You know the golden rule of ecommerce success: Always think about customers. That's critical becomes ecommerce is about solving problems, not creating them. So, the better you understand your target's pain points and needs, the more successful ecommerce business you'll have.

This article will tell you what content an ecommerce website should generate to attract the target audience and make them care about your product. You'll reveal the difference between texts for big and small ecommerce brands and learn how to write those texts for better engagement and conversion.

Two Types of Ecommerce Websites

First, let's divide all online stores into two categories:

1. Big marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon, those offering more than 1000, 10000, or 10000 items. As a rule, they sell products of different brands and manufacturers without focusing on unique product descriptions. Customers come to these marketplaces to compare prices, payment and shipping terms, or warranties. When writing texts for such ecommerce websites, it's worth focusing on those specific benefits.

2. Small stores with unique products that are often handmade and quite expensive. There are not dozens or hundreds of such products on the market, and often they are in that one particular store and nowhere else. Sometimes these unique products may be new on the market. In this case, your informative writing should create a need for this product in the customer.

Ecommerce Texts You'll Need Regardless of a Store's Size

Whether you write texts for big or small ecommerce websites, you'll need the following content types:

• Marketing texts for regular pages: a home page, About Us, payment options, guarantees, FAQs, and contacts

• News and special offers

• Product pages

• Product descriptions

• Useful articles

Please do your best to focus on marketing texts because they are critical for customers' decision-making. It's especially so for users who come to your ecommerce website for the first time and have no positive experience of communicating with you yet.

These texts work on every stage of your sales funnel:

The first step is to attract a visitor's attention, and a marketing text on your home page does this job best. After that, you'll need to show the solution to a consumer's problem, lead them to the desired conclusion, evoke confidence, and call them to take action. Each page of your ecommerce website can deal with one or several goals at once.

How to Write Ecommerce Texts for Your Online Store

Every business, marketing campaign, and content writing starts with research. Below are three details you can't ignore:

1. Knowing and understanding your target audience (There's also a difference between a customer profile and a buyer persona to consider)

2. Understand the marketing strategy of your direct competitors

3. A clear understanding of your USP (unique selling proposition, a value of your product to customers: what makes you stand out from the crowd)

Once you've dealt with all three, it's time to craft text structures and start writing. 

If it's not you but outsourced specialists who write ecommerce texts for your website, do your best to provide them with detailed creative briefs. They need to know all the peculiarities of your business, your product with its features and benefits, and understand your competitors' offers. It will help them craft stellar texts with the correct focus.

Below is the marketing text structure to follow if you want it to work on every stage of the sales funnel:

1. Emotional headline specifying a pain point

2. The solution to the problem covered in the headline (USP-offer)

3. The benefits of your offer to a customer

4. Proofs. Why should they care?

5. A call to action (extra motivation to buy from you)

Please pay precise attention to "Proofs." They'll depend on your ecommerce website's type and product/service. In each particular case, it may be something from this list (or even several items at once):

• Work technology / program / calculations

• Customer reviews and case studies

• Our clients / Have already ordered

• Your/company's reputation and awards (experience, number of projects, sales)

• Guarantees

• Work with objections

Speaking of customer reviews:

Despite all the talk about whether people believe reviews, they look for them and want to read them on your ecommerce website. An online store that doesn't have a single comment or customer feedback would look weird.

Information about current customers, the number of customers, and some achievements and awards of your brand/store would be appropriate to mention in the "About Us" text.

Guarantees and the work with objections can go as a separate text or be a part of the "About Us" writing or product descriptions.

Ecommerce texts for home pages

There's no need to write long, 2000-3000 words text for ecommerce websites' home pages: Not every consumer comes to see it. More often than not, clients come from SERPs to product pages directly.

And yet, your home page text needs to attract a visitor and grab their interest. If a person comes to it, they need to understand where they are and what products/services they will find here.

Source: Beardbrand

Write a short, 800-1000 words text for your home page. It's critical to explain to potential customers what you have for them, where to find it, and invite them to continue interacting with the online store.

Remember about a call to action (CTA). In the case of ecommerce home pages, it's not "Buy now!" or anything like that. The more appropriate variants will be something like, "Visit a page," "Talk to our expert," "Take a look," etc.

Feel free to update regular pages like Home or About Us from time to time, if necessary.

News and special offers

Some online stores don't pay enough attention to this content type, writing something like "Yahoo! We've got new collection" — and that's it, which is wrong to do. News is as meaningful as any other content block on ecommerce websites, helping you inform customers and promote products to a broader audience.

What to describe there:

• discounts and special offers

• bonuses you've got for loyal or first-time customers

• the information about new products, offers, and collections

It's critical to provide detailed information about new products your online store gets: tell about their manufacturer, features, design, benefits, exclusive nature, etc.

When writing texts with news, use a principle of the inverted pyramid:

1. Mention the core benefit in the title

2. Provide the essence of this news in the first paragraph

3. Explain the details later through the text

Such news is easier to read, it grabs attention, and it's interesting for the audience to check.

"How often should I publish the news?" you may ask. It depends on the type of your online store:

For an average store, it is OK to write 1-2 pieces of news per week. If you're a marketplace with many brands that often provide some goods with discounts, you may need to write about them daily.

If you have a small online store with up to 100 unique products, one time per week will be enough. Let it be a comprehensive and engaging text, interesting for your target audience to check.

Product descriptions: How to make them unique

First and foremost, ensure you understand the difference between a product page and a product description. The core elements to describe here don't depend on your store's type: Do your best to provide maximum information about a product, including its main features, custom images, and social proof.

If the products aren't yours, gather all the information from the manufacturer and process it. Also, you can "spy" the info about this or that product from your competitors: Whatever the case, you'll write about it in your own words.

Source: Firebox

While it may seem challenging to write unique descriptions for products that tons of other online stores sell, it's not so. The only rule here: Never copy product descriptions from manufacturers or other ecommerce websites. Consider paraphrasing, use your writing creativity and brand tone of voice, and remember that your text needs look unique for search engines to prevent bans for duplications.

Try original titles and meta tags, add high-quality custom images to engage website visitors, and write using power and emotional words to compel customers to buy.

Remember about ecommerce SEO: use target keywords in image file names, meta tags, and a few times throughout the text.

Why online stores need informative articles (blogs)

Many online stores, especially those small with unique products, manage blogs on their websites. Two reasons:

1. SEO: informative content, well-optimized and relevant to your niche, helps a website to rank higher on Google for more people to see it.

2. Content marketing: informative content helps users solve problems, builds trust in your website, and eventually motivates the audience to buy from you. It's another channel for promoting your online stores, besides SEO, PPC, and other marketing tricks you practice.

Feel free to use different content ideas to transform your ecommerce marketing, but ensure your informative articles solve a customer's problem, teach something new, and contain the element of expertise. It's also critical to format them for better readability and add visuals for better engagement.

The most popular article formats for online stores are instructions (guides), reviews (both text and video), expert tips, and how-tos. 

It's better to prepare the content plan with writing ideas for your ecommerce blog beforehand, based on their relevance to your target audience's interests and needs.

In a Word

Now that you've got the core principles of ecommerce text writing, it's time to develop a content strategy and craft engaging texts depending on your online store's type and target audience's needs.

Consider your sales funnel and goals at every stage — and create texts that will help you achieve them. Professionally-written content assets serve as a powerful weapon to demonstrate your product's benefits and motivate consumers to choose your store among others.

Author’s Bio:

Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers.com. Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz.