how to qualitatively and quantitatively describe your product from every single angle possible.

And we’re talking about every single product specification you can get your hands on -- and make sure you bring on board the people in your company who tend to be a bottomless well of valuable information.

This technique is something so many e-commerce business owners overlook, yet the payoff is tremendous.

21. Shipping & Return Policy Information

For those e-stores looking to gain an edge over the competition, we recommend creating a drop-down menu covering in great detail your shipping and return policies.

Not only would that help you avoid a great deal of confusion, but also search engines love when you have that info on your product page.

Just a small section at the top neatly providing the key shipping information will move the needle:

Expected delivery times
Shipping costs
Shipping methods
Payment information
Shipping restrictions
International shipping

As for the return policy, make sure you have all the bases covered as well:

The items that are eligible to be returned
The items that can be exchanged
The non-returnable, non-exchangeable products
The time span during which your customers can return or exchange the items bought in your e-store (for instance, 30 days past purchase date)
The policy regarding the condition of returned items (for instance, lightly worn or only with tags still intact)
The process of initiating and getting a return or exchange.

22. Easily Accessible Footer Navigation Menus

Instead of just letting your customer leave, at the bottom of each product page, set up logical navigation menus as a means to channel some of your visitors to other pages.

The more pages your visitors visit during one session, the higher the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.

Why is that the case? Well, it all brings us to one of the golden rules of e-Commerce:

The longer they stay, the more they buy.

23. Brand Authority & Social Proof Elements

With fraud and phishing being the plague of e-commerce, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of getting your visitors to trust you so that they can painlessly part with their hard-earned money.

Apply for e-commerce awards and get those placed on your product pages - that social proof can give you just enough trust to tip the scales in your favor and convert yet another visitor.

24. Email Signup Form

The average ROI of email marketing is 4,200%.

Basically, if you’re still not actively using that marketing channel to generate additional revenue for your e-commerce business, you’re leaving so much money on the table it hurts.

You don’t even need to go to extraordinary lengths to start harnessing the power of email marketing. To get the ball rolling, just create a simple signup form -- and you’re all set.

Once there, you don’t even have to lift a finger to watch your subscriber count grow once you spend roughly 30 minutes setting everything up.

Over to You

At first glance, you may be scratching your head, wondering how you can possibly jam-pack everything we mentioned above into your product page layout.

But in reality, if you take a closer look at the best-performing stores in your niche, you’ll notice that those on the top of their e-commerce game follow this blueprint religiously to dominate both the market and the SERPs – while the rest join the ranks of failed e-commerce businesses.

Are you going to revamp your product pages to make sure you have all of the listed elements in place? This is the make-or-break decision that will impact the success of your business.

And if you want any help - don't hesitate to reach out to us.

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