Product Descriptions
How Long Should a Product Description Be?
Length depends on how much the buyer has to work out before committing, which varies enormously between a phone case and a laser cutter.
The honest answer is that a product description should be as long as it takes to remove the last doubt, and no longer. That sounds evasive until you compare two products: nobody needs 400 words to buy a phone case, and nobody spends four thousand pounds on a machine after reading two lines.
Three Things That Decide Length
- Price: The more it costs, the more reassurance a buyer needs before committing. Length tracks risk more closely than it tracks category.
- Familiarity: A product people already understand needs less explanation. A new category needs the explanation before anything else.
- Number of ways to get it wrong: Sizing, compatibility, and fit generate returns, and every one of those doubts costs words to settle.
A cheap, familiar product with one variant can sell on forty words. A technical product with compatibility requirements cannot.
Write Short and Long, Not One or the Other
Most stores need two versions of every description, and writing only one is a common cause of thin category pages or bloated listings.
The short version carries the listing, the category grid, and the shopping feed: one line that says what it is and why this one. The long version lives on the product page and does the real work of answering questions.
Writing both at once costs very little extra, because the thinking has already been done.
What Fills the Space Usefully
Length only helps when it carries information. Padding a description to hit a word count produces the kind of copy buyers skim past and search engines discount.
- Start with what it is and who it suits, in one sentence.
- Answer the question that causes most of your returns for that category.
- Cover compatibility, sizing or fit wherever getting it wrong is possible.
- Say what is in the box, because the omission is noticed more than the inclusion.
- Stop. Anything left is a specification and belongs in the table.
Do not repeat the spec table in prose. The dimensions are already on the page; saying them again in a sentence adds length and no information.
The Practical Test
Read the description and ask whether you could still answer your three most common pre-sale questions from it. If not, it is too short whatever the count. If it answers them twice over, it is too long.
For a catalogue rather than a single product, that judgement has to be made once and applied consistently — which is most of what our product description writing service does.