Practical Tips for Optimizing Your Product Listings

Last week, we took a 30,000 foot view of a flooded and growing e-commerce market. We set out 3 strategies you can start pursuing immediately to stand out against the swelling tides of competition: optimizing your listings, building your brand reputation, and rewarding your customers’ loyalty.

This week, we’ll be focusing some practical tips to make the most of your listings, both on your website and on social media.

Visuals That Put Your Products in the Best Light

Illegible fonts, bad lighting, poor color choices, oh my! Quality is a clear way to differentiate yourself online. It doesn’t take much to signal to potential customers that your business doesn’t care about it, either. Thankfully, one of the biggest turn-offs in your customers’ user experience is also one of the easiest to fix: blurry, low-resolution photos.

Vector graphics (line art, simple drawings, and logos/.svg, .pdf, .eps ) can scale up or down easily, but raster images (photos and detailed illustrations/.jpeg, .tiff, .gif, .bmp) may pixelate when you resize them. A high-resolution image for your website will be between 96 and 72 PPI (pixels per inch) at its final size. To confirm your image’s quality, follow these steps:

For PCs

• Size your image to the final recommended size for your project and save.
• Right click on the image
• Choose “Properties” from the menu
• Check under the “Details” tab for the resolution; if it’s under 72 PPI, your image won’t look its best.

For Macs

• Size your image to the final recommended size for your project and save.
• Open the image in Preview.
• Go to “Tools” > “Show Inspector” (or press Command + I).
• In the Inspector window, click on the “i” tab.
• The “Resolution” field will show you the PPI; if it’s under 72, your image won’t look its best.

You can also use programs like Adobe Photoshop tools to upload your image and confirm the correct PPI. If you don’t happen to have Adobe, you can try a free online tool like Photopea.com. For fast loading times and best SEO practices, make sure your image file size is under 100 KB, as well.

Product Descriptions That Sell

You’ve got a product, a price, and great, high-res visuals go with it. Maybe even a “buy now” button. Now it’s time to really sell it.

MarketingExperiments A/B testing results showed a 78% higher conversion rate for an e-commerce website when it displayed its product descriptions prominently. A smart product name and an easy-to-locate, accurate, detailed description will increase sales conversion rates and decrease pesky returns.

Well-written descriptions not only tell your customers what your products are and how they work, they also tell your customers an attention-grabbing story about how they will solve their problem better than the competition can. (If you missed it, read this post for more on storytelling in sales and marketing.) The best product descriptions will do all of that while incorporating relevant SEO keywords to ensure your message reaches the right audience.

Inside our free Content Kit, which you can download below, you’ll find a Product Description Checklist designed to help you write clearer, more persuasive content without the guesswork.

Enhance Listings with Short-Form Video

Short-form videos are one of the top content marketing trends for 2024. According to Forbes, “Google reported YouTube Shorts generates more than 50 billion daily views. This is still a fraction of Meta’s Reels, which are viewed 200 billion times a day, but strong growth.”

Zheng Xiang Xiang, a Chinese live streamer, made headlines in early Spring 2024 for illustrating the effectiveness of short-form video selling on TikTok. She earned approximately $270K USD in one week via her videos, displaying products in a conveyor-like line for under three seconds each.

The same short-form videos you use on social can be excellent for your website product listings. Nordstrom is a good example of one retailer who is leading this trend. They use a mix of six second “clothing in motion” shorts and >60 second sales consultant shorts that go more in depth into a specific item. Kept brief to prevent slow page loading, which can reduce web traffic, these videos effectively draw attention to the product, show a 360° view, and demonstrate how the item performs in context.

When creating your own short-form videos, it may not make sense to speed run through your products the same way as Zheng Xiang Xiang does, but there’s nothing wrong with starting with a punchy hook to grab attention. Record with a vertical orientation to optimize for cellphones where these videos are most often viewed. Bonus points for demonstrating your product’s quality, telling a story, and/or incorporating authentic content from your customers (with their approval, of course!)

Next Week: Winning Customers for Life

In the next post, we’ll explore some simple ways you can build a strong brand reputation and reward customer loyalty. These strategies will help you create lasting relationships with your customers and encourage repeat business, areas where many fly-by-night companies fall short—giving you a competitive advantage.

Make it a great week online, everyone!