Ecommerce UX: Why Good Product Pages Are Rarer Than They Should Be
The product page is where ecommerce purchases are won and lost. Most brands treat it as an afterthought.
Working on the Pet Drugs Online replatform and the Arnotts eCommerce project gave me a detailed view of ecommerce UX from two very different ends of the market: a specialist online retailer with a highly knowledgeable customer base, and one of Ireland's most historic and prestigious department store brands.
In both cases, the product page — the single most important page in any ecommerce experience — was being significantly underserved by the existing design.
What a Product Page Actually Needs to Do
A product page has one job: help a customer decide whether this product is right for them, and if it is, make the process of buying it as frictionless as possible. Everything on the page should serve one of those two purposes.
In practice, most product pages carry significant legacy content that serves neither purpose — product descriptions written for search engines rather than customers, image galleries that show the product without showing it in context, and specification tables that require domain expertise to interpret.
The Pet Drugs Online Specificity Challenge
Pet Drugs Online's customers were often making specific, technically informed purchasing decisions — choosing between product variants, dosages, and pack sizes for pet medications. The product page needed to support that specificity without overwhelming customers who were less confident.
The solution was a progressive disclosure architecture: clear, plain-language product summaries at the top of the page, with detailed clinical and dosage information available but not dominant. Customers who needed the detail could find it immediately; customers who just needed to know 'this is the right worming treatment for my dog' got that answer first.
The Arnotts Brand Context
Arnotts presented a different challenge: an ecommerce experience that needed to reflect the quality and curation of a premium Irish retail brand, while competing with the browsability and discovery experience of international platforms.
The product page work focused on editorial quality — investing in photography standards, in the crafting of product descriptions that reflected Arnotts' voice, and in the merchandising logic that determines which related products and editorial content appears alongside a given item.
Universal Principles
- Lead with the customer question, not the product specification. 'Is this right for me?' before 'What is this?'
- Photography is product page UX. The image gallery is where purchase decisions are made. Invest proportionally.
- Social proof placement matters. Reviews that appear below the fold on a long product page contribute significantly less than reviews positioned near the add-to-cart action.
- Mobile product pages are a different design problem. Don't responsive-resize your desktop product page and call it done.
