Would this put you off buying?

[Steve_g]

Morning all.

Currently in the process of listing products on Play and trying to find the best way to import my products.

Currently my only problem is the items description, Play's filed for a product description is basic, no HTML, no line breaks or anything.

My descriptions on my site are in this format:

Excellent small family car with excellent features

Manufacturer: Honda

Model: Little car

Color: Red

Warranty: 12 Months

Condition: New

When i paste this description into the upload in Play is comes out in this format:

Excellent small family car with excellent features Manufacturer: Honda Model: Little Car Color: Red Warranty: 12 Months Condition: New

My question is... would this description put you off buying? The title and picture is clear, generally people know what they are buying without reading the description.

It would be really hard for me to change the format of the description (don't even know what i could change it to?) as it would have to be done manually in excel.

Thanks in advance.

 

[mightyone]

As quite an experienced online shopper, I like the process to be pretty quick with the ability to quickly sift through different listings before I actually find exactly what I'm looking for.

I think that layout will severely diminish the conversion rate.

 

[charlesdupont]

Hi Steve_g,

As a consumer myself, I don't think that description is off-putting. On marketplaces like Play, I'd venture the impact would be small.

I don't have any direct data to back this up unfortunately, but there's a long-ish Nielson white paper that could make for interesting reading:
isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk/uploads/3971_Nielsen_Metadata_white_paper_A4(3).pdf

My interpretation is that - for books- incomplete information means that you are only getting 70% of all possible sales. Given that:
- Book metadata (including summaries) is particularly important for buyers, but this might be less strong in other categories.
- You have a lot of factual information in your description, only the formatting is a little off
I'd expect the impact on sales to be minimal.

From a branding perspective, it might be worthwhile giving customers a 'cleaner' experience, but unless you can do this easily I don't think it would be that powerful.

If you are getting a lot of sales on those SKUs though, it will be worth going back and challenging those assumptions - even a few percentage points of lost sales can be worth chasing on high-value skus.

Hope this helps!

 

[jonny123]

If it is possible to add a full stop to the end of each line then this would make it much more readable.

 

[Shelly Watson]

For me, I will put some attention on the description. The clear format will be preferred. But if the quality and price are still the most factors which influence my buying decision.

 

[TotallySport]

Contact play and ask how you add line breaks to the description, although you should be able to add paragraphs so just do that in the same way.

 

[antropy]

Where are you pasting these descriptions in to?

 

[Steve_g]

Thanks for the replies all!

I am copying directly from my website (as the CSV export is in HTML i have to do it this way - Play wont accept HTML) i am then pasting in plane text directly into Play's Excel upload template, doing it this way automatically adds the line breaks but when the upload is live on Play the description is all clumped together.

I have asked Play several times about line breaks, first time they said i need to press CTRL and enter, this added the line break on the Excel template but not on the uploaded listing, i was then told to add a ";" at the point of the line break but this also didn't work.

Now Play have told me that adding the ";" SHOULD work but they have a bug at the moment tha system see's the ";" as HTML and prevents it from working - No time scale on the fix (if this is even true, been told many different things from Play)

so my predicament is now.. do i update all my listings (only have 138 so far) on Play to incorporate the ";" in the hope that it will work one day or find another way? i have about 1000 products in total so ideally need to find the quickest way of getting the description presentable.

Thanks again.

 

[antropy]

Interesting request from Play.com to use ; as the character to be replaced by line breaks because it's a character that may well be used in product descriptions.

Anyway, if the line breaks ARE appearing in your Excel but not on Play.com and they don't accept HTML then I don't think it's something you can fix without them.

 

[fisicx]

Consider that writing sentance can improve conversion. Dis-jointed phrases reduce readability so something that is easier to scan might be better:

Honda Little car. New with 12 months warranty, red body and excellent features. Ideal for a small family.

The brain process chunks of text rather than individual words so keywords will be quickly assimilated.

 

[greengecko]

Thanks for the replies all!

I am copying directly from my website (as the CSV export is in HTML i have to do it this way - Play wont accept HTML) i am then pasting in plane text directly into Play's Excel upload template, doing it this way automatically adds the line breaks but when the upload is live on Play the description is all clumped together.

I have asked Play several times about line breaks, first time they said i need to press CTRL and enter, this added the line break on the Excel template but not on the uploaded listing, i was then told to add a ";" at the point of the line break but this also didn't work.

Now Play have told me that adding the ";" SHOULD work but they have a bug at the moment tha system see's the ";" as HTML and prevents it from working - No time scale on the fix (if this is even true, been told many different things from Play)

so my predicament is now.. do i update all my listings (only have 138 so far) on Play to incorporate the ";" in the hope that it will work one day or find another way? i have about 1000 products in total so ideally need to find the quickest way of getting the description presentable.

Thanks again.

I can confirm the ; is the way Play do line breaks when uploading in CSV format. It took us a week or so to edit all our listings to be compatible.

 

[Steve_g]

I can confirm the ; is the way Play do line breaks when uploading in CSV format. It took us a week or so to edit all our listings to be compatible.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Can i just confirm that this is currently working and live on your products?

I know i can add a bullet point on the "Technical Details" tab using the ; but i just cant get it to work in the main description.

Cheers