Writing product descriptions that sell

Open your DMs. Scroll back a month. Count how many times you typed the same answer to the same question.

That count is your product description, and you've already written it forty times. The job is to write it once, put it under the photo, and get your evenings back.

The shape that works, for almost everything, is four lines: what it is in plain words, the numbers (size, weight, materials, quantity), the one sentence that handles the objection you get most, and what happens after they order. Four lines, sixty to a hundred and twenty words, no adjectives you'd be embarrassed to say out loud. A seller in Lagos who added weight and delivery timing to a ₦4,500 shea butter listing stopped answering nine or ten "how many grams" messages a week. That's the whole return on this.

The description is a support ticket you write in advance

Every question a buyer has to ask is a chance for them to not ask it and leave instead. Most sellers know this in theory and then write a description like a greeting card anyway, because the internet told them to sell the feeling.

Sell the feeling in the photo. Sell the facts in the words. That division holds up in every market and every category, and the moment you invert it you get a listing that reads beautifully and converts badly.

The practical version: keep a note on your phone. Every time you answer a product question in a DM, paste the question into the note. After two weeks you'll have between four and eight recurring questions, and they will be blunter than anything you'd have guessed. Not "what's the story behind your brand". More like "does it stain", "will it fit a 42 inch chest", "how long does it last", "is it real leather", "do you deliver to Ikeja".

Those are your description. In that order of frequency.

The four lines, in order

Line one: what it is, in the words a stranger would use. Not your product name, not your collection name. If your product is called "The Amara Set" the first line has to say "a two-piece cotton lounge set". Someone who arrived from a reel has no idea what they're looking at and won't ask.

Line two: the numbers. Dimensions, weight, volume, materials, how many are in the pack. This is the block people scan and it should be scannable, so use a short list rather than a sentence. "200g. 100% unrefined shea, nothing added. Comes in a screw-top tub, not a jar."

Line three: the objection. Whatever you get asked defensively. "It hardens in cold weather, that's normal, warm it in your hands." "Runs small, size up if you're between sizes." "The grain differs on every piece because it's one board cut in three." A named flaw is worth more than five adjectives, because a seller who tells you what's wrong with the product is a seller you believe about what's right with it.

Line four: what happens next. Delivery window, how you take payment, what you need from them. "Ships from Lagos in 1 to 2 working days. Bank transfer or pay the rider on delivery."

That's it. If you've written more than about 140 words you're writing for yourself.

What to cut

Cut every word that would be true of a competitor's product. "High quality" is true of everything anyone sells. So is "premium", "carefully crafted", "must-have", and "perfect for any occasion". They occupy the space where a fact should be.

The test is easy and slightly brutal. Take a sentence out of your description, put a competitor's product name in front of it, and see if it still makes sense. If it does, delete it. "Perfect for any occasion" survives the swap. "Burns for 45 hours in a room with the door shut" doesn't, because it's a measurement of your product specifically.

Instead of	Write
Premium quality fabric	100% cotton, 180gsm, gets softer after three washes
Long lasting	200g tub lasts most people three to four months
Perfect gift	Comes in a box that doesn't need wrapping
Handmade with love	Made in batches of 12, so colours vary slightly between batches
Fast shipping	Dispatched same day if you order before 2pm

Every entry in the right-hand column is a specific number or a specific consequence. That's not a style choice. It's the difference between something a buyer can act on and something they skim past.

Write for someone reading English as a second language on a slow connection

A large share of the people buying from English-language shops aren't reading English as a first language, and most of them are on a phone with two bars. Both of those facts point the same direction: shorter sentences, common words, numbers as digits.

• "Approximately" becomes "about".
• "Utilise" becomes "use".
• "Twenty-five centimetres" becomes "25cm".
• Idioms go entirely. "A steal at this price" doesn't translate and doesn't skim.

Digits survive everything. They survive a bad translation, a small screen, a fast skim and a buyer who's half-watching a video while they read. Spelled-out numbers don't.

Front-load the sentence too. The important word goes first, because on a narrow screen the second half of your sentence may be below the fold, and because the reader is scanning rather than reading. "Ships Monday to Friday from Nairobi" beats "We are pleased to offer dispatch from our Nairobi base on weekdays".

The first line has to work alone

Wherever your description ends up, the first line travels furthest. It's what shows in a preview, what a buyer skims before deciding whether to open the full listing, and what gets copied into a message when someone shares your product with a friend.

So write the first line as if nothing after it exists. "Two-piece cotton lounge set, ₦18,000, ships from Lagos" is a complete offer. "Introducing our newest addition..." is a wasted line, and it's wasted in the exact position where you have the most attention you will ever have.

Same discipline applies to the product name itself, which is a shorter and harder version of the same problem. How to name your products covers the naming rules that keep a catalogue scannable.

What a buyer is actually deciding

There are only four decisions happening, and they happen in this order:

1. Is this the thing I wanted? Answered by the photo and the first line.
2. Is it the right size, colour, amount? Answered by the numbers block and, for anything with options, by how clearly the variants are laid out. Getting that structure right is its own job: see how to handle sizes and variants.
3. Is this seller real? Answered by specificity. Weirdly specific detail is the strongest trust signal a small shop has. "Poured in batches of 12 on Sunday evenings" does more than a badge.
4. What do I have to do now? Answered by the last line. If a buyer has to guess how payment works, a proportion of them just leave.

Miss any one of the four and you'll feel it in your DMs, because the missing answer becomes a message.

Descriptions for things that aren't objects

Services. The description has to say what the buyer gets, how long it takes, where it happens and what you need from them beforehand. "90 minutes, at your home, within 10km of Westlands. Send a photo of the room when you book." Length and location and notice period are the three things people ask about, so answer all three.

Digital files. Say the format, the file size, what software opens it, and whether updates are included. "PDF, 14 pages, A4 and US Letter both included. Opens in any browser." A digital product's description carries more weight than a physical one's, because there's nothing to photograph and the words are the entire product page.

Custom or made-to-order. Say the lead time in the first two lines, not the last. Buyers who discover a three-week wait at the bottom of the description are the buyers who message you angrily on day eight.

Worked example: shea butter, Lagos, ₦4,500

Chidinma sells whipped shea butter in Lagos. 200g tub, ₦4,500, about 60 tubs a month, mostly through Instagram and a WhatsApp broadcast list.

Her original description, in full: "Pure organic shea butter. 100% natural. Nourishes and moisturises. DM to order."

Twenty-one words, and she was answering the same five questions all day. How much is in the tub. Is it scented. Does it melt. How long does delivery take. Where is she based.

The rewrite:

Whipped shea butter, unscented. 200g tub.

100% unrefined Nigerian shea, whipped with a little coconut oil so it spreads without dragging. No fragrance, no preservative.

It softens in Lagos heat. That's the shea behaving normally, not the product spoiling. If it goes liquid, put it in the fridge for 20 minutes and it comes back.

₦4,500. Lagos delivery in 1 to 2 days, ₦1,500 within Lagos mainland. Bank transfer, or pay the dispatch rider on delivery.

Eighty-two words. Every one of her five recurring questions is answered, and the melting line is the one doing the most work, because it converts the product's most obvious flaw into evidence that she knows what she's selling.

What changed: she stopped getting "how many grams" messages almost entirely, and the ones she still gets are from people asking about wholesale, which is a better problem. She also stopped losing the buyers who saw softened shea in a photo and assumed it had gone off.

What didn't change: her conversion rate on cold traffic from reels. Descriptions fix the messages. They don't fix the traffic. Anyone selling you a copywriting course that promises otherwise is selling you a copywriting course.

Formatting, briefly

Line breaks are free and they double the number of people who read past the second sentence. A wall of text on a 5-inch screen gets skipped.

• Short paragraphs, one to three lines each.
• A list for the numbers block, because lists get read when prose gets skimmed.
• Bold sparingly. If four things are bold, nothing is.
• No shouting. A description in capitals reads as a market stall shout and it's harder to scan.

Consistency matters more than cleverness. If every listing in your shop has the numbers in the same place, a returning buyer learns where to look and stops reading everything else. That's a small compounding advantage and it costs nothing but discipline. The same logic applied to a whole catalogue is in building a catalogue people can scan.

The honest limitation

A description reduces messages. It doesn't eliminate them, and Sailo won't answer the ones that get through. On the manual payment rails, which is most small shops, you're also confirming every payment yourself. Sailo can't tell you a bank transfer landed. Only your bank can. So a great description that brings in twice the orders brings in twice the reconciliation, and that's a real cost of doing this well.

There's a second thing worth saying plainly: nothing translates your product text. Sailo's interface runs in 35 languages, and your descriptions are exactly the words you typed, in the language you typed them. If you sell into a market that doesn't read English comfortably, you write the second version yourself.

What to do next

Take your best-selling product. Open the last month of DMs about it and write down the questions in order of frequency, however scrappily. That list is your description and it'll take about ten minutes to gather.

Rewrite that one listing into the four lines. Leave every other listing alone for a week and watch whether the questions about that product drop. They will, and seeing it happen on one product is what makes you willing to do the other nineteen.

If the photo above the words isn't pulling its weight either, fix that first: how to photograph what you sell is the setup that takes one afternoon and outlasts every description you'll ever write. And if you're rewriting descriptions because sales are slow rather than because your DMs are full, the problem probably isn't the words. Start with what to do when nobody is buying instead.