Yes, I’m talking to you.

I get it, you run an ecommerce store, and you have a ton of products – and they all need a product description. However, when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun of 100+ individual descriptions, it’s a little bit scary.

That’s a lot of writing!

A lot of people in this situation just go ahead and use the supplier’s provided product description, both image and text. After all, it’s accurate, it does the job, and it saves you so much time and money!

Hey, You’re Doing It All Wrong – #stahp That Right Now!

This isn’t a terrible place to start out – when you start a store, you’re juggling so many things that this can seem like a good idea.

Maybe you even think you’ll get to it later.

There’s the problem. When you “get to it later,” there’s going to be even more products, and you might not have either the money or the time to really get it done.

Oh, and it gets a little worse, too.

The more you work on your store and carry out research on your competition, the more you’re going to realize that you really, really need your own product descriptions.

Let’s look at this from a rational perspective. A lot of these supplier product descriptions aren’t written by native English speakers, and it shows. Just to make things a little bit worse, there was no SEO in mind when they were created.

Just go to AliExpress today and you’ll see that the vast majority of product descriptions out there are pretty crummy – and this is exactly what is going on your site if you just dump it all on your site. It’s not a good look.

They’re certainly not inspiring or likely to convert your customers. Ultimately, you’re doing yourself and your business a huge disservice.

You Can Salvage What You’ve Got If You Want To

That’s not saying you can’t use their descriptions at all – just clean them up! Paying attention to the little things can really make a difference here:

  • Optimize your keywords
  • Clean up the weird Chinglish
  • Dump anything that’s not relevant

In other words, clean up your product description. Even so, this is the bare minimum makeover you should be aiming at – even after this quick spring clean, your description likely isn’t exactly where you would like it to be.

Best Practice? You Can Probably Guess…

There are really no two ways about this.  If you want to make your ecommerce store work, then you’re going to have to spend a lot of time on it.

Your products – whether you’re holding the inventory or drop shipping it is why people are visiting. Your job is to get people to buy that stuff.

Preferably from you – and not from any number of your competitors in what is increasingly a very tight space in most niches.

If you want to make an impact, then you need to develop your own brand and voice – and that means product descriptions that are entirely yours (or a copywriter’s).

Your supplier’s product description doesn’t care about any of this, especially if your supplier is Chinese. Why would you let the most important part of your business be dominated by a description that doesn’t sell and makes it clear to your customers that this is likely a dropshipping service?

Because here’s the kicker – you’re making it super-easy for them to find your supplier and buy whatever you’re selling… without your markup.

If that doesn’t convince you to get to work on those copy-pasted product descriptions, then I don’t know what will. Give your business the fighting chance it deserves and fix up your product descriptions today!