Photographs and descriptions that do the selling for you

In a shop, somebody picks the thing up. They turn it over, feel how heavy it is, look at the stitching, hold it against their hand to judge the size, and put it back down knowing far more than they did a moment earlier.

Online, none of that happens. The photographs and the words are all a shopper gets, and they are being asked to do the work of that entire encounter. Most product pages give them one image on a white background and a paragraph copied from the manufacturer, which is not really a product page at all. It is a listing.

The good news is that this is among the cheapest things to fix in an online shop, and you can usually see the difference on your best sellers within a few weeks.

What the photographs are standing in for

Think about what somebody learns by handling a product, and you have your shot list.

They learn how big it is, which is the single most common thing people get wrong when buying online, and the single most common reason things come back. They learn what the material is really like, how it catches the light, whether the colour is warmer or cooler than they expected. They learn how well it is made, from the seams, the joints, the finish. And they learn what it will look like where it is going to live.

One photograph on white cannot tell them any of that. It is a good photograph to have, because it works in a grid and it lets people compare things fairly. It is simply not the whole job.

The set worth having

For anything you sell more than occasionally, aim for something like this.

The clean one. Plain background, whole product, well lit. This is the one that appears in listings and search results, so it needs to be unambiguous rather than artistic.

The other angles. Back, sides, and underneath if there is anything worth seeing there. If it opens, show it open.

Something for scale. This is the one almost nobody does, and it prevents more returns than any other photograph. Put the product next to something everybody recognises, or in a hand, or on a person. Dimensions in millimetres are useful, but nobody pictures 340mm.

A close-up. The weave, the grain, the finish, the stitching. This is where quality is either visible or absent, and if yours is good it is worth showing at the size it deserves.

One in its natural setting. On the table, in the room, being worn, being used. This is the photograph that lets somebody imagine owning it, and it usually does more selling than the clean one.

What actually arrives. If the box contains four things and a manual, show the four things and the manual. It removes a surprisingly common worry about whether the accessories are included.

That is six photographs. Most shops have one.

Consistency is what makes a shop look professional

This matters more than most people expect, and it costs nothing once you decide on it.

Use the same background, the same distance, the same lighting and the same crop for every clean shot in a category. When those images sit next to each other in a grid, the products look like a considered range rather than a folder of pictures gathered from various places over several years. Inconsistent framing reads as carelessness even when nobody could tell you why.

The practical trick is to pick a spot and a setup once, mark where things go, and use it every time. Then a new product photographed next to one from two years ago still matches.

You do not need a studio

A recent phone camera is genuinely good enough for most products. What separates a decent product photograph from a poor one is almost always the light, not the camera.

Shoot near a large window, on an overcast day if you can, and turn the flash off. Flash flattens everything and puts a hard shine on anything smooth. Avoid mixing daylight with the ceiling lights, because the colours fight each other and the result never looks quite right. Steady the phone against something, or use a cheap tripod. Use a plain sheet of card curved up behind the product so there is no visible line where the surface meets the wall.

Then take far more shots than you need, and delete generously.

Why the manufacturer’s paragraph is costing you

If you sell products other people also sell, and you use the description that came with them, you have a page identical to every other stockist in the country.

That is a problem in two directions. For a search engine, there is nothing to distinguish your page from a dozen others carrying the same words, so it has no particular reason to show yours. For a shopper who is comparing three tabs, there is nothing to distinguish you either, which leaves price as the only difference between you. That is not a fight most independent shops want to pick.

There is also the plain fact that manufacturer copy is usually written to describe a specification rather than to help somebody decide. It answers what the product is. It rarely answers whether it is right for you.

What a description should actually do

Open like a person, then get specific.

The first two lines matter most, because on a phone that is often all anybody reads before deciding whether to keep going. Use them to say what the thing is for and who it suits, in plain language. Not “premium multi-purpose organiser”, but what it holds, where it goes, and who tends to buy it.

Then give the specifics, in a form somebody can scan rather than a wall of prose. Dimensions, materials, what is included, how to look after it, what it fits or works with. These are the details people leave the page to go and find elsewhere, and every trip off your page is a chance not to come back.

The move most shops are too nervous to make is saying who it is not for. If a bag is not big enough for a laptop, say so. You lose a handful of sales that would have come back anyway, and you gain the trust of everybody else reading, because a shop willing to talk you out of something is a shop worth believing when it recommends something.

The specifics people email to ask

You already have the list, and it is sitting in your inbox and your messages.

Every question a customer has asked before buying is a question the page failed to answer, and the same handful come up again and again. Will it fit through a standard doorway. Is the blue more navy or more royal. Does it come with the bracket. Can I put it in the dishwasher. Write those answers into the description and the questions largely stop.

Your reviews are the other source, and they are better still, because customers describe things in the words other customers use. That is covered properly in what belongs on a product page, and where, which picks up where this leaves off and deals with the doubt a shopper feels once they are interested.

Where to start

Do not do the whole catalogue. You will lose heart somewhere around product forty and the rest will stay as it was.

Take your ten best sellers, or the ten with the most traffic and the fewest orders, and give those the full treatment: six photographs, a description written by somebody who has actually handled the thing, and the answers to the questions you keep being asked. Leave them a month and look at what changed. That will tell you whether it is worth working down the list, and in our experience it usually is.

We do not take the photographs, and for plenty of products you do not need anybody to. A phone, a window and a free afternoon will get most shops most of the way. Where a professional is genuinely worth the money, we are happy to help you work out what to ask for and how to brief them, so you are not paying for forty handsome images that somehow miss the six that would have sold the thing.

The words work much the same way. We would not write your whole catalogue for you, but we will gladly go through it with you and say which products deserve the effort first and what their pages are currently failing to answer.

If that is a conversation worth having, get in touch, or read more about how we approach selling online. Either way it is nearly always a better investment than sending more traffic to a page that is not yet ready for it.