What is a Product Listing Page?

1. What is a product listing page?

A product listing page, or PLP, is a page that shows a group of products on an eCommerce site. A high-quality PLP provides easy-to-use filtering and sorting options to help users find what they want in product listings. From this single page, customers can see each item with the following:

• Product titles
• Product images
• Product descriptions
• Prices
• Star ratings
• Reviews

This basic information entices customers to click through and learn more before adding the product to their shopping cart or wish list.

2. Why are they important?

Imagine what you expect in your own shopping experience. You want a well-designed PLP that makes finding and purchasing products easier.

Without an effective product listing page, you won’t get customers to click on items. Customers today are all about effortless shopping experiences that are quick and simple.

Therefore, a well-thought-out product listing page that makes it easy to sort and filter items in the customer’s preferred way is essential to increase revenues and profits.

In addition, enhancing the overall eCommerce site user experience creates customer loyalty and leads to repeat purchases.

3. How our customers use product listing pages

PLPs are your eCommerce best friend, enabling you to create a very personalized, pleasant customer experience. When a customer lands on your PLPs, you want them to feel satisfied when they arrive, knowing instantly that you have made browsing and shopping your eCommerce site easy. We’ve learned a lot about how our customers use PLPs to increase sales, including: 

Optimization for mobile devices

Customers today do most of their initial shopping using their phones. As a result, our customers ensure their PLPs are optimized for mobile device users. Mobile devices are all about scrolling, enabling customers to browse items with their thumbs. Awkward product listing pages that don’t fit on the screen properly force customers to slide the page back and forth instead of just scrolling. This makes finding what they are looking for more challenging and increases the risk of customer bounce. Frustrated customers who can’t scroll will find a website that enables them to shop without effort on a mobile-friendly product listing page.

Clear call-to-actions (CTAs) to encourage customers to make a purchase

Pages that provide clear calls-to-action throughout the shopping experience make it easier for customers to purchase. This increases conversions and avoids bounces. CTAs should include your basic “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” options, in hand with other suggestions that make the shopping experience easier and enhance average basket value, such as:

• “Add to wish list” to keep customers coming back if they don’t make a purchase
• “Learn more” to extend product descriptions
• “Customers also viewed” with product suggestions to create upsell opportunities
• “Customers also bought” to create bundling, kitting, or complementary purchase opportunities

Easy-to-use filtering and sorting options

Filtering options narrow down choices to show specific products that reduce scrolling. For example, when selling clothing, you would include things like women, men, children, size, color, patterned, summer, winter, etc., while for windows, you would include dimensions, style, frame, glass, caming, etc. The product’s attributes provide logical filters while sorting is related to customer preferences such as top-sellers, top-rated, priced low to high, or high to low. 

Using high-quality product images

Our PIM/DAM enables our customers to store, share, and access high-quality product images and other digital assets such as 3D, 360 views, zoom, video, etc. In addition, they can match the correct product image to each product, providing the thumbnail for the PLP and then various digital assets once the item is clicked from the PLP.  High-quality images are at the heart of a PLP’s effectiveness.

Providing detailed product descriptions

The product descriptions appearing on the PLP should be treated the same way you treat what users see in the SERPs for your SEO. You have a split second to appeal to their sense of aesthetics with the image and then support that image with detailed product descriptions. The product descriptions confirm that what customers see in the thumbnail image is what they’ll find in the features and benefits of the product.

This combination helps you create robust, searchable, clickable product listing pages to increase conversions.

Our customers depend on our tools to create optimized product listing pages. To see firsthand how a PIM helps create quality product listing pages, click here.