How to Use Shopify Products & Optimize the Product Page to Increase Traffic

(A Gorgeous, yet detailed Shopify product page from Luxury brand, Pratesi) 

Product pages, or Product detail pages (PDP's) are the most important part of your online store; they are where your customers decide what to buy, and when to buy it. Coincidentally, they usually have the highest abandonment rate in a Shopify store’s funnel –which means they provide the biggest conversion rate opportunities for merchants to address. By the time a customer gets to the product page, especially one that they might be skeptical about, they're thinking about whether it makes sense for them to add to cart at all. Merchants and Shopify web designers need to take a hard look at their brand's product pages to tackle objections and promote value. In this article, we’d like to discuss how to improve and capture as much revenue from your product pages as possible. In order to build a successful brand in today’s landscape — you must incorporate thoughtful design, anticipate your customer's needs, know your audience, and listen to what their needs are. There's always room for improvement.

Recommended: Luxury Brands Using Shopify 

1. Run Heat & Scroll Maps

We recommend running heat maps on the three most popular products on your Shopify store. If you have a significant seperation between flagship products & accessories, also run heat & scroll maps on your most popular accessory. For instance, selling camera bags in addition to high-end cameras. Finally, you should run heat & scroll maps on any products receiving large advertising traffic. Popular heat map tools that we like to use for our Shopify clients include hotjar and lucky orange.

A. Let the tests run for a few week, look at the data. Try to figure out whether there’s a significant difference in behavior between the products you’re analyzing.

Does the bounce rate appear to be elevated on one of them? Check against GA’s per-page bounce rate over the same time period. 

Does the scroll depth appear to be shorter for one page? Is that because people are buying without needing to read, or because people are closing the tab after your first pitch, or because you put an element mid-page that doesn’t entice anyone to keep scrolling?

2. Check Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a tool offered by Google that helps you collect, analyze, and report on website traffic data. While GA tells you what is happening—conversions are decreasing, bounce rate is going up, etc.—Hotjar can help you understand why through surveys, incoming feedback and heat maps. In order to retrieve a more nuanced understanding of your Google Analytics data, check out these instructions from draft.nu:

Go to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages, and then type in the component of your product URLs that corresponds to all your products. (On Shopify, this is products by default.) Doing this gives you a list of all of your products, and key metrics for how each of them are performing, including average time on page and bounce rate.

To get ecommerce-focused goals, first go to Conversions -> Goals -> Overview, then scroll down and hit “view full report” in the bottom right, and then type in the component of your product URLs that corresponds to all your products. You’ll see how many people are completing a given goal for each of your products.

Then, to get AOV & conversion rate per product, go to Conversions -> Ecommerce -> Product Performance. This listing is broken out per product. You may have multiple SKUs per product page, of course – so you’ll need to do the number-crunching legwork to average everything together, in order to assess how a given product page performs writ large.

A contemporary, cool yet informative product page by Maude: 

3. Dissect your product page and convey value for your customers

Product pages have 3 tasks, in this order:

• Convey the value of what you’re selling.
• Address objections from customers.
• Close the sale.

Conveying the value

There are many ways you convey the value of what you’re selling. The most common include:

• The overall design of the site
• The photography
• Features
• Outcomes

These are the things that most eCommerce websites get right – but many still have errors, like displaying photography that is not consistent sizing or pixelated, a clear and concise pitch (especially for luxury brands), and confusing language. Most customer objections can be addressed around care, use, replacement, and total cost of ownership.

More importantly, presenting the information is not the same as presenting it well. Most e-commerce store still lazily resort to the defaults that their store provider gives them. Every time you notice the default still happening, that’s a possible conversion opportunity.

Addressing objections

An objection is something that holds a customer back from conversion. Objections take many forms, but the most common are price, shipping, social proof, and utility (aka whether the thing will sensibly fit into the customer’s life at the time they’re viewing your store). Our client with the biggest conversion rate sells dog tags; the customer knows at the time that they are considering a purchase, that they need the product in their life.

Product pages need to address as many common objections as possible. You should audit your store’s objections from customer service inquiries, usability tests, and post-purchase surveys.

Also consider providing customers with a precise shipping date, + or -1 day, similar to Amazon. It’s worth the time and effort that it takes to overhaul your logistics and shipping partnerships. 

Social proof, usually presented in the form of reviews, is frequently glossed over. If you run scroll maps and discover that nobody is even finding your reviews, you need to either move them higher on the page, or cherry-pick a reiew and quote it near your product.

FAQs tackle many objections (see this one on activewear brand Outdoor Voices for a good example), as does a more deliberate and intentional content strategy.|

Closing the sale

Lastly, people need to be able to actually buy the thing you’re selling.

That’s when you get down to brass-tacks UX. How hard is it to find the add-to-cart button? Have people scrolled too far away from the add-to-cart button once they’ve decided to buy? Sticky headers with add-to-cart buttons help here.

Does the product page support many different customization options? You might want to rethink and re-evaluate the way that you support selection of these.

Do you offer many different versions of a given product, some of which are occasionally sold out? You need to clearly note what’s sold out, and allow people to sign up for in-stock notifications through Klaviyo or a back in stock app.

Every single design improvement I just mentioned is worth researching and testing on any store.

One of the most creative and fun shopify product pages by Fly by Jing:

Necessary Information

• It’s recommended that the product’s title be presented without any variants (“in red”, etc), and variants should be displayed as a separate section on the page

• An average rating for reviews, along with rating quantity and stars, linked to the reviews section on the same page

• Installment payment services, if applicable (after pay, shopify pay, etc)

• A variant selector, if applicable, in the form of buttons and not pull-downs

• Is your product customizable? You can include form fields on the product page

• A size chart for retail clothing or accessories

• A quantity selector, with + and – buttons (sometimes this is not necessary) 

• The product’s price, and if the product is on sale, make sure you include the discount pricing as a percentage or dollar off

• A colored, non-100%-width button that reads “add to cart”

• A delivery date estimate

• Shipping terms, if needed, with a link to read more in the form of a tooltip

• if the product is complicated or high value, a link to the customer service help page, or a support email/chat link

Your product pages are the most component of your store. If your store were a team within your company, the product page would be the first employee your customer's encounter. Make sure it’s knowledgeable, friendly, talks to the customer clearly, and closes the sale.