I think Ana has take note of our feedback and requests, so let's try to use this thread to assist people in presenting their items in the best light until the dev team can meet us halfway on the format.

My intro description is roughly as follows:

First sentence: State the models title and what category of object it represents, including at least one descriptive word that hopefully brings some positive associations. If the product has a characteristic that distinguishes it from usual examples of that type, state it here, separated by a comma.

Second sentence: Describes function, basic usage, or appearance. Ideally, as much of this as possible should also be apparent from looking at the clear, well-lit, tightly-cropped photograph of the printed product.

Inspiration, instructions, sizing, buying info, etc should be in the extended description. You can keep the sections separate by adding line breaks ("<br>" tags). Here is an example:

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first off, imo, the model title should be above the picture... if ppl scan the at least they'll have half a clue what they're looking at.

soz off topic


[edit] actually Aaron, the way your example reads, it is a functioning item and possibly open to legal stuff (TV adverts don't have hidden text telling the truth)

[Updated on: Wed, 05 October 2011 18:54 UTC]

@stop4stuff - It's a mix.

Truncating works, research shows that customers don't want to read long text, scroll, hunt, click or do anything at all. The research/statistics into customer behavior is actually terrifying.

On the other hand the more content you have, the better your seo results so it makes sense to shorten content into manageable segments.

BUT - it's usually over used for ad placement. Everyone (including the big box retailers) want their ads at that prime time eyeline so it's a race to cram and condense as much info into above the fold as possible.

It's also a trend. I remember when there was a great call for scripts to summarize blog content, rss feeds, and all the social networking media that followed. Add to that the minimalist trends of Apple and other giants and you get the current climate.

So yes I recommend it to my clients for e-commerce functionality and they request it so they can look like the big guys. , For my ecommerce clients I usually write a script so the client easily controls what information shows in the short description rather than truncating at an arbitrary character or pixel limit. I may set and outlier character amount to preserve other template features but I like my clients to have the control. Different products may require additional info like sizes, colors, styles etc.

So I'm all for shortening the info, but just not the way it's currently being employed by SW.

Sheesh, I can't spell today, sorry!

[Updated on: Wed, 05 October 2011 21:12 UTC]

I can understand the limitation of the description and found it a challenge to adapt my descriptions to match better into the new look and feel.

It does challenge us to make a fitting description in only a few lines or to invite people to click the more link.




But currently it IS still too limited imho.
And I also agree with the more info below white space issue.

Perhaps let the shop owners define the first paragraph via <p> </p> ?
The preference would be to show the contents of that paragraph fully.
Unless it exceeds a certain maximum number of lines/pixel height.

But this way if we want a one or six liner the "more info" could always follow the last line.

Regarding Aaron's example, I find his text is actually very clever, as nothing told there is a lie nor hiding a real truth

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mctrivia wrote on Wed, 05 October 2011 22:22

i think he is looking at the page listing a whole bunch of stuff. That page has truncated results but that is where truncated results should be used. not on a product page.

Where is any description on this page?

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