Anatomy of a Shopify theme product page: Getting started

It’s one of the most important pages on your Shopify store — but it’s surprisingly often one of the most overlooked parts.

It’s also where your customers spend much of their time learning about your store and becoming engaged with your brand.

What is it?

The product details page, sometimes referred to as PDP.

The product page is where your customers learn what your product is called, what it looks like, how much it costs and what it’s all about — and, hopefully, decide it’s right for them and start the checkout process.

In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a closer look at how you can leverage your Shopify theme’s product page to not only explain what your products are all about, but also answer questions, build confidence and, ultimately, increase conversions and make sales.

The small stuff

As a store owner, it’s easy to get hung up on the minutiae of your product page, including:

• Fonts, text sizes and colors
• Image size
• Page layout and design.

The big stuff

However, the first, and most straightforward way to enhance your Shopify theme’s product pages isn’t worrying about these settings — but rather to focus on the words used to describe your products.

The main goals of your product descriptions should be:

• Explain what, exactly, the product is and what it does.
• Describe the tangible properties of the product — materials, colors and any technical specifications.
• Proactively answer shoppers’ questions and concerns about the product.
• Influence the shopper to decide the product is a good fit for them and purchase it.
• Integrate with your SEO strategy.
• Illustrate your products by way of high quality imagery and video.

Anticipating questions

Remember, unlike a customer entering a brick and mortar store, there’s no way for a customer to come up to you and ask a question about the product.

Even if you have a live chat option, it’s important to remember that’s another layer you’re adding to the sales funnel and therefore another chance to potentially lose a customer.

Instead, you have to take that proactive strategy to give them all the information they may potentially need to determine if a product is a good fit or not.

This often requires “thinking outside the box” since you, as the store owner, are likely extremely (if not exhaustively) familiar with your product details. Some good ways to enhance your product descriptions are:

• Start with the basics and give the broadest information up front, then go into more detail further down in the product description.
• Think about the questions and issues a newcomer to your market or someone unfamiliar with your products might have. You can even test this out by showing it to a friend or neighbor who is seeing your products for the first time; see what questions they ask about them, then try to incorporate the answers to them in your product descriptions.
• Illustrate practical, tangible ways your product can be used or how it solves a problem.
• Use headings, subheadings and bullet lists or tabs to organize information and make it easier to access.

Keep working

Once you’ve created your product descriptions you shouldn’t rest on your laurels.

It’s always a good idea to periodically go through your products and read over your product descriptions and, if necessary, update them based on your SEO strategy, customer communication and feedback and other marketing efforts.

Design factors

All this isn’t to say that design and advanced customization isn’t important, but keep in mind that premium Shopify themes, including those developed by Out of the Sandbox, incorporate ecommerce design best practices into their designs.

Your Shopify theme design team has already integrated proven design strategies and techniques into the layout of the product page, including:

• Product image sizing and positioning.
• Column spacing.
• Font sizes in relation to each other.
• “Add to cart” button design and positioning.
• Implementation of familiar ecommerce design elements that make users feel comfortable with your page.
• Basic structure that is optimized for conversions and sales.

Shopify theme options

Like most Shopify theme developers, Out of the Sandbox does give you the option to easily change settings such as:

• Add to cart button location: Above or below the product description.
• Add to cart button settings: Color, font, type size and wording.
• Image gallery location: The left or right side of the page on larger devices.

On advanced themes like Turbo, you’ll also have options to display additional content on product pages such as full-width images, using our product.details template.

The trap

It’s very tempting and easy to fall into the trap of thinking that adding apps, features and design changes to your product page will help sales, but more often than not, product pages come up short on providing customers with the information they need to feel confident enough to make a purchase.

This is especially true for the vast majority of Shopify stores since they are relatively unknown brands and often sell unique or creative products that customers may not be familiar with (at least for now!).

So be sure to prioritize quality content on your product pages, providing the shopper first and foremost with all the info they would have access to if they were standing in front of your product in real life.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a look at how you can use advanced design techniques and layouts to enhance your product pages and the information they provide.