5 content tips to stands out of the marketplace crowd

Lancelot Salavert
Jul 24, 2017 · 6 min read

For small brands in the lifestyle industry dipping their toes in ecommerce, it’s easier to start with an online marketplace such as Amazon or Asos before launching a dedicated online store. Such channels are perceived as great ways to build brand awareness without having to stretch small budgets.

However, it can quickly become difficult to manage a presence on marketplaces because each one of them comes come up with its own set of regulations and restrictions. In addition, small merchants often lack the industry know-how to successfully drive an online presence. Finally, as they grow, brands would start diversifying their sales channels beyond the initial marketplace and open up their own dedicated website or mobile app. Soon, managing multiple product contents across multiple channels become a major pain point. This is why it’s vital that all product content is optimized to attract the interest of a shopper.

Product content refers to product description, size, identificators, quality of visuals and all the way to specific attribute list. These components drive the user further down the shopping journey. Research conducted by Shotfarm shows that poor product content can harm your brand. A majority of shoppers abandon their online shopping carts because the product isn’t what it appears to be, which is due to inaccurate or missing product images (26%) or product content (30%).

Here are 5 tips to help brands scale and optimize their online presence.

1. Including product’s key functions

Brands can see the ‘checklist’ on what marketplaces recommend to include when posting an item for sale. Often overlooked, it is crucial to include details such as shipping time, supplier name and warranty to legitimize the brand and give the potential customer a degree of trust.

Instead of limiting a product’s description to its color and size, include its key usage — is it a beach dress, a party dress or something else. These details can make a product more valuable to a potential customer and differentiate it from countless alternatives that are just a couple of clicks away. Besides, every time a shopper needs to leave the page to search for additional information, he’s getting further away from an effective purchase.

2. Creating an effective title

Different categories have formulas that work best depending on the kind of product. For example, bedding titles should be written as:

“Brand + Line/Pattern + Thread Count + Material + Size + Product Type, Color”. However cutlery should be written as “Brand + Line + Size+ Product Type.”

Below are examples for both cases:

  • Wamsutta Luxury 400-Thread-Count Sateen Queen Sheet Set, Halo

3. Using bullet points

Bullet points simplify your information and breaks it down effectively. Your customer doesn’t have to reread your paragraph multiple times before understanding its content — which is key to a good user experience.

Here is an example of how to effectively roll-out product descriptions on Amazon. By splitting a product’s key attributes into sub-headings and listing its details into bullet points, the reader has an easier time digesting the information.

4. What makes a good product image?

A way to tackle a high cart abandonment rate is through optimized product images. It is advisable to read any brand guideline provided by a marketplace like Amazon, Ebay or Zalando. All of them will specify that a brand should optimize product images for the best results. At Scalia, any user can set up it’s own media rules in order to optimize every images according to the expected output of each and every channel to ensure product photos meet required image clarity and dimensions.

Here is our quick checklist to optimizing product images in general:

  • If possible, always include multi-angle view of product

Also, sellers should worry about image ordering and consistency. Shoppers experience is enhanced when images are ordered in a consistent way across products, typically in the following ordered: front — back — side — zoom in.

Finally, a best in class brand page also includes available colors and additional images of product’s packaging.

5. Standardize data to optimize your output through search engines

Last but not least, data standardization is the root cause of so many things that go wrong in ecommerce. Because data is not properly standardized, internal search engine are inefficient, filters are inconsistent and general layout are not homogenous.

It is an absolute necessity that you manage to follow the guidelines edited by every single distribution channel, when it comes to data consistency, which can become rapidly tricky as they will all have different taxonomies.

For instance:

  • There are at least a dozen permutations around the value “Women”: “Woman”, “W”, “W.”, “Gender: W”, “Female”, “Girl”, “Lady”, etc.

And complexity exponentially increases as you multiply the number of languages…

Scalia standardize your catalogue so that it matches every single output requirements automatically.

Marketplaces are usually the first step to a digital strategy and increased brand visibility for online sellers. Despite its benefits, being on a marketplace means that a brand, no matter how big or small, would have to share the spotlight with competitors alike. For new brands lacking ecommerce expertise, it is particularly important to ensure that your brand stands out through effective, trustworthy and legitimate content.

At Scalia we have developed an internal index called the product quality score (PQS) where we rate sellers and ecommerce website in general. PQS range from 0 to 10 and a 10% increase would drive almost an immediate 3 to 5% conversion boost. You want to know what’s your current PQS and how to improve it?


Scalia is the first web platform which automatically structures product data in order to make it accessible and usable by anyone. Concretely, sharing product info with retailers or any other business partners becomes incredibly simple. By mixing deep tech and advance collaboration techniques, we consolidate, standardize and enrich product data so that anyone can access it in the format they want, following the taxonomy they need, offering flexibility, control and consistency to the whole ecosystem.

Scalia

Scalia is a collaborative data integration web platform launched in 2016. Scalia offers an innovative tech-driven and user friendly solution to meet the current and future needs of the B2B ecosystem: collect, consolidate, control and enrich their product data.

Lancelot Salavert

Written by

Co-founder at getscalia.com | Product enthusiast | Happy Londoner | Curious observer of recent AI developments

Scalia

Scalia

Scalia is a collaborative data integration web platform launched in 2016. Scalia offers an innovative tech-driven and user friendly solution to meet the current and future needs of the B2B ecosystem: collect, consolidate, control and enrich their product data.

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