How to Write Good Product Descriptions
A photograph shows what a product looks like. It cannot tell anyone how heavy it is, what it is made of, whether it will survive a wash, or why it costs what it costs. That is the description’s job, and most product descriptions do not do it.
Worse, the same description usually gets pasted into two places that need entirely different things — a product page selling to a consumer, and a line sheet selling to a buyer.
Start with the two audiences
A retail shopper is deciding whether they want it. A wholesale buyer is deciding whether it will sell in their shop. Those are different questions and they need different copy.
| Product page (retail) | Line sheet (wholesale) | |
|---|---|---|
| Reader | The person who will wear it | The person who will stock it |
| Length | 50–150 words | 15–30 words |
| Tone | Evocative, in your brand voice | Flat and factual |
| Leads with | The benefit or the feeling | Material, dimensions, colourways |
| Must include | Sizing, care, materials | Item number, size run, case pack |
Write the retail one first, then strip it down for the line sheet. Never the other way round — a line sheet description expanded with adjectives reads exactly like what it is.
What a weak description looks like
Here is one you have read a hundred versions of:
Beautiful handmade necklace. Made with love from high-quality materials. Perfect for any occasion — a great gift for someone special!
Every word could describe any necklace ever made. It contains no fact a shopper could act on: no length, no metal, no weight, no reason it costs what it costs. “High-quality materials” is what you write when you do not want to say brass.
The same product, written properly for a product page:
A hand-formed brass pendant on a 45 cm sterling silver chain. One face is hammered, the other left smooth, so it catches the light differently as you move. At 12 g it is light enough to forget you are wearing it. Each pendant is shaped by hand, so no two are identical. Comes boxed.
Same length. Every sentence carries a fact, and the facts do the selling — hammered on one side is more persuasive than “beautiful”, because the reader can picture it.
And the line sheet version of the same product:
BR-114 Hammered Pendant Necklace
Hand-formed brass pendant, sterling silver chain. 45 cm, 12 g.
Colours: raw brass, oxidised. Case pack 6. Wholesale $42 / RRP $84.
No adjectives at all. A buyer scanning thirty brands needs to know what it is, what it costs and how it ships — and nothing else.
The structure that works
Opening line: the single most specific thing
Lead with the fact that distinguishes this product from every similar one. Not “our bestselling tote” — “A 16-litre tote cut from a single piece of waxed canvas, with no seam along the base.”
Most people skim the first line and decide whether to read on. Spend it on substance.
Body: facts a buyer would otherwise have to email you for
- Materials — named, not “premium”. Brass, not metal. 240 gsm cotton, not heavyweight fabric.
- Dimensions and weight — in the units your market uses, and both if you sell internationally.
- Fit or capacity — what it holds, how it sits, what size the model is wearing.
- Care — machine washable or not is a purchase decision, not an afterthought.
- Origin and process, if it is genuinely a selling point. “Cut and sewn in Leeds” earns its place; “crafted with care” does not.
Sensory detail, used sparingly
Online the customer cannot touch anything, so words have to do it: the weight in the hand, the sound a clasp makes, how a fabric softens after a few washes. One or two of these lift a description. Five make it read like a perfume advert.
Answer the objection
Whatever your support inbox asks most often, put the answer in the description. If people constantly ask whether it runs small, say so. Every question you pre-empt is a sale that does not stall.
Practical constraints worth knowing
- Write for the scanner. Two or three short paragraphs, or a short paragraph plus a spec list. Nobody reads a wall of text on a phone.
- Never reuse the manufacturer’s copy. If you dropship or resell, that text appears on a hundred other sites and search engines have no reason to prefer yours.
- Put the important words early. Search engines and shoppers both weight the opening, and truncated previews cut at around 150–160 characters.
- Keep attributes structured. Colour, size and material belong in your product fields, not buried in prose — that is what feeds your catalogue, your filters and your line sheet.
- Write once, in the product data. Descriptions maintained in a spreadsheet and retyped into every document drift out of sync within a season.
A quick test
Read your description and cross out every sentence that could apply to a competitor’s product. If what remains is shorter than what you crossed out, start again.
Getting them into your catalogue
Once descriptions are written properly in your store, they should flow into everything else without being retyped. Foldsquare pulls names, descriptions, prices and variants straight from Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix or Ecwid into a print-ready catalogue or line sheet — so editing a description in your store updates the document rather than starting a new round of copy-paste.
If you are putting a line sheet together, our field guide to what belongs on one covers the rest of the information buyers expect alongside the description, and the free line sheet templates give you somewhere to put it.