Product Pages That Sell - Theory

This article is in two parts Theory and Practice. I hope that you will read both parts of the article to get the full picture.

The web pages that present your products (and services) for sale are in many ways the heart of your site. They are the digital equivalent of your salesman standing on the forecourt showing a customer a product range and then a specific product. You would expect that your salesman would have answers for all questions about function, usability and price. Your web product pages must do the same.

3 Levels

There are three basic levels to the presentation of products:

Overview - range
Product Information - specific product, features and benefits
Technical Information - deeper facts, how to's etc.

The three levels should be present to provide compete information. In some situations the three levels will be on separate pages but in others they will appear on the same page. This will depend on the product, range and amount of information required by the customer to make a decision.

All three levels must be contained in one section. At no time should technical information live in a different part of the site from the actual product it belongs to. What this means is that a user should not have to use the menu to move from a product page to go to another section that contains other vital product sales information. This includes my standard caution against misuse of PDF files.

To Sell in Content or a Shopping Cart?

There are two main ways to sell on the internet. And by "sell" I mean offer for sale which either means a 'buy now' event (e-commerce) or progressive call to action process like: call for more information or visit the store.

As you will see each has it's strengths and weaknesses but the greatest weaknesses lie outside the technologies and in the human domain.

Shopping Cart

Pros: automation, searchability, good for high volumes of simple products

Cons: pre-defined, costly in time and money to develop, can encourage under-selling esp. in complex products, customers don't feel happy unless very well designed

It seems to make sense that if your are offering products for sale on the web that you use an e-commerce shopping cart. But I firmly believe that this is often not the case at all. b-commerce thinking says that we need to think of the customer's needs over our own short term needs (often laziness) and provide what will solve the greater need of serving the customer with a great solution; and the business with a sale.

Shopping carts and similar product databases are undoubtedly wonderful tools but like anything there are some drawbacks with using product databases. People don't really enjoy using databases. You can roll out examples like Facebook or ebay and be right but these are popular not because of the interfaces but because of the content, or opportunities, they afford us. Have a look at a lot of smallish businesses that have put a pile of products in a pre-built cart and said, "Here they are, buy them." I think you will quickly realize that you don't enjoy being in these 'stores' because they are hard to use and generally just don't have the flow that a human desires to be happy.

The second great danger in using pre-built databases for sales is that it formularizes the content that is going in. You can only put information in boxes, and those boxes are not necessarily where the user needs them but where a IT coder found it expedient to put them. Putting information into boxes is like coloring by numbers, it cannot allow freedom for creativity and human spirit. The information that goes into the boxes tends to end up being flat and lifeless, devoid of the spark that makes people fall in love. This often is made worse by handing the filling of the product database to a lower, less involved staff member who sees the task as menial and rote. I don't blame the staff member because obviously that is what the sales and marketing person thinks themselves when they hand the job over. Sales is never rote! Selling by rote shows no passion and therefore a disrespect for the customer. The rote salesman is in effect saying, "I don't care about you. Give me your money." This is a win-lose approach that must see the business come to a sticky end sooner or later. At that point it is either too late to recover (business closes) or will at least cost vast sums of money to make right (re-brand, re-train, customer recovery).

The final problem is uncovered when you attempt to customise, or build, a database to be exactly what you and your customers need. Databases are very expensive things, and rightly so because good database design is a major undertaking. Every little thing that you do has to be planned, turned into business logic and then coded. The smarter you want your database to be (the more connections) then the more planning, business logic and coding that needs to be done.

Shopping carts and product databases are good for high volumes of products and simple items like screws and other things that need to be searched for and don't require any complex or specialist sell. At that point the automation can outweigh any negatives. Still just be sure that the shopping cart is pleasant for users or you will frighten people away at the start.

Content

Pros: dynamic, cheap to build, expandability (more space), good for complex products with lots of information

Cons: requires some human understanding, time to design and build initial formula

Using content (words and pictures on a page) instead of databases has only two real costs and since they are also inherent in using databases are of no greater cost or relevance. Selling in content requires a knowledge of what your customers want and need to decide to buy (or proceed to the next step) and the time to build the pages. Great news is that building a strategy and page formula as a starting point is vastly less costly than database programming. You can even design product page layouts at home on a piece of scrap paper by sketching out a set of storyboards.

Content as a sales mechanism means that you can handle each product as unique and add information that is to-hand in meaningful locations as necessary. Deciding on what goes in and what gets tossed out or put in another section like a Gallery (and referred to with a link) is based on human need rather than defined by a rigid pre-defined structure.

In many cases selling in content offers massive advantage over a database. If you look around at some top companies with smallish product ranges, you will see that they sell mostly in content and then move the customer to a cart when the customer has committed to purchase. As at time of writing I think that Propellerheads, makers of Reason (really cool music software I use) have made pretty good use of content-selling backed with a shopping cart.

to Part II - Product Pages That Sell - Practice