Why read this? : We explore content ideas from 3 different e-Commerce product page examples. Learn the types of images and information other brands use to increase conversions. Read this to stimulate content ideas for your own product pages.
The basics of a good product page are clear. As a minimum, it has to include :-
- product name.
- product information.
- product imagery.
This is about coming up with content ideas and testing them on your page. Your goal is to optimise the experience and drive more sales.
But, how do you come up with these ideas? If you’re lucky, your e-Commerce agency leads this. But if not, your best bet is to research what other online sellers do. You look for ideas you can adapt and try out on your own product pages.
That’s this week’s focus as we share product page examples from Amazon and D2C, plus a page from our own store.
Why these product page examples?
In e-Commerce planning, there’s always a trade-off between complexity and control in different selling channels. The same applies to your product pages.
Selling via a marketplace or bricks-and-clicks online retailer means less complexity, but less control.
They set up the page template for you. You’re limited to putting images and information into their product information management systems.
Design, layout and functionality are usually out of your hands.
Pure players like Amazon give you more control over your product page. You can add content to customise and optimise the customer experience, though you often have to pay extra for this (like most activities with Amazon). Still, the extra content opportunity is why Amazon provides the first of our product page examples.
However, doing it yourself is the best way to get maximum control. Set up your own direct-to-consumer (D2C) site, and you can create the page exactly as you want. That’s why our other product page examples are both brands that’ve done D2C.
Coca-Cola on Amazon
Coca-Cola is very active in e-Commerce, and they’re seen as leaders in consistently delivering the basics of e-Commerce.
E-Commerce gives them more touchpoints to connect with customers, and another channel to bring their brand to life.
They’ve made some changes since we last looked at their Amazon product page. Their whole portfolio is now listed under its own “Coca-Cola Shop” page, with a snazzy intro video.
Coca-Cola 36 Can Multipack product page
We’ll focus on their hero product, the Coca-Cola Classic 36 Can Multipack.
Check the basics on this, and they’re all very clear :-
- product name – Coca-Cola, sub-brand – Classic and specific product identifier – Multipack cans 36 x 375ml. Check.
- product information – further down the page, and we’ll dig into this in a second. Check.
- product images – 7 pack images with an option to zoom in on each. To be honest, only the last one – the nutrition and ingredients information – is useful. But anyway, check.
Price and delivery
The first thing you notice after these basics is the price and delivery information. They’re the next thing your eye scans to. This feels deliberately positioned next to the basics to be the next item in the visual hierarchy.
For shoppers who already know what they want, the basic product information plus price and delivery is often all they need. They can check out from here if that’s all they need to know.
There are 2 different price offers.
A one-time purchase price, and a 10% saving price if you buy on subscribe and save. It also makes it clear delivery is free, and when the product will be delivered (a week from the day we looked at the page).
Product information
We start with standard product information. This :-
- reconfirms the number of cans in the pack.
- describes typical usage occasions.
- shares where the product is made (Australia).
- shows its health rating (low) and recyclability.
Given Coca-Cola is so well-known, you may think everyone already knows most of this, so why include it? But, this type of information adds clarity and consistency. That helps build credibility and removes ambiguity or doubt.
99% of customers may skip past it, but that still leaves 1% who want to find out something specific. Here’s where they start. You have to put a little bit of extra work into your content to make sure you maximise your sales with all potential customers in e-Commerce.
Plus, this type of product information also helps with SEO. Sparse pages with little content don’t show up in searches because they don’t help customers.
Recommendations
Scroll down and next you get a set of product recommendations from Amazon :-
- Frequently bought together products.
- Other items customers bought after viewing this item.
- Customers who viewed this item also viewed.
Further down the page, there are also Products Related to this item. This section is “sponsored”, or in other words, other brands can pay to have their product images appear here to lure these shoppers away.
All this “other product listing” may seem excessive. But it’s done to put more product images on the screen, making the page more like a virtual shelf. It’s the images (rather than the text) that grab a customer’s initial attention with their use of colours and design.
More product information
We then get more specific product information :-
- dimensions and weight of the pack.
- date it was first available on Amazon Australia.
- the ASIN reference.
- county of origin.
- ranking against other products in its category.
- a summary of the Customer Review stars and ratings.
These will have a limited audience, but they still help build the impression of credibility on the page.
From the manufacturer
Next up are masterbrand lifestyle product images from Coca-Cola. These show higher quality images of the product, customers enjoying the product and more pack images. You also get each product’s tagline and what type of packs it’s available in.
Customer reviews
We then get a section with all the reviews for this specific product. There’s a summary count of the 1 to 5-star ratings (it averages 4.8 out of 5 – very good) plus individual customer reviews.
As per our advanced e-Commerce techniques article, this is a good example of social proof. Seeing 800+ other people have bought the product and left a positive review is reassuring. It makes it feel like a more trustworthy purchase.
Even more recommendations
Still with us? Nearly done on this page.
So, finally, before we hit the footer menu, we get even more recommendations. Customers who viewed items in your browsing history also viewed, and popular products based on this item.
You could argue there’s too much information on this page. Some would say less is more, and so much information might confuse customers. However, look at the way it’s laid out. The information is spread over a long page, with clearly marked sections and lots of white space so it never looks cluttered.
The customer will stop scrolling when they find the specific information they want. Arguably, the spacing out of the information is a good example of progressive disclosure as per our design psychology article. The information is slowly revealed as it’s needed by the customer, rather than crammed in all at once.
The overall amount of information here reassures the customer there’s some substance behind the page, even if most of it’s playing a hygiene role.
What lessons would you take from this?
Coca-Cola on Amazon is one the best product page examples to look at, as it’s well thought out and comprehensive. In particular, it’s good at providing lots of clear and consistent product information.
Yes, most customers probably just click buy now and move on. The information hierarchy at the top of the page makes it easy for them to do that.
But some customers will have questions and want to know more. They’ll have their System 2 brain switched on.
This idea comes from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It suggests that most of the time, we have an autopilot (System 1) part of our brain that gets us through most daily interactions. It’s fast and mostly efficient, but based on habits and biases.
But sometimes our System 2 brain kicks in. It’s more logical, analytical and cautious. It needs information to help it make decisions, and that’s really what all that extra product information is helping with here. (See our thoughts about thinking article for more on this).
Assuming Coca-Cola also get analytics data (which they’ll have to pay for, as it’s Amazon), they should be able to track which sections get the most attention and links. This will help them further refine what content to use to further optimise their page.
Bundaberg Rum D2C
We covered Bundaberg’s overall D2C offer in our article about online alcohol selling. But here, we’ll focus on a specific product. We’ll look at how they sell Bundaberg Red Rum 700ml to see what we can learn from this next of our product page examples.
Again, let’s start with the basics
- product name – Bundaberg, sub-brand – Red Rum and specific product identifier – 700ml. Check.
- product information – this is further down the page, and we’ll dig into this in a second. Check.
- product images – only the 1 pack image, though as it sits on a branded D2C site, there are plenty of other marketing images elsewhere on the site. Check.
Price and delivery
We get the price offer under the product name and we’re given a delivery window of 5-14 days. There’s no additional information on this page though.
You have to click on the FAQs in the footer menu to find answers to typical questions like payment methods they accept and details on how and when they handle deliveries.
It’s not impossible to work out this is where those answers are, but it feels like they’re missing a trick not making the link more obvious on the product page itself.
There are 14 items in the footer menu. So there’s a little bit of friction in the customer experience. You have to first know to look for the FAQs, and then pick out the link.
As per our nudge psychology in e-Commerce article, anything that makes it harder to buy can impact sales. You want to make the product page easy and attractive to use. This one might lose a few customers by making it harder to find out more about price and delivery.
Product information
Scroll down to get more details about the product. First, what sounds like the copy from the pack, describing the brand experience.
Bundaberg Extra Smooth Red has been crafted to deliver an incredibly smooth taste while retaining the unique character for which Bundaberg Rum is famous. Filtered through red gum charcoal to deliver an incredibly smooth finish with hints of brown sugar, caramel and honey.
Then, you get the product tasting notes, covering the aroma, palate, finish and a serving suggestion.
There’s also a “more information” tab which shares the manufacturer, alcohol percentage, number of serves, liquor style and volume.
Finally, there’s a tab to leave a review, although at the time we visited, no one had yet done so.
What lessons would you take from this?
Clearly, there’s less information on this page than in the Coca-Cola example.
Part of that might be category-specific. There are rules about what you can say about alcohol. We’d guess the business’s legal team had a lot to say about what type of information could be shared.
Engagement vs. selling content
Also, given this e-Commerce site also works as a brand marketing site, much of the engagement content is kept separate from the product page.
For example, in the top menu bar, you find :-
- links to the company’s story.
- how they make the rum.
- their history.
- their partnerships.
You also get details of how to contact and visit the distillery, and recipes for drinks and food using the product itself.
There’d be an argument here that by spreading this content around, you’re adding friction because the customer has to click / look for it. However, we’re not so sure that’s how it works based on what we assume are 2 different customer journeys to reach this page.
Different customer journeys
First, you’ll have new-to-brand customers who want to find out more about the brand first.
Hitting them with selling information before they’re ready may put them off. So, it makes sense to have separate brand pages so they can browse / engage with the brand first. Then an easy link to the product selling page when they’re ready to buy.
But you’ll also have loyal customers who already know the brand and just want to buy. So, having a relatively clean product page with just the basic information needed to buy, and none of the marketing waffle also makes sense.
It’s really down to what works best in the context of each customer’s journey.
Three-Brains Shop T-shirt design
Finally, in terms of product page examples, we’ll look at one of our own product pages on our online shop.
Clearly, all the basics are in place, as we use this image to show what we mean by “product basics”. So, the product name, the product information and the product images (4 of them) are clear here.
But when we put this page together, that basic information wouldn’t have given us the minimum of 300 words you need to rank on SEO.
Nor would it have given the customer any information about this design or the product.
Which given we’re rather less famous than Coke or Bundaberg, we clearly need to do to encourage customers to buy.
Design information
The first extra information we added was a summary of the source of inspiration for the design.
In this case, it was part of a series we designed around the inventions of different countries. Here, that was Arthur Lydiard, a New Zealand athletics coach widely credited with inventing the running training technique, of jogging. Two of his proteges won gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics.
Features
Given this product is a Spreadshirt Print on Demand based shop, the specific features of the product itself (rather than its design) are standard. So, here we lifted the copy directly from the product description on the Spreadshirt site. For example, the material used and the colours and sizes available. Clicking on the link takes you to an embedded Spreadshirt product page which expands on those details.
That page also shares more information on :-
- delivery (as that’s handled by Spreadshirt, not us).
- other products featuring the same design.
- size guides.
- Spreadshirt’s terms and conditions and contact details.
Design Notes
We also added more details from the design notes, describing our ideas and some of the Adobe Illustrator implementation notes.
For example, the colours and typography we used, as we could then add links to those pages on our site.
There were 3 main reasons for adding this extra content :-
- SEO benefits by including extra text, relevant links and keywords.
- Customer experience benefits by making the page seem more substantial and well thought-out.
- As a way to talk in our brand tone of voice and show the brand’s personality.
Recommendations
Finally, we include recommended other products, under the banners of “Related products” and “You may also like”. The idea here is to add more product imagery and links to the page, so it has the effect of feeling like a virtual shelf. (as in the Amazon example).
If the customer doesn’t like this product, it gives them options to go elsewhere. And if they do like this product, then there’s a cross-selling / up-selling opportunity from those other products.
We set up these sections in the WooCommerce back-end when we first created the product page. That let us shape what the section looked like and for each product, which other products should feature.
Contact
We could have just left contact details in the footer menu. But as the shop runs as a separate experience from our brand site, we wanted to make these more obvious on the product page. This helps reduce friction when the customer needs to get in touch.
It’s also a requirement for listing on Google Merchant Centre to make your contact details visible on your product page.
Social links
Finally, most of our social activity relates to the coaching and consulting part of our business. But by showing our social links here, it makes the customer feel more comfortable we’re an established seller, and are visible in multiple channels. This helps build trust and credibility.
Conclusion - E-Commerce content ideas from product page examples
E-Commerce product pages have to work on multiple levels.
A basic product page always has the product name, information, and images.
But once you have those, you need creative thinking to make the experience better for the customer.
When you sell via an online retailer (as per our Amazon and Coca-Cola example), you want to get lots of helpful information content onto that page.
You put the vital information at the top of the page to make it easy to buy. Then you progressively disclose more information for those customers who want to know more.
If it’s your own D2C store and also represents your brand such as our Bundaberg example, you separate your content rather than cram it onto a single page. Engaging content spread around the site for those wanting to know more. And a simple, clean product page for those ready to buy.
Finally, if selling something less well-known (like our T-shirt designs), you need to get more creative in what you share. The product page has to help tell your selling story, such as we did by adding where the design idea came from, and how we put it together.
The key lesson from these product page examples is there’s no single best product page layout and content. Yes, you need basics and some extra marketing pizazz. But it’s down to what experience will work best with your customers. You try different things and use your data to determine which works best.
Check out our how to get more sales online guide and product page content article for more on this. Or get in touch if you’ve any questions about these product page examples we’ve shared.
Photo credits
Delivery – driver handing over package : Photo by RoseBox رز باکس on Unsplash
Woman looking at phone in dark room : Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash
Question mark sign : Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash
Graphic designer using Adobe : Photo from Pixabay
Customer service headset near laptop : Photo by Petr Macháček on Unsplash
