E-Commerce Blueprint: The Step-by-Step Guide to Online Store Success by Rob Mabry

Author:Rob Mabry [Mabry, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-07-30T14:00:00+00:00

Time to Stock the Shelves

The most beautifully designed e-commerce site in the world isn’t worth much without products for customers to buy. So once the store design work is complete, it’s time to upload your products into the store. Most shopping carts allow you to perform a bulk upload of products from a spreadsheet file in a format called a .csv.

The following information is usually included in the product upload spreadsheet, though the format and columns will vary from cart to cart:

 Category

 Product Name

 Product code or part number

 Retail Price

 Sale Price

 Your Cost (for sales tracking)

 Weight

 Shipping weight

 Fixed Shipping Cost

 Free Shipping (Y or N)

 Product width

 Product height

 Product depth

 Brand

 Option set (such as sizes or colors)

 Can be purchased?

 Product is visible?

 Current stock

 Low stock alert threshold

 Meta keywords

 Meta description

 URL

 Product headline

 Product page title

 Short description

 Detailed description

 Product Image Location

 Meta title

 Condition (New or Used)

Your supplier may provide you with a product spreadsheet that looks very similar to this or you may have to build it from scratch. Store owners are frequently tempted to just load up the product information “as is.” That’s a huge mistake.

At a minimum you need to rewrite the product descriptions using good copywriting techniques that will sell the product to your customer’s. Most manufacturers’ descriptions tell you what a product is, not why you should buy it.

Shoppers want to be enticed into buying a product. They want to know how it will change their life and solve their problems. That’s reason enough to take the time to edit all of your product descriptions, but there is another, better reason.

It’s very unlikely that you are the only person on the internet selling the products in your niche. Most likely, there are dozens if not hundreds of people selling the exact same products. Most of those store owners were probably too lazy or uninformed to even think to bother changing the stock descriptions on their products. They just used the same stale descriptions provided by the manufacturers.

So when a customer goes searching for a product in Google, there are a whole slew of pages that share the exact same description. Many of those pages will just be ignored by the search engines as duplicate content. No need to show ten search results with the exact same information on the first page of your search. Google wants the best possible search experience for its users and will weed out like content in favor of uniqueness.

That’s why it’s important to write unique, relevant content on every page of your site. Not only will it help distinguish your site in the search engines and improve your search engine rankings, it will also distinguish your site from the competition.

Captivating product descriptions that are colorful, informative and sell an experience are far more likely to keep a customer glued to your site then a list of attributes and specifications. Tell me why the product is going to make my life better and I’m far more likely to buy.

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