Webinar Recap: Enhancing Your PDPs to Drive Conversion, Cross-sell, and Upsell
In talking to thousands of ecommerce leaders, we’ve heard time and again that one of the biggest challenges they face is finding a way to elevate their Product Detail Pages (PDPs) beyond basic templates. And as online shoppers are increasingly landing directly on PDPs and bypassing homepages where brand-building and storytelling often happens, it’s become an even bigger priority to find a way to test new conversion-driving designs on the pages where buying happens.
Yesterday I was joined by Zmags’ Senior Solutions Engineer Asafe Nogueira to discuss how ecommerce teams can finally create dynamic and engaging experiences in those critical shopping moments. The following is a summary of our discussion, which you can also view on-demand anytime.
The Growing Importance of PDPs
PDPs have always been a critical point in the customer journey, but more recently, it has also become the starting point for many customer journeys. Buyers are doing more research ahead of time, especially for larger purchases. When they’re ready, they’ll google a specific product, bypass your homepage and even your Category or Product Listing Page, and land directly on the PDP. I was at a conference recently where the Director of Marketing for Best Buy Canada shared that 40% of their web traffic enters on a product page. During the webinar, we found that for most companies on the line between 41-60% of web traffic lands on their product pages.
Most ecommerce leaders don’t need to be convinced that PDPs are critical, but if you’re looking for more interesting stats, an Adobe Business report stated that the conversion rate on ecommerce homepages is around 2-2.5% on average, while the conversion rate for visitors who land directly on a product page is around 7%. What’s more, Content Square says that across all industries, the average user spends less than 54 seconds on any given page. You not only have to wow them, you have to do it fast or they’re gone.
Challenges with PDP Templates
Ecommerce teams always want to be able to do more. They might have restrictive, rigid templates that require them to use either internal or third-party developers to help them make any kind of change. And with that level of investment, they really can’t test and iterate too quickly and might need to go all-in for all product pages at once instead of trying out their hypotheses before committing. Changes are therefore one-size-fits-all, and you’re unable to customize based on product or category.
Even if you can successfully update a template, it’s probably going to stay that way for a while. It becomes stale again quickly. You could probably draw a PDP with your eyes closed – that's how similar and standardized they are. If you want to customize and have a more dynamic approach, the question then becomes scalability – how can you do that for possibly thousands of products? The answer is by leveraging Fastr Frontend.
Ideas for Enhancing PDPs
There are tons of ways you can make over your PDPs, but on a 30-minute webinar we only had time for a few inspirational examples. Asafe shared how a few companies are doing it with Fastr Frontend.
Beyond Primary Products: Cross-Sell & Upsell
One opportunity for enhancing PDPs is to create an intelligent product carousel to showcase complementary products. The data to populate the carousel can be sourced from APIs or your backend, or in the example shared, could live as unstructured data in a simple table on your existing product page. Asafe shares how Artistic Tile revolutionized their PDPs to ensure that buyers could find all the relevant products to go with their tile, all without having to search by name or visit other pages.
More importantly, an ecommerce merchandiser can create a single experience and scale it across the entire site – without having to manually indicate which complementary products are relevant. By automating the population of complementary products, you’ve reduced your effort to one design and one behavior orchestration.
More Creative Control than Plugins Offer
It’s important to note that there are plugins for some ecommerce platforms that purport to provide the same end result. Often, though, plugins might get you 50% of the way there but not all the way. You might not be able to put it where you want on the page or control the styling of it. This is where Fastr Frontend can edge out many available plugins – through its flexibility to deliver exactly what you envision, exactly where you want it to be.
Bringing your Brand to Life on PDPs
For some brands, it’s not just about selling more alongside a product. PDP enhancements can also be about driving more conversions of the primary product by bringing in the brand story. For Timex, this can mean anything from elaborating on the construction of their products, the sustainability of the materials used, or the history of the style or design. To do this, they might bring in video content or blog content from other parts of their site.
Empowering Ecomm Teams to Enhance PDPs at Scale
Whether it’s complementary products, related content, immersive brand experiences, or all of the above, you as the Ecommerce lead can control those elements – and you can test, iterate, and refine all on your own.
If you have a vision for your PDP and you’re not sure if it’s possible to bring it to life, get in touch. We would love to help you with a PDP makeover.
Access our on-demand recording of the full webinar to see some of the above examples live.