Best Practices for Designing Shopify Product Pages in 2020 

Well-designed product pages are more likely to sell. Here are the essential practices to follow when building your Shopify product pages to ensure more sales. 

All of your marketing, all of your branding, and all of your efforts to divert traffic to your online store are ultimately trying to get people to one place: the checkout. Your most powerful means of doing this are your product pages, therefore it makes sense to have a thorough understanding of the best practices for building Shopify product pages in 2020.

“The paramount goal for your product pages should be to build user confidence by providing all the information necessary for a purchasing decision and making the process as intuitive and straightforward as possible.”

- Rosara Joseph, Venture Web

Why are product pages so important? 

A poorly designed Shopify product page can turn a potential conversion into a cold dead end, whereas a well-designed one that has your customer’s aspirations in mind can be the final push that convinces them to buy. 

Suit Supply has sleek and minimalist product pages that take into account expert strategies to push customers to buy. 

There are unwritten rules that every Shopify product page should adhere to. You might think that your product is so amazing and that your website and branding look so great that all you need to do is show your customers the product and they’ll buy it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. 

In reality, many people will land on your product pages from elsewhere on the web without ever having seen the rest of your website. They’ll be completely unaware of your brand and new to your products. 

In the next part, you’re going to learn how to make your product pages shine. 

How to build incredible Shopify product pages

You already know your products are awesome, now you need to get the right information across so anyone visiting your product pages knows this too. You can do this by employing these best practices when building all of your product pages on Shopify. 

Have a clear CTA 

The sole function of your product page is ultimately to sell the product. Everything else on the product page is just there to further convince the customer to hit the ‘Add to Cart’ button. For this reason, your CTA - the ‘Add to Cart’ button - needs to stand out more than anything else on the page. 

The CTA button should be visible as soon as the customers land on the page - they should never have to scroll down to find it. Your CTA should have an uncluttered design and distinctive color that makes it stand out from the rest of your page. Customers want to know that they can buy the product quickly and without any hassle, so give them what they need to act on impulse and part with their money. 

Invest in great product photography 

There are many perks to selling online, except for one thing: Your customers can’t just walk into your warehouse and start trying out your products. Great product photography is essential to get around this handicap that selling products online gives you. 

Humans are visual animals by nature, and looks do count for a lot when it comes to buying products online. Make sure that your product photography is professional, high-quality, and appropriate for the product you’re selling. 

Your customers should be able to view your product photos from different angles and zoom in to analyze the product in more detail. If you’ve installed an app to show different product variants on your Shopify product pages, then they should be able to see photos of these variants as well. Don’t leave anything down to guess-work.  

Thursday Boots make use of expert photography, as well as the ability to zoom and view different variants. The brand is also clearly visible under the banner. 

Also, bear in mind that your product photography won’t just show up on your website, but also on search engines like Google, on social media, and on other websites. Your product photographs are your online brand ambassadors, so make sure that they look great. 

Make your brand immediately visible

It is absolutely essential that you show your (awesome) brand and what it stands for on your product pages. You can do it in your copy, as well as by having a short sentence summing up your brand’s mission at the top of the product page. People should be able to recognize your brand and what it stands for within seconds of visiting your product page. 

Poo-Pourri’s brand is reflected in its logo, photography, and copy. 

As mentioned before, many of your customers will be landing directly onto your product pages from elsewhere on the web. They might come from links on social media channels such as Facebook posts or links in YouTube descriptions, or they might be coming from links on Google or another search engine. 

In short, they may well have no idea who you are and why they should buy from you. Coupled with the fact that they’ll very likely be using a mobile device while out on-the-go, and you’ve got a very limited time to convince them to buy your product. 

They need to know that you’re the people to turn to when you want to buy ‘Product X’, so make sure to show your brand loud and clear to catch their attention.

Write copy to suit your customers

Imagine you’re selling a product to David and Sabrina. David is an expert in the product category you’re selling, whereas Sabrina is a new fish who doesn’t really know much at all about these products. Your copy needs to convince both of them to buy your product. 

Thursday Boots have a clever way of getting the key information across in a way that anyone can understand. 

To do this, you’ll need to ensure that your copy includes all of the essential information about your product in a clear and easy-to-understand way. Note that only essential information is what’s needed here, not every piece of information. You’ll want to keep your copy fairly short as most people will just skim through it 

On top of this, try not to be patronizing or too technical. You want to strike the balance between providing the information that will win over the experts, while also not confusing the newcomers. 

You’ll need to lay everything out in a clear and concise manner as well. Making good use of headings and subheadings is a great way to help customers skim down to the information they need while skipping the bits that they don’t. 

Declutter your Shopify product pages

If you have too much copy alongside bundles of photos and other clutter, then your customer is not going to be able to pick out the essential information easily. Design your product pages to be uncluttered so that the essential parts of the page - like your CTA and leading copy - stand out against the backdrop and catch your customer’s eye immediately. 

MVMT Watches are known for their minimalist designs - it seems their product pages follow suit. 

You can use dedicated Shopify page builders like PageFly Advanced Page Builder to make excellent product pages using a simple drag-and-drop mechanism, as well as professional templates. Tools like this are great for ensuring that your product page design isn’t overwhelming and that your customers can pick out the information they need straight away. 

Use your brand’s voice in your copy

As you can imagine, a brand selling skateboards is going to communicate to its customers very differently to a brand selling luxury watches. Your brand should have a voice that speaks to the type of customers who are going to buy your product and it’s important that you include this voice in your copy. 

Don’t be afraid to sing that voice out loud and if a word or phrase feels like it doesn’t fit your brand voice, then don’t say it. Your customers will appreciate your brand for being genuine and speaking to them on a human level, so definitely leverage this to your advantage when writing copy on your Shopify product pages. 

Poo-Pourri uses a playful voice in their copy - after all, their product is about making your #2 smell good.

The most important thing is to not write like a robot. No one wants to have a conversation with a robot - unless they’re a tech geek who is specifically looking to buy robots… 

Make use of social proofs 

People value reviews from other buyers more than they value the words of the brand selling the product. Customers expect merchants to highlight the positives of their products, but it’s the words of other customers that really give the most value. 

Having some reviews and testimonials present on your product pages do wonders to your conversion rate, so make sure to weave this in there. You can also use trust badges to your product pages - especially payment partners and other big brands that you have an association with, or possibly big media outlets where you’ve been featured. Anything that demonstrates where others have put their trust into you. 

You can use Judge.me to seamlessly integrate customer reviews into your product pages. Judge.me will add SEO rich snippets to your reviews to help bring in organic search traffic. You can also share individual reviews on social media to showcase specific products. It’s easy to set up Judge.me also integrates with page builder apps like PageFly.  

Pete & Pedro boldly display user reviews - as well as their spot being featured on US entrepreneurial TV show Shark Tank. 

Use a currency converter 

Your customers will relate more to your brand when landing on a Shopify product page with prices listed in their own currency. It also diminishes their confusion regarding the price of items. Put your customer’s concerns to rest and install a currency converter app to build up more trust with customers overseas. 

Install a live chat 

Who hasn’t ever needed more information at some point while shopping for a product? Having a live chat feature on your product pages not only allows customers to get specific information when they’re stuck, it also helps to build trust between them and your brand. 

A live chat shows that you’re present and ready to help, and in-turn it shows that you’re on top of your business and that you take it seriously. This will give customers more confidence in your brand. 

You can install a live chat feature on your Shopify product pages when you design them with PageFly Advanced Page Builder. 

Use countdown timers honestly 

We’ve all seen the countdown timer that says ‘1 hour, 59 minutes and 59 seconds left to save’. How convincing is that? Not very. Countdown timers can be great ways to fire up the FOMO (fear of missing out) factor in customers, but if they’re obviously just rigged to start ticking every time you land on the page, then they’re going to damage customer trust in your brand. 

Use countdown timers genuinely and people will take them a lot more seriously. This is especially true for repeat customers who can see that the price did indeed go back up once the timer was over. 

Make sure that your countdown timers fit the theme of your product pages and don’t make them look cluttered. 

Conclusion 

Shopify product pages can be extremely effective at generating more sales when they’re done right - or they can be a real drag on your business when designed poorly. Follow the aforementioned best practices for building product pages on Shopify and we guarantee that you’ll start seeing an upshoot in conversions from your product pages.