Top 10 Ecommerce Website Content Best Practices

Searchability is an important part of converting sales — consumers have to find you before they can buy from you. If visitors bounce off your site before they find what they’re looking for and make a purchase, all your SEO work is useless. Your content is what makes your ecommerce website sticky, engaging and centered around the customer experience. 

To create ecommerce website content that has your brand and your products stand out, we recommend following 10 best practices.

10 Ecommerce Website Content Best Practices

1. Know Your Audience
2. Identify Your Value Proposition
3. Engage Your Readers
4. Focus on Readability
5. Use Action Words
6. Create Urgency
7. Put Testimonials to Work
8. Use an Omnichannel Strategy
9. Tell Your Product’s Story
10. Be Smart About AI Content

Using these 10 best practices, you can create copy that speaks to your ideal customer and moves them to take action.

1. Know Your Audience

Whether you’re writing for your home page, your product pages or your checkout page, your content has to be targeted to your consumers. You need a clear understanding of who your ideal customers are — which requires some research. 

Using that information, you can create profiles or personas that give a summary of those customer groups. These profiles will help you better visualize the type of language that speaks directly to your customers’ beliefs, opinions, interests and motivations.

Your customer profiles will help you identify what makes your product unique to those customer groups. 

Mobile First

About 75% of customers prefer to shop using their mobile devices. So if your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing a huge slice of the market. 

Here are some ways to make your website more mobile-friendly.

• Responsive Design: Ensure your website automatically adjusts to fit the screen size and resolution of any device, so it’s easy to view on a cell phone or tablet.
• Fast Loading Times: Optimize images, minify code (CSS, JavaScript, HTML), and leverage browser caching to speed up page load times, keeping mobile users engaged.
• Simplified Navigation: Design a straightforward, touch-friendly navigation menu that makes it easy for users to find what they're looking for with minimal clicks.
• Readable Content: Use legible font sizes and contrast ratios, ensuring text is easily readable on small screens without needing to zoom.
• Touch-Friendly Buttons and Links: Make buttons and links large enough to be easily tapped with a finger.
• Mobile Apps: Consider creating a mobile ordering app to make it easier to place and track online orders. Starbucks’ mobile app, for example, is so popular it’s caused congestion in their stores.
• Optimize Images and Videos: Compress images and videos to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality, ensuring they load quickly and look great on mobile devices.
• Test on Multiple Devices: Regularly test your website on a variety of mobile devices and browsers to ensure compatibility and a consistent user experience.
• Accessible Forms: Design forms for easy input on mobile devices, with appropriately sized form fields and clear, descriptive labels.
• Localize Content: If you sell outside the United States, allow users to easily switch regions/languages, enhancing the experience for global audiences.
• Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): Consider implementing AMP for static content to further increase loading speed and performance on mobile devices.
• Regular Updates and Testing: Continuously update and test your website, fixing any mobile usability issues identified through analytics or user feedback.

2. Identify Your Value Proposition

Unless you’re selling something completely innovative, your products will likely be similar to your competitors’. So consumers want to know what makes your products and brand different. What sets you apart from the rest of your competitors?

Does your company have a different approach to design, manufacturing or packaging? Is your company woman-owned or socially conscious? Is there a unique story behind your brand or the products themselves? 

This is your value proposition. 

Use your value proposition in your copy as much as possible and allow it to shape the keywords you choose. Research the keywords your competitors use. Then look for similar keywords that have a high search frequency. 

Keep in mind the trend toward voice search. Long-tail keywords are becoming more popular as consumers ask Siri to find the answers to their questions. Your goal is for consumers to find your website based on unique keywords and key phrases. 

But remember, once users find your website, you still need to keep them engaged.

3. Engage Your Readers

From the moment consumers first look at your landing page or home page, you have about 15 seconds to capture their attention. Your content should get consumers excited about shopping with a strong point of view or “hook.” This is where your value proposition really comes into play. You need to quickly show how your products are unique and/or superior — and they need to solve the consumer’s problem.

One great way to do this is through storytelling. An engaging story about your brand, your product or even how other customers have benefitted from your product will pull readers in and create interest.

As an experienced writer, you probably know that the basic story elements include a protagonist, a conflict, rising action, a climax and a resolution. But you may not know how to execute this to sell a product on your ecommerce website. 

Here’s what our partners at BigCommerce suggest:

• Make the consumer the hero or protagonist. 
• Use the problem they’re trying to solve as the conflict. 
• The rising action includes all the ways the consumer tries to solve their problem on their own.
• The climax happens when the consumer becomes a customer and purchases your product. 
• Your customer’s satisfaction with your product is the resolution.

Stories are engaging because they allow your customers to identify with the protagonist since you’ve made them the hero of the story. This will draw them in and create an emotional relationship with your product that will more likely lead to a purchase. 

Once you have a great story, your ecommerce website copy needs to be easy to read and interact with. 

4. Focus on Readability

Your ecommerce website content has to be easily understood if it’s going to engage and convert. To make that easier, today’s writers can lean on a wealth of tools like the Flesch Reading Ease Test, which determines how readable a sentence or paragraph is using two measurements:

• Average sentence length based on the number of words
• Average number of syllables per word

Even more convenient, you can paste content into an online tool, such as the Flesch reading ease calculator, to check the readability of your copy. 

The “Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report” found that copy with a Flesch reading ease test score of 60 and above performed the best on ecommerce sites. That equates to middle school level reading and below. 

How do you ensure your content meets that benchmark? Start with sentence structure. One of the easiest rules to follow when writing ecommerce website copy is to avoid compound sentences and clauses. Short, concise sentences that get to the point quickly convert better than wordy, run-on sentences. Also make sure to review your content and delete any unnecessary words and sentences that may be confusing or stray from the main selling point. 

What about word choice? That has to have impact, too — right?

5.  Use Action Words

When creating copy for ecommerce websites, be directive. Tell consumers what you want them to do. That means using action words like “buy,” “try,” and “start.” To that end, use verbs instead of adjectives to describe your products. 

Here’s how that looks.

Instead of this sentence:

“These warm, comfortable down jackets are perfect for winter.”

Create a sentence like:

“These stylish jackets will keep you warm while you ski slopes, hike trails, and take on your next winter weather adventure.” 

The second sentence has more verbs and allows readers to imagine themselves wearing the jacket instead of just looking at it. Using action words can also help you answer consumer questions about your products. This happens to be one of the most important roles of product descriptions and the key to conversions.

Should you use jargon?

It’s easy to use jargon as a way to sound like an expert about your product. Jargon can be very useful, especially with more sophisticated brands and buyers. But be careful how much you use. If consumers don’t understand your product and what it’s for, they won’t buy it. 

Once you inspire action, you need to make it time-sensitive — that requires urgency.

6. Create Urgency

Remember that you are writing persuasive copy — you’re convincing consumers to convert to customers. One tried-and-true principle of persuasive writing is to create the feeling of scarcity – that there isn’t enough for everyone. 

You can do this subtly with phrases that refer to your products as “high demand,” or you can be direct. Highlighting a limited-time offer or low inventory may encourage consumers to make a purchase.

You can also create urgency by offering immediate gratification. The same benchmark report mentioned earlier found that a button labeled “Buy Now” was almost three times more successful in converting consumers to customers than a form they needed to fill out for more information. 

On a cautionary note, watch how much you use scarcity as a tactic. It can backfire. Everything you sell can’t be in limited supply all the time, or consumers will question your ability to deliver the products they want. Also, today’s ecommerce shopper is pretty astute. They know when the scarcity tactic is being overused.

Speaking of your customers, don’t miss the opportunity to let them sell your products for you.

7. Put Testimonials to Work

Your customers’ testimonials have a lot to offer. They describe your product and how it works in their language. That’s almost as good as having a satisfied customer act as a salesperson. Use the words your customers use to describe your brand and your product as much as possible. 

The same goes for comments on review sites and social media apps. Any content you can curate from your actual customers will be extremely useful for converting consumers. 

And those social media apps? They should be part of your overall content strategy.

8. Use an Omnichannel Strategy

Website traffic doesn’t just come from direct web searches. The key to getting more eyes on your messaging is to meet consumers where they already are. 

Integrate Voice, Social, SMS, and Emails: Use these channels in harmony to guide consumers to your website, ensuring a seamless experience across all platforms.

Bridge Online Research and Offline Purchases: Recognize that many consumers prefer to research products online before purchasing in-store. Tailor your content to support and enhance this journey.

9. Tell Your Product’s Story

Stories are remembered more than 22% more than facts alone. So, using them in your content is a great way to hook readers and move them through the buying process.

Immerse Consumers with Engaging Stories: Craft narratives around your products, highlighting their journey, impact and uniqueness. Giving products personalities can significantly enhance consumer connection.

Use Real Customer Stories: Incorporate consumer case studies and anecdotes to add authenticity to your storytelling, making your products more relatable and desirable.

Highlight Sustainability and ESG Efforts: If your brand is committed to sustainability, make that a core part of your website's messaging. Consumers increasingly prefer brands that are transparent about their environmental and social governance (ESG) efforts, so if your brand is, too, be sure to signal that to them.

So how do you create all this content? Don’t worry, help is available.

10. Be Smart About AI-Generated Content

AI tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but they can also generate borderline unreadable content. So be strategic about how you use AI. Here are some things to try:

Use AI to Jumpstart Content Creation: Use AI to generate content outlines and initial drafts. This can streamline the content creation process, allowing for more personalized and varied content.

Balance AI With Human Insight: While AI can be a powerful tool, ensure that final content is edited by humans to reflect your brand’s voice and values accurately.

Implement AI Chatbots: Use AI-powered chatbots on your website to provide instant customer service, guiding visitors through their purchase journey and answering queries in real-time.

Ultimately, your ecommerce website copy relies on knowing your customers and targeting your messaging to address their beliefs, needs and wants. ClearSale’s original research reports can help your company better understand how consumers think and their expectations from ecommerce merchants and their websites. We also offer a wealth of information about ecommerce platforms and how to optimize your website for traffic and navigation. Our experts are available to help you get started on your ecommerce journey.