The good product page - Part 5: Reviews and cross-selling

October 9, 2023

Your webshop is live, and now you have the best, most stunning images, the right amount of text and specs. You’ve handled variants and made deliberate decisions about the user interface elements – so what’s next?

This is the fifth and final installment in our series of posts about the perfect product page.

If you’ve followed the guidelines in our previous posts, you’ve done a great job meeting your customers’ expectations. But if you want to take it to the next level, it’s all about giving users that little extra something that reassures them this is exactly the right product, and exactly from you, that they should buy it.

This is where social proof in the form of reviews – showing that others have purchased the product from you (and hopefully are happy with it) – is a great way to emphasize your credibility. In addition, you can showcase your fantastic product catalog by displaying both supplementary and substitute products in connection with the product in question.

Last but not least, there may be supplementary content that is actually legally required, but at the very least are great additions to emphasize the point that you know everything there is to know about the product. This category includes data sheets, manuals, assembly guides, energy labels, tutorial videos, Q&As, and more.

But without further ado – let’s dive into the best practices around supplementary content.

Questions and answers

Even with the best content writer and the sharpest AI, you can’t anticipate every question a potential customer might have about a product. For example, the manufacturer of a robot vacuum may state a maximum room size, but the potential buyer may want to know if that limit can be exceeded.

Answer the questions you can’t think of. Easy, right?

Basically, there are two types of Q&A solutions:

User-driven – users ask and answer autonomously.
Store-driven – the store “asks itself” and provides the answers.

Each of these comes with its own drawbacks. A purely user-driven setup may suffer from inactivity and quality issues, such as redundant questions and answers or even misleading information.

The store-driven setup, on the other hand, clearly lacks input from real users and real-world scenarios. Here, the store misses out on contextual knowledge that only actual users can provide.

That’s why a third option is preferable: the hybrid model, where users can ask and answer questions themselves, but with involvement from the store, which ensures that any unanswered questions get a reply and that any incorrect statements are corrected.

With a questions and answers section, you as a store owner can gain valuable insights that you might even incorporate into your product description – giving you a competitive edge.

What to consider?

Benefits and practical steps you can control

Do you have enough resources?

It takes available hours or new team members to curate customer questions and respond to them knowledgeably. There’s no point in launching a Q&A feature if you don’t have the time to maintain it.
Do you have enough sales and products with a high level of customer involvement?

Your customers need to be invested in either your brand or your product if you expect them to help carry the load by answering other users’ questions. Very few people have the altruistic urge to help others without getting anything in return. So consider whether you can cultivate these kinds of customers through encouragement or incentives. And if you’re selling a single box of nails to three customers a month, you probably can’t expect your user-driven Q&A community to thrive – this isn’t realistic for every shop.
Can you prompt customers to answer questions?

Consider a setup where automated requests are sent out to other customers when a question is posted on a product they’ve purchased. We know the concept from platforms like Tripadvisor and Google Maps, where users who have marked themselves as having visited a specific location and reviewed it will receive an email if others ask questions about that place.

Duravit excels in every conceivable file format available for download for their products. Thomann has included an audio clip of their instruments, which is an excellent form of supplementary content. Bygma also offers a wide range of supplementary documents and has chosen to highlight what is legally required.

Cross selling

Being able to sell more items to the same customer will likely always be a focus area for optimization, both in physical and online stores. When a customer already has one item in their cart, it signals that the store has passed the test: the customer trusts the store’s credibility and the quality of the product.

This is why cross selling is often used—a term without a great Danish equivalent—which aims to inform the customer about more and/or different products than the one they’re currently interested in.

There are alternative definitions and classifications of the different types of cross selling one can use. Here, we’ll focus on the two main types: Complementary and alternative products.

Complementary products:

The former should be seen just as much as a great service as it is a conversion-boosting initiative. This may need a bit of explanation, because while it definitely contributes to increasing the average basket size, the focus shouldn’t be on that. Instead, the goal should be to provide the potential customer with quick and easy access to the products that go well with the one they’re currently viewing. Examples include:

Batteries that fit the toy in the correct size
Blades that are compatible with the circular saw
Pants that match the color (or match what the model is wearing in the lifestyle image)

This is similar to what we often see in physical stores, where such products are displayed together—think of a mannequin in a clothing store. This is a great example of complementary cross selling.

If you don’t sell products that naturally “fit” with others, you can use the “Customers also bought” model, where you instead show what other customers have had in their cart on the way out—something that’s hard for physical stores to replicate. Regardless of the model, it’s all about giving the potential customer a quicker path to a great product experience by having everything they need to use their product as soon as they receive it.

A variation of complementary cross selling is bundles or package deals, where the effort has been minimized to the point where the customer simply selects the bundle—no need to add each item to the cart individually.

Alternative products:

Separate from complementary products, alternative products are a collection of items that are closely related to the current product and may be seen as replacements for it. The reason to show these is to give the potential customer insight into the breadth of your product catalog, as well as fast access to alternatives if the current product doesn’t meet their needs. As tempting as it may be to curate this section to only show more expensive options, consider whether you’d rather sell a cheaper alternative than risk sending the customer to a competitor.

What all types of cross selling have in common is the importance of clear section naming, so the potential customer can quickly understand what types of products they can expect to find in each section.

What to consider?

Benefits and practical steps you can control

Do you have products that complement each other?

If your product portfolio includes items that “go together,” you should seriously consider creating a dedicated section for this on your product detail page (and most likely also establish the relationship in your PIM).
Do you have bundles or kits?

Can I help you package some of your complementary products into bundles or kits to ensure your customers get everything they need? These don’t necessarily have to be under unique SKUs, but maybe a way to add all relevant SKUs to the cart at once - and remove them again if needed.
How do you handle alternative products?

We’re all familiar with sections named something like “Customers also bought” or “Similar products,” but what’s the logic behind them? A well-organized product assortment doesn’t leave these relationships to chance, but takes pride in presenting users with genuine alternatives. Consider whether to expand with key specifications in the display. It’s hard to judge if the “Grass Mower 3000i” is better than the “Grass Mower 3000u”—so help the customer evaluate this without having to jump around ten different pages.

Greenline has created this bundle logic, where you can add all products to the cart with a simple click. Ryobi not only shows the batteries that fit each machine but also how many screws/holes you can expect per charge.

Thomann has expanded the typical “Customers also bought” feature here by showing actual numbers of how many bought the product you’re viewing and how many chose differently. Whether the logic has been tampered with, we don’t know. Asus not only displays alternative products but also offers an extended view where you can compare side-by-side to see which is the better alternative.

Reviews

To stay within the analogy from the real world, there really is no good equivalent to the digital review universe. When you enter a physical store, there are (usually) no previous customers standing outside telling you about their visit. You won’t be met by altruistic people waiting by the breakfast aisle to tell you about their experience with the organic granola from four years ago.

But that’s exactly what is possible online, both through store reviews like Trustpilot, and through embedded product review systems. And it makes good sense to have this layer in the digital buying process—because in physical stores, there’s usually a person behind the counter or an address you can return to if there are problems. On the internet, it’s much easier to end up at what would be the equivalent of a shady back-alley pop-up shop selling miracle water that claims to cure everything from tile fungus to acne. The next day they’re gone, having gotten away with selling poor products to trusting people.

Therefore, reviews should be seen as the ultimate social proof—others have bought the product or used the store. And their honest opinion carries great value for the new customer. An important distinction to make here is between genuine user reviews and test-site reviews. While test-site reviews can be completely real and objective, they are often met with suspicion from shoppers, who fear they are manipulated, paid for, or only shown when the results are positive.

So it makes perfect sense to give customers the opportunity to add reviews on the store’s products. However, with the following 9 features: