A product description is a type of marketing copy that brands use. It provides essential details about specific items that merchants are selling online. Compelling content makes up for the lack of tangibility in shopping online just by describing product features, key benefits, dimensions, models, and make. 

The Role of Product Descriptions in Online Conversion

In the world of eCommerce, online merchants need to rely on the power of product descriptions and various media to entice shoppers to add to cart and check out. Marketing copy is brand storytelling, a way for retailers to give customers a clear picture of how a product looks and functions. 

Studies have shown that missing or unclear product details account for 20% of failed purchases. A good product description should answer what customers are likely to ask to make a purchase. Sellers just need to consider the various factors that can influence a buyer’s decision and use that as a foundation to write great product descriptions. 

The Formula of a Good Product Description

A good product description also enumerates an item’s technical details, highlighting its value by telling how it can solve the target market’s pain points or needs. A poorly-written product description can do as much harm as having nothing at all. Merchants must invest time and energy to ensure that marketing copy accurately represents both the brand and the product. 

A good product description commonly consists of the following: 

• Headline
  Creatively writing product headlines is not the goal. It can be as straightforward as merely providing product and model names that customers can easily refer to.

• Feature and Benefit
  The main difference between a product feature and a product benefit lies in intent. The former is more about educating the market about the product’s specifications of the item. The latter is about providing the product’s value, telling how it can better make a user’s life.

• Reviews
  There is more to customer feedback than just building a good reputation. Retailers can use glowing reviews as a basis to write compelling product descriptions. Identifying what particular product feature rakes in positive sentiment and incorporating it into the product description is an effective copywriting strategy.

• Call-to-Action
  A seller’s goal with a good product description is to sell, so it only makes sense to write it in an actionable way. A call-to-action can be in the form of a button or a closing statement designed to encourage the reader to put the item on their carts and check-out. 

How to Write Product Descriptions That Sell 

More than a formula, a seller must consider a lot of things when writing product descriptions. Here are five tips that can help online entrepreneurs craft compelling and high-converting copy: 

1. Know Your Audience
   Effective marketing feels personal. A good copy resonates with the retailer’s target audience, and a great approach is to understand what they value and look for in products as consumers. Merchants equipped with the knowledge of their customers’ pain points will make it easier for them to write copy that directly addresses those.

2. Use High-Quality Product Images
   While words have a powerful impact, images serve as key supporting content that can give a literal picture of how a product looks like. Online sellers must not settle with blurry or pixelated product photos, especially since the human brain processes visual data 60,000 times faster than text. Merchants must invest in having high-resolution pictures of their products or risk losing their consumers’ interest.

3. Be Descriptive About the Product
   Writing product descriptions should be treated as creative storytelling. A good marketing copy can make the reader feel as if they can physically see, hear, feel, or taste the product. It is about helping the online shopper imagine what it is like to own the product enough to make them push through with the purchase.

4. Make Formatting Clean and Simple
   Given that humans are highly visual beings, a product description placed on a poorly-designed page layout might discourage online shoppers from reading it. Merchants must consider the design of their product page in relation to the other elements that make it. Using negative space wisely can help sellers direct their consumers’ focus on the main point of the page, which is the product.

5. Use Social Proof.
   A 2018 ReviewTracker Research showed that 90% of consumers would avoid a business after reading a negative review about it online. This statistic is a testament to the influence product reviews have over a consumer’s purchase decision. Placing social proof, like online reviews and star ratings on product pages, can boost conversion rates and build credibility for sellers. 

The art of writing compelling product descriptions is not something merchants can master quickly. But with patience, testing, and data analysis, they eventually craft marketing copy and reap long-term benefits through increased online sales and repeat customers. 

If you need expert advice in managing inventory and order fulfillment, do not hesitate to reach out to us here at ZhenHub! 

If you’re alone on Valentine’s Day, you may feel like you’re the only one in this world without a partner. But that’s okay; China now has a day that celebrates singled too.

The unofficial holiday is named the Single’s Day, and when you look at it, it’s bigger than both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, combined. This year’s Singles’ Day has come and gone with lots of records broken. The holiday is celebrated on November 11 -11/11.

So, what’s it with Alibaba and Singles’ Day?

The unofficial holiday was an idea conceived in the 1990s by a group of college students as a form of protest against China’s traditional festivals, most of which are predominantly couple-centric. But that’s only about history.

Singles’ Day is the world’s largest shopping event today, thanks to Alibaba. The retail giant came into the picture sometimes in 2009. That year, Alibaba rebranded what we’ve always known as Singles’ Day and promoted it as an opportunity for singles to splurge on themselves, offering massive discounts on goods on its TMall consumer-focused store.

That first year, Singles’ Day sales raked in about $7.5 million in gross merchandise value, GMV. Eight years after, this had become 3,000 times higher than the first year’s value of $25.3 billion.

It’s noteworthy that while it only took Chinese consumers the first two minutes to splash $1 billion in the 2017 Singles’ Day sales, Amazon needed 30 hours to hit that mark during the Amazon Prime Day sales, in the same 2017.

Singles’ Day Shopping & Festivities

Alibaba employs a combination of both massive online shopping discounts together with awe-inspiring offline entertainment.

The company has been organizing galas to mark the holiday celebration since 2009. These events are usually televised, drawing in an audience of about 200 million who would watch various things from celebrity performances to product launches, prize winnings, etc.

For 2018, the celebration had featured A-list names like Pharell Williams, Jessie J, along with a short kung-fu film that had featured Nicole Kidman, Jet Li, Donnie Chen, and many others, alongside Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder.

Singles’ Day 2019

This year, the event kicked off with a bewildering concert headlined by Taylor Swift. This year, all it took for the retail giant to hit the consumer spending mark of $1 billion is a mere one minute and eight seconds. Sales for the 2019 edition raked in a total of $38.4 billion, more than the $30.8 billion recorded last year. That’s more than analysts predict for the combination of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monda.

This year’s sales also surpassed last year’s number of orders and deliveries. At the heart of this massive success is Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics network. The network has always been able to boldly handle the challenges that come with Singles’ Day sales very effectively. In 2017, more than 331 million boxes were dispatched on Singles’ Day sales. The first order only took 13 minutes to be delivered to the Shanghai customer who had ordered some snacks.

What can we learn from this?

Just like Alibaba has been able to do with Cainiao, fluidity in logistics will play a crucial role in the success of any e-commerce business. But while you may not have the financial muscle to pull such a network, ZhenHub can help. Here, everything we do is aimed at helping retailers simplify the processes involved in inventory, logistics, and much more.

Our resources will be deployed to help you refine these core areas of your business to give you a competitive boost and support your long-term business growth.

Click here to get started.

In the end, you’ll have to do the best for your business to get ahead in today’s competitive consumer markets. If you’re contemplating how to go about this, ZhenHub can help you get started!

How to Beat Other Product Design Companies

Investing in product design agency has become a popular tool for e-commerce businesses to improve on product innovation and their branding strategy. But with growing competition, how does a product design agency emerge at the top? Here are some strategies product design agencies can use to do so:

Consumer Behavior 

Most product design agencies insist they focus on the client’s audience. Yet KPIs are usually poor for performance on customer metrics. As an effective agency, research needs to be thorough to consider what consumers want and why. This requires to go beyond collecting data. 

Agencies need to have clear communication streamlines with their clients to understand their customers. Agencies need to pair with clients and conduct shopper-shadowing exercises or interviews to observe and learn the consumer experience of a product and what motivates the use of it. 

Act Fast 

Secondly, it is important to act fast and be able to release products into the market quickly. This requires rapid prototyping multiple iterations and quick adjustments based on customer feedback, which would prevent costly mistakes happening in the long-term. This would be appealing to clients as it ensures that the product will be viable and can get on the market faster than competitors. 

Team Organisation 

Due to the complexity of the customer journey, a large number of skills and expertise is needed. Thus, it is important to have clear team divisions committed to specific focuses. A structure advised by McKinsey&Company involves teams split into 4 categories – technology and data, customer experience, business operations, and team-planning. See image for each of the roles carried out by the team. 

To learn more email us – hello(a)zhenhub.com or submit an enquiry here.

What is social commerce?

Social commerce is the use of social networks for eCommerce transactions, i.e. it involves selling products directly through social media networks. This differs from social media marketing. Social media marketing redirects users to an online store; social commerce allows them to checkout directly within the network or app they are using at that particular time. In this way there is a more convenient way for people to complete the purchase of products they want and need. 

Instagram: This is an example of how social commerce can be facilitated through Instagram­­. Instagram’s shop-able post feature began in March 2018. These posts go live giving brands the ability to tag items in organic posts, when tapped, and redirect users to a new page where they can purchase and checkout the item.

Facebook: Similarly, Facebook has shop-able pages or posts that allow consumers to redirect to the brand’s site where they can buy products instantly from. In June 2018, Facebook Marketplace was launched and now serves as a competitor to Amazon, Esty and eBay.

Sale can really benefit from this method as it capitalizes the point at which a user’s purchase intent and excitement for a product is highest.  Moreover, 60% of Instagram users say they find new products through the platform. 30% of online shoppers claim they are likely to make a purchase from a media network like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or Snapchat.

With a growing user presence on social media, social commerce would be a profitable marketing and sales strategy for e-commerce businesses. 

To learn more drop us a line at – hello(a)zhenhub.com or submit an enquiry here.