Screencast for Improving Product Pages

August 28, 2007 | In Best Practices |

Just a quick note to call your attention to a screencast for optimizing product pages (fancy word for video recording of someone’s monitor) recently posted over at GrokDotCom by Bryan Eisenberg, co-author of Call to Action:Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, and several other good ebooks. Bryan walks through product pages on FingerHut, BestBuy and TigerDirect, pointing out what can be improved.

His tips center around:

  • Readability/scanability of product descriptions
  • How many and what type of images are used to help inform buyers
  • Placement of add-to-cart buttons.

It’s good to see that even the giants get things wrong at times, and learning from both their missteps and successes can be invaluable for gaining insight into improving your own product pages. I highly recommend checking out the other screencasts on conversion rate tips from Target and Petco and also on reducing cart abandonment.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

4 Comments »

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  1. Paul,

    Thank you for sharing this with your readers. I am glad you are finding these screencasts interesting. Is there any other you would like to see done?

    Best wishes,
    Bryan

    Comment by Bryan Eisenberg — August 30, 2007 #

  2. Hi Bryan,

    Would love to see a screencast with your thoughts on single-page checkout (when it works, when it doesn’t and whether specific vertical markets seem to work better than others with this type of checkout). Another popular topic would be around building trust and credibility throughout a site–who’s doing it right and wrong. Again–thanks for the screencasts–great resource for merchants.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — August 30, 2007 #

  3. Hi,

    I wasn’t sure how else to contact you, but I was wondering if you’ve had the chance to look at the “Windows Live Product Upload” service for their shopping network. Their required information for catalog uploads can be found in a yahoo store’s database except for “image urls.”

    It seems that yahoo’s image urls are now static (as in the urls stay the same now??) Is there a way to get the image url info for such a service?

    Thanks

    Comment by Pepe — September 1, 2007 #

  4. Pepe,

    The image urls do not remain static until changed unless you reference images uploaded to your files in your templates (which some stores customize their templates to do). If you upload your images using the multi-image upload, then your image urls may change at times. Some merchants use third party services to optimize their shopping feeds and provide static images. Don Cole over at Your Store Wizards has such a service.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — September 5, 2007 #

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