How to name your products

You spent a week on the brand name and about forty seconds on the product names. Now your shop lists "Serenity", "Wanderlust" and "The Odette", and nobody browsing knows that two of those are soap and one is a tote bag.

The format that works nearly everywhere: what it is, then what makes it different, then optionally your house name. "Charcoal soap bar, 100g". "Linen tote, natural". "The Odette linen tote". A $9 bar of soap has about two seconds to be understood in a grid of twenty products, and a name that requires the photo to explain it has already used both of them.

Cute is not banned. Cute-only is.

The four places a name has to work

A product name isn't a label. It's the same string of text doing four different jobs, and most bad names fail three of them.

In your grid. Under a photo, next to a price, at about 14 pixels tall, competing with nineteen other products. The buyer is scanning, not reading. If the name doesn't add information the photo already gave them, it's dead weight.

In a message. When a buyer taps through to WhatsApp from a shop, the order arrives pre-written with the item, the options, the address and the total. The item is your product name, and it's what you'll both refer to for the rest of the conversation. "Serenity, Large" tells you nothing when you're packing at 8pm and you have three products beginning with S.

In a search box. Both the one on your shop and the one on Google. People type what things are. Nobody has ever searched for "Odette" who wasn't already your customer.

In your own head, later. When you're packing 25 orders on a Sunday and reconciling payments against them, product names are the index you work from. Names that don't sort, don't group and don't distinguish will cost you real minutes and occasional mistakes.

Optimising for one of those at the expense of the others is the usual failure. Brand names win in the grid and lose everywhere else.

The format

[Product type] + [distinguishing attribute] + [optional house name or size]

Some examples of the same product named badly and well:

Instead of	Write
Serenity	Charcoal soap bar, 100g
The Odette	Linen tote, natural
Golden Hour	Beeswax candle, honey and fig
Bestseller Set	Three-soap gift box
Item #4	Ceramic mug, speckled cream
Summer Vibes Tee	Cotton tee, sun print

The right column loses nothing. If "Serenity" matters to you, it becomes "Serenity charcoal soap bar" and both jobs get done in three words. The house name goes with the product type, never instead of it.

Put the distinguishing attribute where it's visible early, because names truncate. In a grid, on a phone, a long name gets cut off after roughly 25 to 30 characters. "Handmade artisan cold-process soap bar in charcoal and tea tree" becomes "Handmade artisan cold-pr..." which is indistinguishable from every other product you sell. "Charcoal soap bar, 100g" fits.

Front-load the word that distinguishes

If you sell nine candles, the word "candle" is not doing any distinguishing work inside your own shop. The scent is.

That produces a tension: "candle" needs to be there for the person who arrived from a search, and the scent needs to be first for the person scrolling your grid. The resolution is usually to put the distinguishing word first and the category second, once the category is obvious from context.

• Honey and fig candle
• Cedar and smoke candle
• Wild fig and vetiver candle

Each of those scans in the first two words, which is what a scrolling buyer actually reads. If instead every name starts with "Beeswax candle in...", the first eighteen characters of every product in your shop are identical, and the eye has nothing to grab.

Test it the lazy way: write all your product names in a single column, in a note on your phone, and look at the first three words of each. If they're the same, reorder them.

Keep the shape consistent

More important than any individual name is that the names look like a set.

Pick a shape and hold it. If one product is "Charcoal soap bar, 100g" and the next is "Soap - Lavender (100 grams)" and the third is "OATMEAL SOAP", the shop reads as three different shops. Consistency in the grid is what makes a small catalogue look like a real business, in exactly the same way that consistent photography does.

Decide, once, and write it down:

• Sentence case, not Title Case and not CAPS.
• Comma before the attribute, or no comma. Either. Just pick one.
• Sizes as "100g" or "100 g" or "Large". One of them.
• Colours as your buyer says them. "Navy", not "Deep Ocean Blue #3".

This is a ten-minute decision that you then never revisit, and it's worth doing before you have forty products rather than after.

The catalogue-level version of this problem, the order of the products themselves and how they're grouped, is a separate job and a bigger one: building a catalogue people can scan.

Names for people reading English as a second language

An English-language shop sells to Lagos, Manila, Nairobi, Dubai, Delhi and Manchester, and a large share of those buyers are reading English as a second or third language.

That changes the calculation on wordplay. A pun, a rhyme or a cultural reference is invisible to a reader who's translating in their head, and often actively confusing. "Bee-utiful honey soap" is a name a chunk of your buyers will read literally and then wonder about.

Use plain nouns. Use the international word where one exists: "tote bag" travels further than "shopper". Avoid slang, avoid regional brand references, and avoid anything that only works if you know the joke.

Worth saying clearly, because people assume otherwise: nothing translates your product names for you. Sailo's interface runs in 35 languages, and that's the interface. Your product names are exactly the words you typed, in the language you typed them, on every version of the page. If you want a second language in your names, you write it yourself, and the usual approach is the plain English noun with the local word in brackets.

Internal codes are for you, not for the buyer

Plenty of sellers need a code. If you make one-of-a-kind pieces, or you hold stock in a spare room, or you sell across a market stall and a shop link at the same time, a short code is genuinely useful.

Keep it out of the customer-facing name.

"Linen tote, natural" is what the buyer sees. "LT-NAT-03" lives in your notebook, your spreadsheet or a note field. A buyer reading "LT-NAT-03 Linen Tote" learns nothing from the first eight characters and mildly distrusts the shop, because codes in customer-facing names are a dropshipping tell.

The exception is genuine one-offs, where the code is the identity. Vintage sellers, artists selling originals, anyone where "the blue one" is ambiguous because there are four blue ones. Then a short, human code helps both of you: "Vintage denim jacket, No. 14". Notice that's still a readable name with a number on the end, not a SKU.

Naming variants versus naming products

The most expensive naming mistake is turning a variant into a product by giving it a name.

"Cotton tee, sun print" in four sizes is one product with a size option. It is not four products called "Cotton Tee S", "Cotton Tee M", "Cotton Tee L" and "Cotton Tee XL". Sellers do this constantly, and the naming is the symptom rather than the cause. If you find yourself putting a size in a product name, you're structuring your catalogue wrongly, and the fix is in how to handle sizes and variants.

Colour is the borderline case. If you hold stock in three colours of one bag, colour is an option, not a name. If your colours are genuinely different products with different photographs and different buyers, like scents in a candle shop, then the scent is a name and each one gets its own listing.

The signal to watch: if two listings share a photograph, they're one product with an option.

What a name should never contain

• Emotion adjectives. "Beautiful", "gorgeous", "stunning". The photo does that job.
• Sales language. "Bestseller", "New!", "Limited". These change, and a name shouldn't. Put them in the description or the collection instead.
• Your entire description. "Handmade organic cold-pressed vegan soap with activated charcoal for oily skin" is a description that thinks it's a name.
• Punctuation that breaks a message. Long dashes, quote marks and unusual characters can render strangely when the name gets pasted into a chat message or a spreadsheet. Plain characters travel further.
• The word "product".

Worked example: soap in Philadelphia, $9 a bar

Nadia makes cold-process soap in Philadelphia. Nine bars, $9 each, around 130 bars a month split between a farmers market and Instagram.

Her original names were all single words: Ember, Grove, Tide, Meadow, Ash, Salt, Thicket, Hollow, Bloom. Nine words, no nouns, and a grid where every product was a photo of a rectangle with a mystery word underneath.

Two things were going wrong that she could measure.

At the market, people picked up bars and asked what they were, every time, which was fine because she was standing there. Online, nobody could ask, and her online sales were about 15% of her volume despite most of her audience being online.

And when orders came through to WhatsApp, the pre-written message said "Ember, 1". She'd then have to check which one Ember was, because after nine months she still couldn't reliably remember. She had mis-packed twice.

The rename, done in one sitting:

Was	Became
Ember	Smoked cedar soap
Grove	Rosemary and mint soap
Tide	Sea salt soap
Meadow	Chamomile and oat soap
Ash	Charcoal soap

She kept the old words as a subtitle in the description, so "Ember" still exists for the people who knew it, and the market signage kept both. Nothing was lost.

What changed: her online sales roughly doubled over the following two months, from about 20 bars a month to just over 40, on the same posting schedule and the same photos. The bars people bought online shifted too. Charcoal and sea salt, the two most self-explanatory scents, went from her slowest online sellers to her fastest, having sold perfectly well at the market all along where she could explain them.

The mis-packing stopped entirely, which she cared about more than the sales, because a mis-packed order costs a bar, a postage label and a customer's patience.

When to rename, and when not to

Rename freely while you're small. Nine products and a hundred customers is nothing to unpick.

Be more careful once a name has been out in the world for a while, because your old posts, your printed cards, your market signage and every message thread with a repeat customer all point at the old name. If a customer asks for "the Ember one" and you've renamed it, that's fine as long as you know what they mean. It's a problem if you've forgotten.

The safe method is what Nadia did: change the name, keep the old word visible in the description for a season, and update your pinned posts. Don't rename in the middle of a launch, don't rename twice, and don't rename because you saw a shop you liked.

One thing to check before renaming anything: whether the name is doing work in search. If people find a product by typing its name into Google, that name is an asset and changing it costs you something real. For most small shops that's not the case yet, and the relevant groundwork is in how to get found on Google as a small seller.

The honest limitation

A name won't sell anything on its own. It removes friction, and removing friction only helps if there's demand pushing against it. If nobody is buying, renaming your catalogue is displacement activity and it will feel productive for an afternoon.

On the Sailo side, the free plan holds 10 products, which for a shop with nine soaps is generous and for a vintage seller with 70 one-off pieces is not. If your naming scheme involves a unique name per physical item, count your items first and know that Pro at $19 a month is what takes you to 250.

What to do next

Write every product name you have into one note, as a plain list. Look at the first three words of each. If a stranger couldn't tell what any given line was selling, that line needs a noun in it, and you'll be able to see which ones in about thirty seconds.

Fix your three best sellers first. Leave the rest for now, and check in two weeks whether the questions about those three have changed.

Then look at the words underneath the name, because a good name that hands off to a vague description just moves the confusion down one line: writing product descriptions that sell is the four-line format that answers what the name started. And if the photo above the name isn't earning its place either, how to photograph what you sell is the afternoon that fixes the top half of the listing.