Product pages: a practical guide

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. This guide covers what product pages actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What is actually at stake

Answer the questions that stop someone buying. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

What good looks like

Multiple images from real angles reduce returns. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Stock, delivery, and returns belong above the fold. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Answer the questions that stop someone buying
• Multiple images from real angles reduce returns
• Stock, delivery, and returns belong above the fold
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

The mistakes we see most

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Making it stick

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.