Everything You Should Know About Product Listing Pages

What is a PLP?

Product listing page (PLP) is a category page on an e-commerce site that displays products the site sells. It usually contains images of these products, prices, and a brief description. The description may extend when the customer hovers over a product they want.

These pages usually show products in a grid or list format, and they often allow users to adjust how many products they want to view per page. Product listing pages also usually have filters and sorting options, helping customers narrow down the selection of product that fits their preferences.

That’s why product listing pages are essential to the customer journey. According to research by Salsify, 87 % of shoppers claim that complete product content significantly influences their purchasing decisions.

To improve your e-commerce website’s sales, you must step into the world of product listing pages (PLPs) and automated solutions that deal with PLPs. These software solutions can drive your profits up, increase visitor conversion, and enhance the overall user experience on your website.

Why are PLPs essential?

If you’re running an e-shop business, you undoubtedly already know what product listing pages (PLPs) are and are probably using them, just like most e-shops. However, not all product listing pages are equal, and if you want your e-commerce website to succeed, you must work on your PLPs and improve them as much as possible.

For example, suppose you’re using a product grid on your e-commerce website. A product grid lets the customers view many products all at once, easily comparing them visually before they select the one they want to purchase.

But how the product grid is organized and what information it displays is vital in improving the user experience, as the customer doesn’t have to spend too much time searching through thousands of products. That’s why enhancing your PLPs is essential.

A well-designed product listing page can massively increase your website’s conversion rates, especially if you can show thousands of products in a clean and straightforward design, and that’s precisely where services like Luigi’s Box can help you.

Best practices for product listing pages

Creating a product listing page and putting the items you sell in a product grid won’t be enough. If there are thousands of products, it’s easy to have duplicate content issues, especially if you have product variations.

Moreover, you’ll also need to sort products, which can be challenging, mainly if you sell thousands of products with many category titles. That’s why you need to employ certain practices regarding product listing pages.

1. Include AI-driven features

With companies selling so many different product types, needing to include product images for each one, and optimizing the website for mobile devices, it’s impossible to do everything by hand, and it’s certainly not a job you want to leave to humans. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.

Websites driven by AI features can quickly sort through thousands of products, using AI to order them in the best way possible. They also include powerful filtering capabilities, which immensely help customers, and you can pin your best-selling products at the top of the page. Therefore, these AI-powered features can lead to better sales, higher conversion rates, and a great customer experience.

AI algorithms for the best product order

The first result on search engines gets over one-quarter of all clicks when people search for something. Compare that to links in the last three spots, and you realize the click rate is ten times lower. That’s why appearing on the first page is essential, but that isn’t important only for search engines.

Almost 90% of people choose and purchase individual products from the first page of e-commerce websites. That’s why popular products should appear first, but keeping track of that by yourself or having a team of people do it is inefficient. That’s where AI learn-to-rank algorithms come in.

These AI algorithms can help your e-commerce website by ordering products from best to worst, improving customer product discovery, and increasing conversion. Your e-shop business will boom, and your products will sell even better.

Dynamic filters for easier search

How often do you browse certain websites and see filters that do very little to improve the experience? They’re still there, existing even after you’ve filtered t-shirts, for example, and offering to filter something that doesn’t have anything to do with t-shirts. Once you click them, the page simply refreshes, and nothing changes. These filters can negatively impact the customer experience and they are often not that useful.

Fortunately, dynamic filters also exist, and they change depending on the customer’s search intent. The filters can change depending on the context of the category, so they will stay relevant and helpful. These filters help create a faceted navigation and help site visitors narrow their search and find what they want. They include price ranges, brands, sizes, colors, but also many finer details which can help customers find precisely what they’re looking for in a selected product category.

By including dynamic filters on your website, you’re making it easy for customers to find their way around, which increases conversion rates and boosts your sales. Moreover, these filters allow the same website to have different dynamic filters for various web pages and types of products they sell.

Product-boosting for even better sales

Since certain products will inevitably do better than others, pushing these products to the first page is essential. You can do precisely that with product boosting, also known as merchandising or pin-to-position functionality.

Essentially, these services employ AI to track which products are selling well and which are receiving the most comments, ratings, or reviews, putting those products ahead of the rest. That leads to search queries showing such products first, increasing their popularity and driving further sales.

Of course, intelligent product listing websites also include a pin-to-position function for your e-commerce website’s product listing pages. That way, you can pin a product that’s selling well to the specific position you want, which helps it sell even better, further driving your sales and increasing conversion rates.

2. Optimize product listings

As mentioned, creating simple PLPs and PDPs isn’t enough for a website to do well and sell many goods. You’ll also need to optimize your product listings to improve the customer experience, enhance product discovery, and possibly even recommend additional products once they search for something.

Use high-quality images

Various social media websites are social proof that high-quality images, and even edited ones, do much better than those that aren’t edited or lack quality. It’s the same for e-commerce websites, no matter what type of products you’re selling. That’s why high-quality images are crucial for an e-commerce product.

Ensure you’re using high-quality and high-resolution images that clearly display your product. If the customer can zoom in and see more details about your product, that’s even better. Choose pictures that show your product in the best possible lighting, as they’re the first thing a customer will look at.

If the images lack quality or don’t appeal to customers, they might be less likely to even look at a product’s description. Combined with a tactic of putting down the price, the customer might not be convinced of the product’s quality overall and your product might not sell well under any circumstances.

Provide detailed product descriptions

Modern online shoppers like to get informed about what product they are buying, and some of them might be interested even in the tiniest details. Rarely would anyone risk spending their hard-earned money on something they know nothing about. That’s why product details are essential to the selling experience, as they let customers know what the product you’re selling is all about.

These detailed product descriptions can confirm or change the customer’s thoughts about purchasing an item or a product. They keep the customers glued in, telling them about a product, informing them whether it’s a good brand, made of excellent materials, and will keep them satisfied if they purchase it.

No matter the product description’s importance, it doesn’t mean that this part should include any lies about the product. However, a creatively written product description emphasizing the product’s strong points and advantages can significantly impact the customer’s decision. The customer can also better manage their expectations, and you can help prevent any disappointment.

Display customer reviews and ratings

E-commerce sites that display more information about the product or service they offer have better chances of selling to customers. Product reviews are some of the essential elements when it comes to buying decisions, and the more positive reviews your website has on the product, the better your sales will do.

Customer ratings are also vital since they let potential buyers know how satisfied were people who bought or tried your products. Reviews can increase trust and credibility, and the product is bound to sell many more units than one with no customer reviews or ratings.

3. Focus on user experience

Something that companies often forget or simply don’t care enough about is the user experience. It includes a few aspects that can lead to higher sales, more profit, and better ratings and reviews for your products and the website.

No matter how good your products are, you’ll lose potential customers if the shopping experience is subpar. That’s why you need to work on it as much as you work on the products you sell, and you can do so by taking care of the following aspects of your e-commerce website.

Make sure the page loads quickly

One of the aspects that can heavily impact the user experience is the loading speed of your pages, filters, and images. The website’s loading speeds can also heavily impact an e-commerce website’s success.

Nothing frustrates customers more than slow-loading pages and unresponsive sites. It will affect your website’s bounce rates the most, making customers close the tab for your website and take their business elsewhere.

Use a clean and consistent design

Another vital part of a great website user experience is the design. Here, doing less is often better. You don’t want to overdo it and have many unnecessary items that confuse users, making the website slower and more challenging to optimize for different devices.

Keeping it simple and clean and staying consistent for all your website’s pages is an excellent idea for improving the customer experience. You only need relevant keywords, primary navigation buttons, and a shopping cart button, and you can handle thousands of products.

Of course, website navigation is crucial, and these primary navigation buttons should lead to other navigational elements, category page content, and other internal links to thousands of products. Then, you could have product attributes with target keywords and a few action buttons, and you should be ready.

Include calls-to-action to encourage purchases

Finally, there’s also the call-to-action element. It can impact the customer’s purchasing decision, and including this can even change user intent from browsing to purchasing. Everyone likes a good deal, so offering encouragement to buy something can go a long way. Even a small coupon or a product bundle recommendation for customers and asking them to register or join a mailing list for benefits can encourage them to purchase instead of just browsing.

That doesn’t mean you should annoy your customers with various pop-ups whenever they click an item or get on a different web page. Occasionally offering it is plenty unless you want to risk pushing your customers away.

Top product listing page solutions

To reap the full benefits of excellent product listing pages, you should use automated software with AI capabilities to make these pages, deal with dynamic filters and sorting methods, and boost products by tracking which products are doing well and which need help. That’s why we’ve created a list of some of the best product listing page software you can use.

1. Luigi’s Box Product Listing

Created primarily to deal with PLP, title tags, and product variations, Luigi’s Box is the ultimate product listing page solution. It can enhance your customers’ browsing experience and improve your e-commerce business’s profits on a massive scale in any industry.

With Luigi’s Box, your website visitors can easily find what they’re after and learn everything about your product by reading its characteristics, quickly converting to customers. They are more likely to promptly purchase after looking into product ratings, reviews, and detailed descriptions.

As your customers won’t have a reason to leave your e-shop, your website will enjoy various benefits such as:

2. Bloomreach Discovery

Another product listing page solution is Bloomreach Discovery. Their AI engine predicts your customers’ expectations, orders products to support your business goals, and provides personalized search results and recommendations.

Bloomreach Discovery brings the following advantages:

3. Lucidworks Fusion

Lucidworks Fusion is another viable option for product listing pages. Lucidworks offers automated AI solutions to create product listing pages for your e-commerce website or business, similar to the abovementioned solutions.

AI can help make your website faster and more responsive and create product grids or lists for thousands of products. You can add dynamic filters that work great with your business’s supplies and product variations, including colors, brands, sizes, etc.

Lucidworks Fusion will bring your e-commerce products certain advantages that you won’t have without an automated PLP solution. These include:

4. Squarespace

Although Squarespace is primarily a website builder tool, they also deal with e-commerce websites and have built-in solutions for creating product listing pages. These product listing pages will undoubtedly lack the functionality of a dedicated product listing page service, but they also have some benefits.

5. Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento Commerce, stands as a powerful choice for product listing pages. It provides versatile AI solutions tailored for e-commerce, enhancing both the creation and management of product listings.

Adobe Commerce’s AI facilitates the creation of dynamic, responsive product grids or lists, accommodating vast product assortments. It supports dynamic filters for efficient product categorization based on various attributes like color, brand, and size, enhancing user experience and navigation.

Conclusion

Product listing pages (PLPs) are essential to an e-commerce business’s success as they bring various benefits if appropriately handled. However, you’ll need to employ certain practices for PLPs to work to reap these benefits. These include using AI-driven features to sort products, dynamic filters to help customers quickly find what they want, and product boosting to sell more of a particular product that needs help.

The best way to do this is to use advanced software, such as Luigi’s Box, to handle all of this for you. Such software will improve your website’s conversion rates, help customers find what they’re after, and increase the overall user experience. That will further drive your sales, increasing your profits.

Frequently asked questions