What Is Rich Product Content?

Product pages may seem simple at the surface: a page title, a short description, a few bullet points, and a photo or two showing shoppers what would appear on their doorstep if they clicked “buy it now.”

However, limited or “bad” product content can hurt sales and leave shoppers unsure as they move through the consideration stage of the buying journey — whether you know it or not. These abandoned sales could have been avoided with rich product content.

Explore the basics of building winning product content, and get answers to your most pressing questions, including: What is product content? What is rich content? What is the difference between rich product content and normal content?

What Is Product Content?

Product content is information and data, such as text, imagery, and videos, used to describe a product on a sales channel, such as an ecommerce website, a mobile app, a product catalog, or a social media platform.

Features of product content include:

• Text: Product descriptions, pricing, features, and specifications.
• Imagery: Product packaging photos, product detail shots, and brand graphics.
• Videos: Product demo videos, testimonial videos, how-to videos, and comparison videos.

What Is Rich Content?

Rich product content is content that goes beyond the basic product content required to publish a product page, offering more engaging multimedia elements like video, image galleries, product feature tours, comparison charts, downloadable materials, and more.

Rich product content is also known as rich content, enhanced product content, enhanced marketing content, below-the-fold content, A+ content, and rich media.

Rich product content is how product and retail brands can ensure a “good” content experience for their customers. (What’s the difference between product content and rich product content? Salsify data found that rich product content can lead to a 15% higher conversion rate on average.)

Features of rich product content include:

• Richer product descriptions: Detailed product descriptions that are creative, informative, and persuasive and brand storytelling. 
• Enhanced videos: Editorial videos, how-to videos, and comparison videos.
• Extensive image galleries: Lifestyle photos, 360-degree product spins, and infographics featuring product information and data in a visually appealing format.
• Feature tours: Product feature highlights, interactive elements, product zooms, pop-up descriptions, and 360-degree product spins.
• Comparison charts: Product features and specifications comparisons, price comparisons, visual product comparisons, ratings and reviews comparisons, and more.
• Downloadable materials: Product manuals, user guides, assembly instructions, recipe ebooks (e.g., for food-related products), and more.

Rich content — and the omnichannel, also called distributed ecommerce, strategy it drives — helps make products shine on the digital shelf. This then drives shoppers' buying decisions, ultimately leading to more revenue and increased market share.

What Is the Difference Between Rich Product Content and Normal Content?

Normal product content gives shoppers basic details about a product, and rich product content uses engaging multimedia elements to provide more detail about a product.

Shoppers' needs for product information have evolved, and the modern buying journey requires more detail to help them move from “consideration” to “decision.”

While normal product content may give shoppers the basics, they may be left with additional questions the bare minimum of product content cannot answer. Rich content delivers these extra details that help them make confident buying decisions.

What Is ‘Bad’ Product Content?

As a shopper yourself, you’ve likely found yourself in a situation where the product content was lacking — and this consciously or unconsciously impacted your decision to buy.

Maybe the product photos were blurry. Maybe the color of the item was different across the sales channels you browsed. Maybe the product description lacked details about the product dimensions or materials. Or maybe you just weren’t sure how it compared to similar products — and couldn’t figure out which item was right for you.

Product content helps shoppers make buying decisions by providing the information they need to answer the questions they have about your product.

And “bad” product content stops the buying journey in its tracks.

“Bad” product content includes everything from low-quality product imagery to missing product information. Salsify research found that 55% of global shoppers wouldn’t buy a product because of this “bad” product content — and 20% said inconsistent product data across sales channels was their reason for killing the sale.

What Is ‘Good’ Product Content?

The buying journey is no longer linear, and most shoppers now go through what Think with Google calls the “messy middle,” which is when shoppers move through “twin modes of exploration and evaluation, repeating the cycle as many times as they need to make a purchase decision.”

As a shopper yourself, you’ve also likely found yourself in this omnichannel buying journey when making the buying decision for a new item.

Maybe you spent some time researching it to see what your favorite review website said about it. Maybe you watched a YouTube or TikTok review from a social media influencer you like. Maybe you searched on Amazon — or checked Google to compare prices across sales channels. Or maybe you even went and checked out the item in a brick-and-mortar store.

Product content must meet your shoppers wherever — and whenever — they interact with your product or retail brand. “Good” product content not only meets them there, but also gives them helpful, consistent, and engaging information.

“Good” product content includes everything from high-quality editorial and product packaging images to product demo videos and detailed product descriptions.

How To Stand Out on the Digital Shelf

Naturally, product content is absolutely imperative for every ecommerce effort. Why? When shopping online, shoppers can’t physically view or handle the products they want to purchase, so they’re entirely dependent on the product content your brand provides.

If this product content is lacking, shoppers may feel unsure about the sale — and decide to abandon it. If this product content is inaccurate, shoppers may have lingering frustration with your brand long after the sale.

In an increasingly competitive ecommerce environment, brands need to do everything they can to stand out on the digital shelf. Developing rich content through effective product content management is a great step in that direction.

However, simply creating rich content alone is not enough. To gain the most value from these resources, brands need to also invest in and implement technology like a product experience management (PXM) solution to support the creation, management, and syndication of rich product content at scale.