Product Descriptions
What to Write When Your Products Are Nearly Identical
Forty variants of the same item cannot each have a unique story, and copying one description across all of them creates a different problem.
Some catalogues are genuinely repetitive. Forty colours of the same t-shirt, twelve lengths of the same cable, a hundred sizes of the same fitting. Every one needs a description, none of them has a unique story, and the two obvious approaches both fail.
Why Both Obvious Options Fail
Copying one description across all variants gives you a hundred near-identical pages, which is the duplicate content problem in its purest form and can drag the whole section down.
Writing a genuinely different description for each produces strained, padded copy — because there is nothing different to say, and the writer ends up inventing distinctions that do not exist.
The real question is usually not how to write a hundred descriptions. It is whether you need a hundred pages.
Consider Variants Instead of Separate Pages
If the difference is colour, size or length, these are usually variants of one product rather than separate products. One page with a variant selector concentrates all the ranking signals in one place instead of splitting them a hundred ways.
It is better for buyers too. Someone comparing lengths would rather use a dropdown than navigate between twelve pages.
This is a platform decision as much as a copy one. Consolidating variants after the pages are indexed needs redirects from the old URLs to the survivor, or you lose whatever they had earned.
When Separate Pages Are Right
Sometimes they genuinely are different products — a different application, a different buyer, a different search. A 2m and a 20m cable are bought by different people for different reasons.
In that case, write from the difference rather than around it.
- Write one strong shared section covering what the product is and how it performs.
- For each variant, write two or three sentences on who that specific one suits and why.
- Put the distinguishing detail first, so the page opens with what makes it different.
- Keep the shared section shorter than the distinct part, not the other way round.
The Test
Read two variant pages side by side. If the only difference is a number, they should probably be one page. If a buyer would search for them differently, they should be two — and the copy should show it.
For large catalogues this decision is worth making once, deliberately, before anyone writes anything. It is the first thing we settle in a product description project.