What are product detail pages and why are they critical for ecommerce success?

Dec 11th 2023ecommerce

Winter is coming, along with a bunch of houseguests. You want to replace your battered old sofa — after all,  the dog chewed it up last year — with something classy, cushy, and cozy. A sofa fit for having coffee, lounging on after eating Thanksgiving turkey, opening holiday presents, watching the tube, and beyond.

So pulling out your trusty mobile device, you hit your favorite ecommerce website, searching and browsing its web pages until you find an amazingly perfect-looking couch. You happily place this prospective addition to your household belongings in your shopping cart to think about for a while as you scroll through your social media feed.

But then, doubts start to creep into your mind. Is something about this sofa too good to be true? Is it OK to buy furniture online? Will it fit along the window in your apartment? What’s the fabric like? Are the product reviews all glowing? If not, what are the problems you could encounter? Will your houseguests ooh and ahh and tell you they love the look? Will the dog consider it the next conquest?

The ecommerce product detail page

This is where the product detail page (PDP) for the couch comes in handy. You know, the page that sits a level below the product listing page (PLP; also known as the product category page), which highlights a variety of attractive sofas or other types of items that might catch your eye. It’s the page you ultimately drill down to in order to see the specific product attributes and relevant details before making a purchase decision.

When you’re shopping online, the PDP gives you all the relevant information in plain English. When you’re selling online, it does the same for your shoppers. Product page design and content creation play a crucial role in capturing your shoppers’ attention and driving up your conversions. PDPs serve as virtual shelves of your online business, providing shoppers with comprehensive overviews of each product’s benefits, features, and specifications.

That’s all good, except that some ecommerce retailers don’t get their PDPs quite right. They don’t realize the importance of fine-tuning these key pages, or they don’t make the time to optimize. Which is unfortunate, because product detail pages are not only informationally critical, they’re an opportunity to personalize content in order to upsell and cross-sell to keep revenue up.

What are product detail pages?  

A product detail page is an ecommerce product page that showcases and describes a product and covers everything shoppers might possibly want to know about it. Here’s an example of a PDP from Amazon:

The PDP typically includes these components:

• Product title: The product name, for instance “PS5 Spiderman 2 Limited Edition”, identifies the nature of the item and begins to describe it.
• Product images. A picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s also true on the Internet. When selling something like a movie or music CD, a single image may convey enough information. But with other types of products, such as clothing, various high-quality product photos, showing the item at different angles, are a no-brainer. Let’s say a shopper arrives at a product listing for a long-sleeve soft touch red turtleneck sweater. They want high-quality images of this potential purchase from the front and back so they can imagine how it might fit. Plus, they likely want to zoom in to visually feel the fabric and try to discern whether it’s the right shade of red.
• Product description: This is the written overview of the product — marketing copy that highlights the product benefits and features.
• Specifications. These include measurements, color options, information about assembly (if applicable), and other details.
• Price: The cost, which could vary by version and indicate discounts that would be applied.
• Customer reviews and star ratings (usually from 1–5) from real people, which can help potential buyers cut through any marketing hype to uncover any risks of buying and customer problems with item quality.
• User-generated content, such as testimonials in the form of product videos customers have created. This type of endorsement lets shoppers get more familiar with the product and how it works. If they’re looking for a state-of-the-art blender, for instance, a satisfied buyer showing it whipping up smoothies is a great way to win them over. 
• Availability information: The product detail page indicates whether the item is in stock.
• Shipping costs and shipping options, estimated delivery time frames, perhaps with links to FAQs about shipping information.
• The return policy — for how long is an item accepted back and what are the conditions? 
• Cross-selling recommendations: You can use AI to recommend related or complementary products that shoppers might want to add to their purchases. For example, if someone is making a buying decision about a laptop PDP, a popular laptop bag, headphones, Microsoft software, or a monitor might be suggested as an add-on.
• A chatbot or question-answering functionality enhances shopper satisfaction by letting people get details and resolve concerns. A PDP can also include a FAQ section.
• A call to action (CTA): This is a prompt, such as an Add to Cart or Buy Now button, that visually encourages shoppers to complete their check-out process.

In the competitive, crazy, crowded world of ecommerce sites, PDPs must include all of these elements to win over potential customers, get them through checkout, improve conversion rates, and maximize revenue. The good news is that with high-quality PDP page components, you can work wonders for your online shopping KPIs.

Why great PDPs boost revenue 

PDPs are an integral part of a successful ecommerce optimization strategy that can:

Showcase selling points 

PDPs are the place for retailers to emphasize benefits and key features of their products. Engaging, easy-to-read product descriptions and photos that highlight benefits win over shoppers: 85% factor in  product information and images.

Build trust  

As part of a good customer experience, shoppers consult PDPs in order to assess the quality of a product and its suitability for meeting their needs. Supplying detailed information about product benefits and features ensures transparency and builds credibility, which, over time, engenders trust.

Improve sales with personalized recommendations 

By leveraging shopper data and browsing history, on PDPs, you can then provide personalized product recommendations — upselling and cross-selling suggestions for complementary items and similar products, along with offers you can be confident are likely to resonate with shoppers. According to McKinsey, this can be pretty lucrative: you can earn 40% more revenue by personalizing content.  

Drive organic leads 

Incorporating relevant keywords and meta descriptions helps search engines determine what your site is offering, which makes it easier for your target audience to discover your products. That means more-qualified leads finding your online store PDPs, a potentially lower bounce rate, and shoppers possibly exploring more products in your catalog.

Maximize the power of PDPs  

By presenting comprehensive, well-organized, attractive information, a PDP gives shoppers the all-clear to click Buy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the quality of a PDP can profoundly enhance shopper satisfaction and increase revenue.

Ready to take the initiative to improve your ecommerce business user experience and revenue? Along with excellent PDPs, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve got effective internal search to direct people to those pages. Search technology leader Algolia offers a powerful search solution that helps ecommerce shoppers zero in on what they want. Contact us or request a demo to get the scoop!