It takes a lengthy chain of events to lead to a sale. As a merchant, you can’t control every step along the way, much as you’d like to: most frustratingly, the average online purchase will begin with a search that you can’t meaningfully prompt. Yes, advertising will help, but even the most effective ads in the world don’t guarantee results.

You can waste time and energy bemoaning this situation, railing at the unfairness — or you can focus on the things you can control. The latter is obviously the right choice. After all, you can sway every step after the first point of contact with your brand. That minuscule link presents an opportunity, and each step beyond it grows in importance.

The smart approach is to work backward from the point of conversion. Bringing someone to the cusp of purchase before letting them slip away is infuriatingly wasteful. And while the checkout stage technically presents the last step, it’s the penultimate step — that of selecting the product to buy — that’s particularly deserving of your effort.

And in the end, there’s one page that matters more than any other for sending shoppers to the checkout phase: the product page. Get that right and you’ll significantly improve your conversion rate. To that end, here are some key tips for creating effective product pages.

Research and Cater to your Target Audience

Every facet of each product page should be tailored toward the people you’re trying to reach. There’s little point in trying to service a general audience. And before you can do this tailoring, you need to actually know what those people are looking for. The research will give you the required insight. Look at their preferred social media channels and high-value influencers. Consider how they communicate, what they talk about, and what brands they mention.

What are the features they look for? Are they more interested in saving money or paying for top quality? Do they trend towards formality or informality? Are there companies (or even pieces of content) that they tend to promote or condemn? Answering these questions will help you create pages that can provide strong first impressions. You may only get one chance to earn someone’s custom, after all. You need to take advantage of it.

Make it Easy for Shoppers to Get Assistance

No product page can ever cover everything that a prospective customer might want to know. It’s hard enough to cover most things since you need to strike a delicate balance between being overly short and going into so much detail that you drive people away. Due to this, it’s vital that you make it as easy as possible for shoppers to get assistance when they want it. Try using a dropshipping website builder that is designed for this in mind, making your life easier.

Providing varied contact details is a good start, yes, but you need to go beyond that. It isn’t a great customer experience to submit an email query and await a response for a day or two. Whenever possible, you should offer live support. This is doable now even if you lack the resources for a 247 support team. The trick is to bring in elements of automation.

If you can have regular live support at certain points during the day, you can supplement that with AI-driven support the rest of the time. Today’s chatbot software is a world away from the clumsy messes that were popular during the early days of the internet. A well-programmed chatbot service (there are free options available, Useful) can deliver great results.

Keep your Content Trim and Keyword-Optimized

As noted, it’s possible to go into too much detail on a product page, so it’s key to cut out anything unnecessary. If you plan on using FAQs on product pages (which can be useful), put everything under collapsible subheadings for neatness. And for the sake of SEO, review your content structures and pay particular attention to keywords. Do you underuse them? Overuse them? Put them in the wrong places? Allow multiple pages to compete?

Once you’ve found your keywords, hit your primary keyword several times in headings, and spread your secondary keywords in sensible ways throughout your paragraphs and subheadings, but avoid the robotic feeling of so much online content. Text that reads as contrived will work against your goal of convincing the reader to buy from you. When in doubt, go with wording that sounds natural.

Include Clear and Representative Photos

A core issue with buying something online is the lack of physical context. You’re buying something material, after all, yet you don’t have the opportunity for inspection that you’d have if shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. How big is the product? What is the texture like? How does it look in different lighting conditions? The less you know, the tougher it’ll be to commit to an order. As a seller, you need to understand this.

Each product page must feature a strong range of product photos. These photos should span various distinct angles and conditions, allowing visitors to infer how the product will look in reality. This is true regardless of whether you’re selling products you’ve developed in-house or simply listing dropshipping items: the one thing you can always do yourself is to take some great product photos, and it can make a huge difference.

Conclusion

Your product pages can make or break even your most promising leads. If you use the tips we’ve set out here, you can create product pages that build on your hard-earned visits, earn high-value conversions, and leave buyers feeling satisfied with their experiences.