Product pages

What a product page is

A product page is one page for one product. It says what the product does, who it suits, what it costs, what is in the box or in the plan, what it will not do, and how to buy it. It is the page a buyer reads with their wallet half out, and every sentence on it either moves them closer or gives them a reason to keep looking.

Four page types on this site are easy to confuse, so it is worth being blunt about which is which. A service page covers one thing you sell as work. A product page covers one thing you sell as a thing. A solution page is arranged around a problem the buyer has and usually cuts across several products or services at once. A feature page takes one capability of a product and explains it in full for the person who came looking for exactly that. This page is the second of the four.

It is also not a product description. Descriptions are short, there are hundreds of them, and they sit above a buy button in a shop. A product page is for a considered purchase — a machine, a subscription, a piece of equipment — where somebody reads for several minutes and may bring a colleague back to read it again.

Who this is for

Businesses with a small number of products that people think about before buying. A manufacturer with four machines. A software company with three plans. An equipment dealer whose pages were written by the supplier and read like a datasheet with a logo on top.

The symptom is always the same. The page lists what the product is made of and never says what it is for, so buyers phone to ask the question the page should have answered. Voltage, dimensions and materials are all there. Whether it will handle a particular job is not.

You do not need this if you have a large catalogue of similar items; that is product descriptions, and it is a different rhythm of work. You do not need it either if the page is read and understood and people still do not buy, which is usually a price or proof problem and better handled as conversion copy.

What goes in it

Every page in the set follows the same order, because a buyer comparing two of your products should not have to learn a new layout halfway through.

• What it does, in one sentence. The outcome, not the mechanism. A buyer who reads nothing else should be able to repeat this sentence to a colleague.
• Who it is for and who it is not. The jobs it handles well, and the job size at which you would honestly send someone to the bigger model or to another supplier.
• Features turned into reasons. Each specification followed by the thing it lets the buyer do. The number on its own means nothing to anyone outside your trade.
• What comes with it. What is included, what is extra, what needs installing, what the warranty covers and for how long.
• The price, or how the price is set. A figure, a band, or an honest sentence about what changes it. A page with no pricing information sends the buyer to a competitor who has some.
• Proof and the awkward questions. Who already uses it, for what, and the two or three doubts your sales people hear every week.

What you get

The pages. Each product page as a separate document of 600 to 1,000 words, with headings, body, specification table wording, button labels, the title tag and the meta description. Three to eight pages is a usual set.

A feature-to-reason table. One row per specification, with the plain-English reason a buyer should care. Your sales people tend to keep this and use it on calls, which is a decent sign it is right.

A shared page outline. The section order every product page follows, for your developer to build once and reuse as the range grows.

A walkthrough call. Forty-five minutes with whoever sells the products, so the pages and the sales conversation stop contradicting each other.

A worked example

An illustration. A small Ontario manufacturer sells three commercial dough mixers. Each page opens with a photograph, a model number and a table of eleven specifications supplied by the parts maker. The phone question, several times a week, is whether the middle model can handle a full day of pizza dough or whether the bakery needs the large one.

The rewritten pages open with the answer instead. The middle model is described as suited to a shop producing a few hundred bases a day with one operator; the large model is for a shop running two shifts. Bowl capacity stays in the table, but the page now says what that capacity means in trays, and what happens to the motor if it is run past that all day. Each page names the models it sits between and links to both. A short section covers installation, the single-phase and three-phase question, and parts lead times, because those subjects account for most of the calls. Three pages of about 800 words replace three datasheets, and the calls that do come in start further along.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. The range, who buys each one, and the questions your sales people answer most often. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of pages, the price and the dates, agreed before anything starts.
3. Product access. Specifications, manuals, warranty terms, and time with whoever knows the products best. Seeing one in use is worth more than any document.
4. Drafts in batches. Two or three at a time, so you can read the first while the rest are written. One round of changes per page.
5. Final set and walkthrough. All pages, the outline and the feature-to-reason table, delivered together with the call.

Two to four weeks for a set of three to eight pages is typical.

What it costs

Product pages are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size of the job varies with the range and with how technical the products are. The price depends on the number of pages and how much usable material already exists in your manuals and proposals. A set is priced per page. The number is fixed in writing before the work starts, and the pricing page shows the shape of the four ways of working.

What happens next

Once the range is written, the two usual follow-ons are a page that sets you against the alternative, for buyers who are choosing between suppliers rather than models, and the questions that cause returns, answered before the sale rather than after it. Businesses selling to several trades sometimes add the same range described in one trade’s vocabulary. Each is a separate decision. The product pages are finished work on their own, and nothing further is assumed.