Let’s talk product pages.
If its your homepage's job to get visitors to your product detail page, then its your product detail page's job to get them to add to cart.
I'm about to give you some clear design rules for making the most of your product page (and boosting your add to cart rate in the process.)
The Buy Box
First, make sure the "buy box" is above the fold. (The buy box is a term my guy Ezra Firestone coined.) That means your photos, thumbnails, title, price, product description, color swatches, ADD TO CART button, etc. are all above the point where the customer would have to scroll down. See this example from Tactical Baby Gear I designed:
Because people can't see, touch, smell, or otherwise experience your products in person, your product photos are incredibly important. Some quick tips here:
- Enable click-to-zoom. This is important, people want to see what they're buying.
- Crop all images consistently. (More on that below.)
- Consider including a product video.
- If you sell apparel, include your size chart as a photo so people can't miss it
Image Ratios Demystified
The number one thing that baffles merchants is image ratios. When I say image ratios, I mean the ratio of the width to the height of the images. Everyone struggles with getting these right, and that's a problem, because inconsistent images cropping will result in messy, unprofessional looking thumbnail grids and collection grids.
I am going to give you the easy way out here: Just crop all your images square so they're consistent.
If you have hundreds of product photos already uploaded at odd ratios, don't panic. You can use the app PixC to automatically resize the images square.
Once you get your images cropped square, you’ll have a nice clean look as customers switch through the image thumbnails.
Image Sizes
When uploading product photos to your store, you want to upload them as large as you can. "But Kurt, what about PageSpeeeed?!" Fear not– The theme and Shopify will work to resize photos, so you should aim to upload the max size Shopify will accept at a square resolution.
Here are the stats:
- Size: Square, up to 2500x2500 px
- Type: JPEG (dont you dare upload PNGs)
- Quality: 60%, progressive, don't embed color profile as it has little value.
Pro-Tip: Before uploading them to Shopify, drag & drop them all into ImageOptim, it's a free, safe, and automatic image compression tool.
Social Proof
Make sure you have reviews on your product page. If you don't, that should be the first thing you do.
My favorite reviews apps are Stamped.io, Judge.me, YotPo, Loox, even Shopify Product Reviews.
The Number One Secret: Copywriting
A clean layout and quality photos will only get you so far. The most successful stores all invest in detailed descriptions for their products. You need to treat your product descriptions like sales letters.
But copywriting is hard, right? I thought so too, then I discovered the magic of copywriting formulas.
My colleague Joanna Weibe has put together a phenomenal guide called The Ultimate Guide to No-Pain Copywriting (or, Every Copywriting Formula Ever). Bookmark it.
For further reading, check out Sean D'Souza's The Brain Audit. This was the one book that made copywriting click for me. It's a quick read too.
Hope that helps,
-k.
P.S.: For more info on building the perfect product page, listen to our podcast Building The Perfect Product Page.