Having an online shop is both similar and different from your offline retail store.

One of the biggest differences is how shoppers interact with your merchandise.

Offline, your shop, along with its contents, comprise your product display.

Certainly this is obvious, but there are subtleties to the situation that you, the small business owner, may not have considered.

In fact, in a real world situation, you have a strong degree of control over your customers. With the physical arrangement of your retail store, you are controlling:

1) WHERE your customer enters — you have a main front door and you may have another entrance from a parking lot or similar situation, but the customer doesn’t just materialize inside the store, near a particular product.

2) HOW your customer interacts with the merchandise — is it in glass cases or out on open shelves where it can be handled and touched?

3) WHAT they see and the information that they have about the products — is the product on display with literature, but the sales staff is available to demonstrate and explain the product’s use and features?

For this example, think about how sewing machines are sold in a specialty store, as opposed to how they are presented in a discount store.

In addition, if you have a knowledgeable and experienced sales staff, they are likely tailor their product presentation to the interests, experience, and questions asked by the customer.

As you can see, offline and in person, you actually have a strong degree of control over the entire sales process and especially, over any customer’s shopping experience.

Online, you have none of these advantages.

Instead, you are relying on web site navigation and product descriptions. This changes the selling landscape immeasurably. Let’s take a moment to contrast the online experience with the offline experience.

1) WHERE your customer enters – on a web site, we hope that the customer will be entering the site on the home page, but the reality is far different.

In the case of an online store, the customer is far more likely to enter your site from a search engine results page (known as a SERP). In this case, the customer will be clicking on a link provided by the search engine, in the case of free or organic search or on a paid advertisement that you have provided.

In many instances, this means that a customer will be entering your site and landing on a page that is directly related to the term that he or she was searching for — in many cases this will be a product page.

If the customer is unfamiliar with your store or company, this means that the product description needs to act as both a description of your product and an introduction to your company.

2) HOW your customer interacts with the merchandise — online, the product is not available to be touched or even looked at closely. This means that the tools you have available in the current technology — images and written descriptions — must be as detailed and as accurate as possible.

It also means that the product pictures must minimize the limitation of the written description and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, it is easy for you to miss important information, simply because you are so familiar with the product.

An excellent example of this is providing a clear picture with easy to see details. While this would seem to be a good solution, if the image does not contain a visual reference to demonstrate the actual size of the product and if the written description does not provide this missing information, you may be losing sales to people who don’t want to take the time to ask and who can find that missing information on another web site.

3) WHAT they see and the information that they have about the products — Again, the important thing to remember is that your online customers can see and read only what you provide. Scrimping on the written product descriptions on your web site is like putting gags on your offline sales people… not a good thing for anybody!

If anything, provide too much information. If you worry that folks won’t want to read it all — and this IS a valid concern — then start with a brief overview so those who skim can read that and move on, but provide more detailed information further on for the careful purchasers who will read and consider every word.

The beauty of doing this is that while you are providing detailed, descriptive, and valuable content for your human visitors, the search engines also love this type of website content.

The cold hard truth is that detailed and unique product descriptions are becoming more and more important. Gone are the days when you could slap up a few descriptive words, or copy the information provided by the manufacturer. Yes, it is more time and work for you, but the long term rewards will likely be well worth it!

For more information about turning product descriptions into good little sales people, check out the Survival Guide – Preparing Product DESCRIPTIONS for Presentation on the Web