You import an XML feed from a wholesale supplier, and 5,000 products magically appear in your online store within minutes. Add a few nice photos, set the prices and wait for the flood of orders. Sounds like the e-commerce dream, right?
In reality, it’s the fastest way to bury your store in invisibility. If you use the same product descriptions as dozens of other sellers, Google will penalize you for it, and nothing will convince your customer to buy from you specifically (except the lowest price, and you don’t want to get into that price war).
In this article, we’ll show you why blindly copying supplier texts is a mistake and how to write a product page that convinces customers to buy even when you’re a bit more expensive than the competition.
The Double Suicide of Your Online Store
When you copy a product description onto your site that the supplier also sent to thirty other online stores, you shoot yourself in the foot twice:
Hit number 1: SEO (search engine optimization) Google hates so-called “duplicate content.” If Google’s crawler finds the same block of text on twenty different websites, it thinks: “Why should I rank this new store first when it offers users no unique value?” As a result, your product page sinks to page 8 of the search results, where nobody ever clicks.
Hit number 2: Customer psychology Supplier texts are rarely written by copywriters. They’re written by technicians or warehouse staff. They’re dry lists of specs (dimensions, material, weight) that trigger absolutely no emotion or desire to own the product. They don’t answer the most important question: “How will this thing make my life better?”
Features vs. Benefits (The Golden Rule of Selling)
The most common mistake on product pages is focusing on features instead of benefits. Customers don’t actually buy your product. They buy a better version of themselves or a solution to their problem.
- Feature (fact): What the product has or what it’s made of.
- Benefit (advantage): What the customer actually gets out of it and how it helps them.
A real-world example (selling a winter jacket):
- Supplier text (feature): The jacket features a 20,000 mm waterproof rating and a GORE-TEX membrane.
- Your new text (benefit): Stay dry and warm even in the worst snowstorm. Thanks to the premium membrane, you can ski all day without feeling cold or damp.
Every time you write a technical spec, ask yourself: “So what?” The answer to that question is your selling point.
Write for “Scanners,” Not Bookworms
Picture a customer standing in line for coffee, browsing your store on their phone. They don’t have time to read walls of text without a single paragraph break. People don’t read on the web; they “scan” text with their eyes. They look for anchor points.
How to format product copy the right way:
- Short paragraphs: No more than 3 to 4 lines of text.
- Clear subheadings: Let the customer know instantly what each section is about (e.g. instead of “Material,” use “Material that lasts for years”).
- Bullet points: They’re absolutely essential. Put the product’s biggest advantages right next to the main photo in 3 to 5 clear bullet points.
- Bold text: Highlight the keywords and phrases that matter most to you. If the customer reads only the bold words, they should still get the point of the product.
Answer Objections Before They Come Up
When customers browse a product, doubts run through their heads. “Will it fit me? What if it breaks? Won’t it be too complicated for me to use?”
If your product page doesn’t answer these unspoken questions, the customer won’t buy and will go look for information elsewhere (and probably buy there, too).
Your product page should include:
- Precise sizing / usage guidance: Avoid generic charts. Write: “The model in the photo is 180 cm tall and wears a size M. If you’re between two sizes, we recommend going with the smaller one.”
- An FAQ section (frequently asked questions) right on the product page: If people often email you the same question about this product, put the answer directly on the site.
- Guarantees and social proof: Reassure the customer that you’ll stand by them if something goes wrong. Use the power of A/B testing (which we wrote about in a previous article) and test whether adding “Hassle-free returns within 30 days” right below the “Buy” button increases your conversion rate. It usually does.
Your Copy Is Your Best Salesperson
A good copywriter can turn an ordinary piece of plastic into an indispensable helper the customer can’t imagine their day without. Don’t settle for products that are merely “physically present” on your site.
Invest time (or money) in quality copy. The product page is the moment of truth where a visitor becomes a paying customer. If you greet them there with a dry manual copied from China, your expensive PPC campaigns go completely to waste.
Do you have thousands of products in your store and don’t know where to start? You don’t have to rewrite everything at once. Get in touch with us at Tronos.
We’ll pick your top 20% of best-selling products or the categories that bring in the most revenue. We’ll write top-notch copy for them, improve the visual hierarchy and then run A/B tests to prove that the new copy really brings in more money.
👉 I want product pages that sell
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Do I have to rewrite the copy for all 10,000 products in my store?
No, that would be inefficient and, for many companies, financially devastating. Follow the 80/20 rule. Use your analytics to find out which 20% of products generate 80% of your revenue (your bestsellers and category “workhorses”). Rewrite those first. For the remaining, slower-selling items (the “long tail”), you can keep the basic copy for now, but over time optimize at least the main category descriptions.
Can I use artificial intelligence (e.g. ChatGPT) to write product descriptions?
Yes, AI is a great helper, but watch out for the copy-paste approach. If you just type “Write me a description for this pot,” the AI will churn out a pile of generic fluff that won’t sell and sounds robotic. Use AI more like an assistant: give it exact specifications, your unique tone of voice and a list of keywords, but always read the final text and add details that make it sound human.
How long should the ideal product page be?
There’s no universal word count. The rule is: the text should be as long as it takes to answer every objection and build the customer’s desire. If you sell a cheap €5 phone case, a few punchy bullet points will do. But if you sell an expensive €1,500 coffee machine, the customer expects a complete story, an explanation of the technology, video guides and plenty of reviews before buying, so the page has to be much longer.
