More than 90% of dropshipping businesses worldwide have to face failure in the very first few months. There are numerous reasons behind this failure, one of the common ones is poorly written or no descriptions of products.
Product descriptions are highly crucial for online brands. They let both the targeted audience and search engines know about the features and benefits of the products being sold. Now sadly, generic descriptions are too common in the world of dropshipping.
That’s why, we decided to craft an awareness blog to save future dropshipping businesses from failure. In this article, we will learn about the critical role of product descriptions in dropshipping and many other useful information. So, let’s jump right in!
The Role of Product Description in Dropshipping Business
Picture this in your mind: Product descriptions play a deciding role in making a dropshipping brand successful and unsuccessful.
- Encourages Customers to Make Purchases
When shopping online, the only thing customers have is product descriptions, as they cannot physically test out the product. The descriptions tell them about the features and benefits that they would get after making the purchase. Getting familiar with this sort of information will encourage them to make purchases and become regular customers.
- Helps in Winning Trust & Loyalty
Gaining customer’s trust and loyalty is one of the top-most priorities of brands. This not only boosts conversions but also increases brand recognition in the targeted market. And guess what…? Product description can greatly help in winning customers' loyalty and trust, let us explain how.
When a business provides 100% accurate and valuable descriptions, it will make the customer feel confident about the worthiness of the product they are planning to purchase.
- Positive Impact on Rankings
Search engines like Google encourage dropshipping brands to add necessary details about their product. This helps them carefully analyze the content to determine whether it completely answers the audience's query or not. If yes, then the description will be rewarded with a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP).
Common Mistakes in Product Descriptions
There are numerous mistakes that are commonly made by dropshipping businesses in product descriptions, some of them are discussed below.
- Focus on Benefits, not on Promotion
Most of you out there will have personally experienced this. Many dropshipping brands especially new ones try to be promotional in their product description. They portray themselves as “Our product is #1,” “No one can come close to it,” BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.
This approach is not good in any way, it leaves a negative impression on the consumer that the brand’s primary goal is to sell, not to provide value.
So, instead of glorifying themselves, dropshipping businesses should focus on highlighting key benefits in descriptions. Doing so will automatically differentiate them from their competitors, increasing the overall chances of success in terms of conversion.
- Vague Information
Another common mistake that dropshipping businesses make is adding vague information (intentionally or unintentionally) in the product description. The vague information refers to text that is either unclear or ambiguous.
Such descriptions will most likely fail to grab the attention of potential customers as well as search engines. So, it is recommended to be clear and try to add value to keep the reader engaged and interested.
- Grammatically Inaccurate
Most dropshipping businesses worldwide mainly hire writers to craft product descriptions. Due to human error, there is a high possibility that the writer may make grammatical mistakes, which will damage the business's credibility and leave a poor impression on the customers.
They might think how can a business deliver quality products when it is not even able to craft grammatically perfect descriptions?
Therefore, before you post product descriptions, proofread them with a free grammar checker. It can help you quickly find and remove all grammar errors, making your descriptions flawless.
Impacts of Bad Product Description on Dropshipping Businesses
If a drop shipping business is standing on bad descriptions, there are multiple consequences it would have to face, some of which are as follows.
- Low Conversion Rates
When your product descriptions are not up to the mark in terms of benefits highlighting, readability, fluency, etc., then they may not be able to encourage the customer to make purchases. This will ultimately lead to a significant decrease in the conversion rates – which would be concerning for any business.
- Increased Refunds
Customers who decide to purchase the product even after reading a poorly written (unclear/vague) description may become disappointed when the product arrives. This can be because their purchased product lacks features or benefits that the consumer thought of when hitting the purchase button.
The dissatisfaction will result in increased return or refund requests which will be a great loss for the dropshipping business in terms of budget, increasing the overall risk of failure.
- Negative Customer Reviews
Finally, when customers have a bad purchasing experience due to poorly written descriptions, they will most likely vocalize their frustration through negative reviews. Receiving too many negative reviews can prove to be devastating for the dropshipping business.
The bad reviews will not only restrict new customers from making purchases but also damage the brand’s image in the market and cause low SERP visibility.
How to Write Effective Product Descriptions
Below are a few essential steps for crafting a compelling product description.
- Cover all Details that Customers Want to Know
When writing product descriptions, it is highly essential to provide potential customers with all the information that they need to make the final decision. Again, instead of promoting, you should highlight the key selling points or benefits of the product.
For instance, if you are selling a gaming laptop, then you can consider writing a benefit-oriented description like the one below.
“With its 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and 32GB DDR4 RAM, this laptop will provide you a smooth gaming and multi-tasking experience.”
A description like this is more likely to win consumers’ trust, resulting in an increased no. of purchases.
- Use Compelling Language
No matter how much valuable information the description contains, if it is not engaging to read, it may not provide the required results. That’s why, it is recommended to make use of powerful words and phrases while writing. Additionally, try to follow a fluent sentence structure as well.
No doubt, drafting a compelling description with this approach will require robust writing skills and significant time. It is also true that some dropshipping business owners have to create hundreds of descriptions, they can’t afford to spend extra time to pay attention to description attractiveness.
So, a preferable option would be to opt for a paraphrasing tool that will turn your dull product description into an engaging one by improving word choice and sentence structure.
For proof, we have also provided a demo of turning a dull product description into an engaging one using a paraphrasing tool below.
Here is the source link of the tool used: https://www.paraphrasing.io/
This way, the marketing team can quickly transform their boring descriptions into interesting ones without devoting much time and effort.
- Add High-Quality Images
A product description is incomplete without images. Through pictures, dropshipping businesses can allow potential customers to evaluate a product’s quality in terms of aesthetics. So, invest your time and resources in creating high-resolution pictures of the product.
Additionally, it will be great if you hire a specialized photographer and graphic designer for this purpose. However, there are also photo editing tools such as Canva that you can consider leveraging.
- Proofread
Finally, once the writing process is done. You must go through the entire product description at least once to make sure all the essential details are properly covered. If not, don’t hesitate to make alterations.
Moreover, while proofreading make sure the text is completely free of any sort of grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes. These issues can put dropshipping business credibility at risk.
Final Words
The success rate of the dropshipping business is 10% to 20%. There are multiple reasons why many businesses struggle in this field. One of them is neglecting the importance of product descriptions. The descriptions not only encourage customers to make purchases but also improve the visibility of products in the SERP.
In this detailed guide, we have tried our level best to highlight the importance of these in the dropshipping world. Hope you will find this article valuable.
