Product FAQs

What product FAQs are

Product FAQs are a short block of questions and answers attached to one product, or to one range, made up entirely of things customers have actually asked. Each question comes from somewhere real: a return, a support ticket, a pre-sale email, a phone call. The answer is written to be read before the sale, by someone deciding whether to risk their money.

They are not a site-wide FAQ page. That page answers questions about the business: opening hours, guarantees, how ordering works. Product FAQs answer questions about one item, and they live on that item's page where the doubt occurs. They are also not the description. A product description makes the case for buying; the FAQ deals with the specific objection that stops it.

When you need them

You need them when your return rate on a product is higher than you can explain, or when the same email keeps arriving about the same item. Both are the product page failing to say something, and both are cheap to fix compared with the cost of the parcel going out and coming back.

The second case is a product with a compatibility or sizing question that nobody can answer from a photograph. Anything that fits into something else, anything sold by a measurement the customer has to take themselves, anything with a version number.

You do not need this if the questions arriving are about the shop rather than the product. Delivery costs, account problems and returns policy belong in one place on the site, not repeated under every item. And if you have no record of what customers ask, start with gathering the questions before paying anyone to answer them.

Where the questions come from

Every question in the set is traced back to a return or a ticket. That is the rule, and it is what makes these different from the invented FAQs most shops publish, which tend to answer the questions a marketing department wishes people asked.

• The return reasons. Your returns data, read line by line. “Did not fit” and “not as expected” are not reasons; they are the start of a conversation with whoever processes them.
• Support tickets and pre-sale emails. Three months of them, sorted by product. The question asked five times before a sale is the one costing you orders.
• What is in the box. Listed item by item, including what is not: the battery, the mounting kit, the cable, the second one people assume comes in a pair.
• Compatibility and sizing. Stated against something the customer can check at home, with the measurement they need to take and how to take it.
• What it does not do. The uses people buy it for and should not. This is the question most shops leave out, and it is the one that saves the most parcels.

Shops resist this. Writing “this will not fit a standard door frame without the adapter, sold separately” feels like talking somebody out of buying. It is, sometimes. That is the point of it.

A sale lost at the FAQ costs you the margin on one order. A sale made despite the answer being absent costs you the outbound shipping, the return shipping, the handling, the restocking, the refund, and a customer who tells people. The honest answer loses the occasional order and saves several returns, and the returns are worth more than the order was. It also does something the description cannot: a page that admits what a product will not do makes everything else on the page believable.

What you get

The question sets. Six to ten questions per product or range, written short, in a spreadsheet keyed to your SKUs so they can be imported into whatever accordion or tab your shop uses.

A questions register. Every question, the return reason or ticket it came from, and which product it belongs to. Your customer service people keep adding to this after I have gone, which is how the set stays current.

The answers your staff can reuse. The same wording formatted for email replies, so the page and the person answering the phone say exactly the same thing.

A worked example

An illustration. A Montreal shop selling replacement parts for espresso machines has a return rate on gaskets and portafilter baskets that the owner has been living with for years. The reason logged on almost all of them is “wrong part”.

Reading three months of tickets alongside the returns shows the same three confusions. Customers do not know which of two similar models they own, because the model number is on the underside. They do not know that the 58mm basket sold on the site does not fit the 53mm machines the same manufacturer sold until 2016. And they assume the gasket comes with the screen, which it does not. Six questions are written per part, including where to find the model number and what is in the packet, with a line saying plainly which machines the part does not fit. The same six answers go into the support inbox as saved replies. The shop is now turning away a handful of orders each month that used to come back a fortnight later.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which products come back, what the returns say, and which email your support people are tired of writing. No charge.
2. The records. Returns export and three months of tickets, plus twenty minutes with whoever processes them. This is the whole raw material.
3. A fixed price in writing. How many products, how many questions each, agreed before anything starts.
4. The draft sets. Ten working days for a first group, so you can see how blunt the answers are before the rest is written.
5. The technical check. Whoever knows the products best confirms every factual answer. Nothing is published on my word alone.
6. Handover. The sets, the register and the saved replies, ready to import.

What it costs

Product FAQs are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, priced per product or per range with the rate falling across a set. What moves it is how many products are covered, whether your returns and ticket records are usable as they are, and how much technical checking each answer needs. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts. The pricing page shows the four ways of working here and how quotes are built.

What happens next

Once the questions are answered, the answers usually need to exist in more than one place. The longer ones, the ones about setting a product up rather than choosing it, become support articles for people who already bought. Where the recurring question is which item to choose rather than how one works, that is a guide that makes the choice. And if you sell the same products through a portal, the same answers have to be rebuilt as listing copy inside that platform's rules. Each is a separate job. The FAQs are complete on their own, and nothing further is assumed.