If you ask e-commerce businesses which page of their website is the most important page, some may say it’s their checkout as this is where customers abandon their baskets and leave without buying. While the checkout is obviously important, the product details page (or PDP) is the most critical page when it comes to increasing your sales and revenue.

The power of the PDP lies in its ability to provide essential information and features about products that helps customers make informed buying decisions. This is especially true with mobile PDP, which is often a big challenge for e-commerce retailers. Not continuously optimising their mobile PDPs can prevent these businesses from achieving their revenue goals in the most efficient way.

Challenges we regularly see with mobile PDP

Mobile brings between 65% and 80% of shoppers to e-commerce websites and generates between 40% and 60% of their total revenue. However, mobile converts up to 50% less than desktop. One reason is because about half of the traffic landing on mobile PDPs bounces. This rises to up to 60% for retailers whose traffic comes from paid activities like Google Shopping.

Even with all this waste, most online retailers are reliant on paid activities because they account for up to half of their total revenue. At least 80% of paid activities land on a mobile PDP. However, between 75% and 90% of mobile shoppers who land on a PDP do not add a product to their basket.

The takeaway? It will become increasingly difficult for online retailers to grow at the same rate as mobile uptake continues to grow, and conversions from mobile continue to underperform desktop.

The PDP’s main jobs

Your product description page has two main jobs. First, it has to get shoppers to stick around and not bounce back to search results or Google Shopping. Second, it must give shoppers the information they need to make an informed buying decision in your business’ favour.

Getting visitors to stick around

An international online marketplace was experiencing high bounce rates on their PDPs, including traffic that was coming from paid search and Google Shopping. This is not uncommon behaviour among visitors who use Google Shopping to view multiple products and brands in the same session.

Based on our research, we identified ways to help the retailer give visitors more reasons to stay on the site and keep browsing rather than bounce, even if the specific product on the page wasn’t what they were looking for. To accomplish this, we moved the product recommendations carousel (e.g., You Might Also Like) to the top of the page to give shoppers reasons to keep shopping and browse for similar products, rather than bounce back to Google Shopping or search results.

This delivered a significant uplift on mobile devices and decreased bounce rates on all devices. The business experienced a 7% uplift in conversion rates, 5.5% decrease in bounce rates and 7.25% increase in average order value. The strategy increased the efficiency of the paid media channels by delivering increased sales from the same investment.

Giving shoppers the information they need to make an informed buying decision in your business’ favour

For this second part, it’s important to understand ‘what information do customers want’ when shopping your PDP and ‘how do customers make buying decisions’?

• Customer research conducted methodically, frequently and with a systematic process will help figure out what they want.
• The psychology behind knowing how customers make buying decisions and knowing how to influence and adjust their behaviour will help you present information to your visitors that helps them choose you over competition.

Work your assets that are important to your visitors harder

There are many different assets at your disposal that you can use on your PDP to accomplish these two objectives, including but not limited to the following:

• Product images
• Promotional badges
• Wish list
• Colour options
• Sizes and size guide
• Triggers (e.g., usually placed directly underneath the CTA)
• Product details and fit
• Returns
• Product recommendations
• Recently viewed items
• Reviews
• Call to action (CTA)

Here are some examples on how you can use them:

• Triggers help increase “Add to Basket”

Triggers should make buying products on your website as easy as possible and help tip hesitant shoppers in your favour. We performed research to find out if the five trigger messages being used by this global ecommerce retailer were effective or not. Based on our findings, we removed the messages that research deemed were negative or neutral and increased the visual hierarchy of the ones that were deemed by research to be positive and helpful in making buying decisions.

This utilized a psychological technique known as the Fogg Behaviour Model and resulted in a 2.25% uplift in conversions, which increased sales by £2 million.

• Put “Shop the Look” where its most impactful

We also added “Shop the Look” items, or other products buyers might like based on what’s in their basket, to the Add to Basket popup. This resulted in a 1.4% uplift in conversions while increasing the average order value by 2.9%. This utilized psychological techniques known as visual hierarch and WYSIATI, or What You See is All There Is.

• Use pictures to educate visitors and sell your products’ benefits

We performed research for an online appliance retailer to determine how they could improve their product details page in order to boost sales and revenue. Appliances are complex products that can be hard to explain in words, so we added product images to the PDP to help shoppers better understand the appliances so they could make more informed positive buying decisions.

This utilized a psychological technique known as the picture superiority effect and resulted in a 1.46% uplift in conversions.

Benefits of optimising the PDP

Understanding the importance of the product details page in the shopper’s buying journey and optimising this page can accelerate revenue growth for online retailers. It can also boost the efficiency of paid media channels by delivering increased sales from the same investment. Perhaps most importantly, it can enhance your customers’ overall shopping experience, which may increase customer loyalty and lead to more repeat purchases.

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