People can’t buy what they don’t understand
A photograph can show somebody what a product looks like. The description has to do rather more.
What is it? What does it do? Is it right for me? What’s it made from? How big is it? Will it fit? What makes this one different? And why does it cost £20 more than the remarkably similar-looking one next to it?
A good product description anticipates the questions standing between interest and purchase and answers the important ones without making somebody work unnecessarily hard to find them.
I’ve been writing professionally for 30 years, including product, retail, advertising, brand and technical copy for businesses large and small.
I write product descriptions that explain what matters, bring out the useful differences and give customers enough information to make a decision.
Sometimes that takes 40 words.
Sometimes it takes 400.
The product gets a vote.
Features matter. What they mean matters more.
Product descriptions have always been told to sell benefits rather than features. That’s useful advice, up to a point. If I’m buying a laptop, I probably do want to know how the processor, memory and battery affect what I can actually do with it. But I may also want to know exactly which processor it contains, how much memory it has and how long the battery lasts.
Features and specifications aren’t the enemy. Unexplained features are.
A technical characteristic may translate into something faster, lighter, quieter, warmer, easier to clean, simpler to install or less likely to need replacing. My job is to understand that connection and decide what needs explaining. Because “premium-grade construction” tells me considerably less than what the construction actually does for me.
The customer can’t pick it up
Online shopping has removed quite a few useful things from the buying process.
The customer can’t necessarily feel the fabric, check the weight, turn the object over, try the handle or ask the person standing beside it a question. The product page has to compensate. That means thinking beyond the obvious sales message.
What might make somebody hesitate? What do they need to compare? Is there something about size, compatibility, materials, care, installation or use that needs explaining? Is an important detail buried in a specification table that many customers won’t understand?
The description shouldn’t repeat everything else on the page. It should fill the gaps.
Your products shouldn’t sound as though they belong to somebody else
Manufacturer descriptions are useful sources of information. They’re not necessarily useful marketing copy.
If you and 20 other retailers use the same description, there’s very little in the words to distinguish your version of the product from anyone else’s. And your own products have a voice too.
A £1,500 piece of furniture probably shouldn’t sound like a £12 kitchen gadget. A children’s product needs a different approach from an industrial component. Fashion, food, technology, homeware and specialist B2B products all ask different things of the writer.
I’ll work with your existing tone of voice and brand guidelines where you have them. Where you don’t, I’ll establish an approach that suits the products, audience and wider brand.
Consistency matters.
Generic consistency doesn’t.
Search engines need to understand the product too
A product page can only sell to somebody who finds it.
For e-commerce descriptions, that means understanding the words and phrases customers use when they’re looking for the product and incorporating the relevant ones naturally. Product type, material, size, style, intended use, important features and other attributes can all help establish what a page is about.
But SEO product writing shouldn’t result in the same keyword being wedged into every other sentence. The search term has to belong there. Where required, I can work from keyword research supplied by you or your SEO agency, or research appropriate search terms and competing pages as part of the project.
Depending on the brief, I can also provide product titles, meta titles and descriptions, category copy and other supporting content. Getting somebody onto the product page matters. Giving them a reason to buy once they’re there matters rather more.
Three products are a writing job. Three hundred are a system.
Large product ranges create a different challenge.
Each description needs to say something useful about the individual product while remaining consistent with everything around it. Before writing hundreds of descriptions, I prefer to establish the rules.
How long should they be? Which information appears where? How are features and specifications handled? Which terminology remains consistent? What changes between product categories? How does the brand voice flex? Which products need more explanation than others?
For larger projects, I’ll usually create a sample batch first.
We can agree the structure, tone, level of detail and terminology before applying it across the wider range. That saves discovering at product 147 that we should have done things differently.
What about AI?
Yes, AI can write product descriptions. Quite a lot of them. Quite quickly. For large, structured catalogues, that’s potentially useful.
The more interesting questions are what information it’s working from, which details matter, how products should be differentiated, what the customer needs to know, what can safely be claimed and whether the resulting 500 descriptions sound like your brand rather than 500 variations of the same paragraph.
The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be human or AI.
For some large projects, the sensible approach may involve technology for scale and human judgement for strategy, examples, editing and quality control. For others – particularly premium, complex, unusual or strategically important products – individual writing deserves more attention.
I’m less interested in defending the honour of the human copywriter than in finding the approach that produces good product copy.
Accuracy isn’t optional
Persuasive doesn’t mean imaginative with the facts. I’ll work from your product data, specifications, supplier information and other approved source material. For specialist or technical products, I’ll ask questions where something isn’t clear rather than filling the gap with something that sounds plausible.
That’s particularly important when working across a large range. One inaccurate detail copied into 200 descriptions isn’t consistency. It’s just the same mistake 200 times.
If your products need better words, tell me about them.