Your guide to product details

Products are the physical goods, digital files, or services that you sell. To create a product display on your website, you need to specify the essential details, such as the name and product images. In addition, you can add product details that help your clients better understand the product. You should add available sizes, SKU, description, and more.

Note: You don't have to provide every detail for each product you sell.

Managing product details

In your Online Store admin, go to Catalog > Products to view and edit product details.

Click the arrow next to Edit Product to view all options for product editing:

Here are the most important details of your product listing.

Images

Images show your customers what your products look like. Show the various perspectives of the product such as front, side, underneath, close-up, and more, so your customers can see every detail of the product they are buying.

Remember, the quality of your product images directly affects your ability to generate sales. Here are some tips:

Each product image should be of uniform size and style across all products you sell.
Use high-quality images, so customers can see all the fine details.
Learn more about Customizing product images.

Name and description

Name is a title for your product. When you name a product, you should automatically make customers think about the most valuable features of your product and the benefits they are getting when they buy this product.

The Description is information about your product. It emphasizes its advantages, lists its characteristics, or highlights product features. You may also use videos, images, and animated elements that help to describe your product. Write unique product descriptions so they rank higher in search engines.

The product description section has the WYSIWYG editor, so you can easily add text, change color, size, and font, add bullet points, paragraphs, links, or additional images and videos.

Tips to improve your product descriptions:

Avoid long sentences and complex vocabulary. Imagine you are explaining the product benefits to a 10-year-old child.
Provide a short and long version of your description. Some people scan rather than read, and some like to read more in-depth details about your product, so you need to make sure you address the needs of both types of customers.

Pricing

This is the price that you're charging for the product. The arrow to the right of the price shows the Compare to price and the Bulk discount settings:

Compare to price: Enter the original price and the sale price in the main window. When you enter a Compare to price, the product displays a sale price in your Online Store:

Note that sale and promotional pricing is available on premium Online Store plans only.

Bulk discount: Tiered pricing for each product based on quantity. Discounts are applied immediately as soon as the quantity added to the cart reaches the number required for a bulk discount. For example, a product costs $44, but if you buy five items, the price will be $40 each.

This feature is available on Professional and Unlimited Online Store plans.

Note that automatic "On Sale" and "Sold out" labels are available on all Online Store plans.

Shipping

Requires shipping or pickup: The setting for whether a product needs to be shipped. Uncheck it for digital products or services, or for other intangible products that you do not ship.

Weight: The product's actual weight. Enter the exact product’s weight for calculating the correct automatic shipping rates.

Specify the product's weight and dimensions to obtain precise carrier-calculated shipping rates for your customers in the Tax and Shipping tab on a product details page.

Shipping rates: Specify shipping rates for this particular product. Use one of four offered options to set an individual shipping strategy.

You can configure available shipping methods and add product dimensions on Professional and Unlimited Online Store plans only.

Real-time shipping estimates are available on all Online Store plans.

Inventory

SKU (stock keeping unit): This code identifies the product within your Online Store. You can use the product identification code provided by manufacturers or your own combinations of letters and numbers. Each SKU needs to be unique.

Note: If you leave the SKU field empty, the Online Store will automatically generate an SKU.

Availability: Product availability can be selectively enabled and disabled for each product. When the product availability is Disabled, your store visitors can’t view/see that product in your storefront. Enable availability whenever you are ready to sell.

Stock control: Use the stock control section to specify the number of products in stock and set up low stock notifications.

Quantity: Number of items in stock:

Please note that inventory control is available on the Basic Online Store plan, while product variations with stock control functionality are available on Professional and Unlimited Online Store plans.

Attributes

Attributes let you specify product identifiers, which you may require for accounting, inventory, or other purposes. For example, books are typically distinguished by such attributes as ISBN, author, publisher, cover type, language. Apparel can be characterized by brand, season, material, etc.

You can add this information in attributes. In the Attributes tab, click Manage attributes in the top right-hand corner.

With the help of attributes, you can also record private details that you don’t want to share with your customers (e.g. net cost).

Options and variations

If you sell products that have variants like colors and sizes, you can list them as one base product with options. With the help of product options, you can also offer extras, e.g., gift wrapping, or ask buyers to upload a file for ordered service, and more.

Product variations can help you assign different images for every product option in your store, as well as to track the stock of options like sizes.

Tip: If your products are produced in different colors or materials, make sure you have images for every version.

Digital files

You can sell downloadable files such as e-books, videos, music, digital art, and any other digital products. When files are uploaded, Online Store instantly and securely delivers them to buyers after the payment has been made.

You can also sell a physical product or service that includes a file, for example, an instruction manual, e-book, documentation, that buyers can download upon purchase. In the Files tab, you attach a file that the customer receives.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) settings allow you to set specific SEO-related information on your product's page.

When analyzing a webpage, search engines get information about its content from the so-called “meta tags”. This includes the page title and meta description. Search engines use meta tags to describe pages as they appear in the search results and rank them by relevance.

Online Store automatically generates metadata based on your product's name and its description. Search engines display a limited number of characters, so you may want to rewrite the page title and meta description.

Edit page title and descriptions by adding relevant keywords so your product may appear higher in search engine results.

Page title: The title is shown as a clickable link in search results. You can customize the title to target your ideal customer more accurately.

Meta description: This is a short sentence summarizing the content of the product. Write a more detailed text describing your product or service. Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to ~155–160 characters.

The enhanced SEO functionality is available on Professional and Unlimited Online Store plans.

Related products

The Related Products section will allow you to display You may also like product suggestions in your Online Store cart. You can manually select specific recommended products or show random products, as well as a combination of the first two options.