9 Most Common Product Description Problems [SOLVED]

Many eCommerce stores have product descriptions that suck - but seriously.

It’s not accidental that many newly founded eCommerce stores are failing every day.

Why?

It's not because they're selling the wrong product, or their platform is terrible for eCommerce, or any other reason. 

Many of these problems can be easily identified & solved. 

The real and most usual problem that many store owners are missing is the fact that they're using generic and dull product descriptions.

What they think is by the time the customers end up on the product page and read the product descriptions, they’re instantly ready to buy.

So wrong and such a silly assumption to make.

You need to understand that descriptions are like the hooks used to catch the fish.

If you don't use the right bait and set it up correctly, nothing will happen.

Product descriptions are an essential part of the whole eCommerce sales process.

It’s sad that people massively drop the ball when it comes to this segment.

So, how do they screw things up?

Today's article will explore the 9 most common product description problems that kill sales every day and how to overcome them.

So if, you're ready to make some sales, let's get straight to it!

1. Inaccurate Product Description

This is the #1 most common product description problem that many eCommerce & Dropshipping businesses are constantly doing.

It’s most usually related to overpromising.

There are numerous stores whose product descriptions say that it's the best quality, most beautiful product globally. 

Satisfaction guaranteed. Yeah, right. 🤣

Those kinds of product descriptions use the wrong adjectives to present the product, which makes the customer's perception of it wrong.

Not only do they disable the customer from visualizing the product correctly and in natural light, but they are massively resulting in dissatisfaction upon product delivery.

It can be really harmful for your brand reputation in the long term. So trust me, you don't want that return rate level and your conversions running down and sinking the whole business.

Solution

Make sure to inspect your information, write relevant content, and present your product as it actually is. 

2. Duplicate content

The easiest way to write your product descriptions is to copy your manufacturer’s one and paste it on your website.

Unfortunately, this will bring you much more stress than joy.

Search engines don't like finding duplicate content published on websites. As a result, you can easily get a penalty in search engines, negatively affecting all your previous SEO activities.

Also, there’s an opportunity that the consumer has already seen that same product description on your manufacturer’s website.

So why would they buy from you?

Solution

Use the manufacturer’s information about products as the inspiration for writing your unique product description. Yes, you can use the same facts about the product, but try to distinguish yourself by providing practical benefits of your products.

Pro tip: You can drop some ideas regarding the product, and use the TextCortex paraphrasing option to structure it into a meaningful piece of content.

All you need to do after you download the TextCortex Chrome extension is just highlight your idea, and hit the “Rewrite” option.

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You can always recreate some parts that can be improved, so you don’t have to drain your energy trying to structure your ideas into a compelling product description.

3. Bad Grammar, Typos, and Other Mistakes

It looks a bit disappointing to see that someone sells a high-quality and expensive product, but they have grammar, typing, or other mistakes in their product descriptions.

Yeah, it can happen to anyone, and many people will get over it.

But there is always that small percentage of individuals who expect everything to be perfect.

So why lose those sales when you necessarily don’t have to?

Solution

Double-check your grammar, typos, and sentence structure to ensure there are no product description problems and that it's clean and easy to read.

4. The inconsistent tone of voice

You probably heard numerous times that every brand needs to have its tone of voice.

Well, yeah. Customers are getting close and relating with your brand, just like it was a person.

For this reason, every successful brand needs to have a sense of personality, identity, and characteristics that you want your customers to see in common with your brand.

The only way to do this is by developing your own style and tone of voice to represent your brand's values and characteristics that you want to be associated with it.

If you’re not presenting and writing your product descriptions with that same tone of voice, then your brand will be less relatable for customers.

And it will be much harder for you to make it memorable for your customers.

Solution

Use a pen and paper, and write how you want your brand to be perceived. For example, what would be your tone of voice? Is it formal, informal, friendly, etc.? 

Describe it like it is a person. Define its values, and always have those things on your mind. This graph might help you define it.

5. A lack of detail

It is usually pretty easy to describe a product in a few words.

But next to the basic specifications and details, product descriptions need to provide users with adequate additional information.

Many store owners are failing here, and presenting their products as a list of technical specifications, mentioning just features, but not benefits.

Solution

You need to bring every detail of the product to life so the customers understand the technical information about it and acknowledge how they can use it in real life if they decide to purchase.

What benefits are these product features providing them with?

6. Too long description

The opposite of the previous product description problem is providing the customers with unnecessary information.

This major mistake of writing an essay instead of product descriptions is highly present in eCommerce stores.

Even though you’re trying to impress your potential customer, it doesn’t make you credible or authoritative.

Solution

Try to avoid showing that you know everything about your product. Instead, make your descriptions easy to consume by using subheadings, bullet points, paragraphs, so your description is more visually attractive.

7. Not Using Bullet Points

When users land on your product page, they don't want to see a giant wall full of text, just like in Matrix.

Their eyes will jump around the page to different places, such as:

• Product photos
• Product price
• Options for color/style/size
• Customer reviews
• Add to cart button, etc.

While they’re thinking about buying the specific product, they’ll scan and try to find relevant information about the product.

It’s up to you not to make this hard for them as numerous shops do.

Solution

Split your product description into small parts that are easy to consume. For example, you can use bullet points to present your product's features, bold them, and use the image to support it. 

It will enable your visitors to scan the page much easier and learn about the product just by scanning.

8. Over-dependence on images

Did you know that 63% of consumers think product pages that contain reasonable-quality images on eCommerce sites are even more important than the product descriptions?

Images will show your customers what your products actually look like, and they are important for every eCommerce store.

However, many product pages rely on images to describe the products, and in most cases, it's not enough.

Product descriptions and images need to work together to show potential customers the product's actual value.

Some customers are more inspired by the high-quality photos, and some with compelling product descriptions.

Solution

Instead of letting the images do the work, use both formats to communicate everything about your product that needs to be said. 

Just imagine this photo without description or vice versa? Huge difference, right?

A compelling product description supports the information from the images and shows it differently - one that some customers will react to more positively.

9. Monotonous & Generic

This is one of the most common product description problems with eCommerce stores.

People write such monotonous and generic descriptions.

That mostly happens with eCommerce stores with a high volume of product descriptions, so there is a lot of repetitive and generic content that no one likes to read.

Not only does this repetition make customers feel as they’ve already read it earlier, but it’s not awaking any sense of excitement for being interested in the product.

Sometimes, this is not the problem with copywriting, just a natural consequence of writing a vast amount of product descriptions in a short period.

Solution

Try to make your product descriptions being mini descriptive stories that will lead customers to forget about the sales pitch, and instead awake the need for that product in them. 

Take advantage of sensory words, as they are proven to engage our brain processing and lead to increased sales.

Conclusion

Writing a good product description for the right people at the right time is a kind of art.

Most copywriters spend most effort and energy researching to understand who they're writing for. 

To write a compelling product description, you have to step into your target customer's shoes, and many store owners don't do it properly.

That's why product descriptions are usually never written the right way and why there are millions of product descriptions that suck.

You don't necessarily have to hire a professional copywriter to write all your product descriptions, but instead, you need to put some time and energy into writing descriptions that work.

Just imagine how it seems to write 100s of different product descriptions for your store in a short period?

Sounds terrifying, right?

And spending thousands of dollars on copywriters to write it is not always the best move, especially if you just started with a business or are not quite profitable at the moment.

You could spend that money in much better ways, trust me.

For this reason, we created TextCortex AI.

TextCortex is a use-case module-based AI writing assistant that can save 70% of your time and loads of money by creating product descriptions for your store in seconds. 

How does it work?

TextCortex use-case modules train their AI writers with 3 billion sentences to write on various topics, formats, and features. 

This includes creating product descriptions, marketing, ads copies, story writings, autocomplete text, support emails creation, etc.

What differentiates us is that TextCortex is based on training our models on specific use cases. 

While other AI copywriting tools use GPT-3 for everything in a one-size-fits-all approach, we are training much smaller expert AIs on the specific use case. 

Expert AIs lead to higher relevancy, significantly impacting the quality of your produced product descriptions.

How to use our TextCortex to create selling descriptions for your eCommerce shop at scale?

Just enter the TextCortex app, navigate to the “Creator Suite” section, and choose “Product Description With Features.”

Then, enter the details regarding the product, such as name, and features, and once you’re done, hit “Create.”

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Your product description will be created in seconds. 

It’s easy as that.

If you’re thinking what to write within the features segment, here you can enter product features such as:

• colors,
• forms,
• styles,
• usages,
• purposes

As always try to help our AI writers to understand what you mean. It is best if you use a format like “Color: red” or “Feature: Laptop pocket.” 

Of course, you can test what suits your style best, the middle is usually the golden rule. You should experiment with creativities of 35% to 70% and see what suits you best.

To start writing content at scale for free, all you have to do is:

1. Sign up to the TextCortex

2. Navigate to the “Creator” segment, and choose the “Product descriptions” template

3. Give TextCortex instructions

4. Enjoy creating tons of content in seconds 

You can create a lot of content, but you can also make a lot of time and money savings. 

By using TextCortex, you can significantly improve your product description quality, leads, replies, and conversions, and you can sign up for free to see how it fits you.

It’s time to stop overthinking your content, reduce costs and time spent writing, and focus on what expresses your products best.

While you focus on business, let your content write itself using TextCortex.

If you're ready to put your content on fire, sign up now for free and see how TextCortex skyrockets your product description creation instantly. 🚀