I read a product page last week that listed eleven features. Material, dimensions, weight, the warranty length, the certifications it had passed. All true. All accurate. And not one line told me what owning the thing would actually do for me.
That page was not badly written. The grammar was clean, the photography was good, the brand looked expensive. It just described the product instead of selling it. The reader has to do the translation work themselves, and most will not bother.
A founder said this to me on a call this year: “We're trying to scale ad spend $100K per month on Meta and Google. Fifty thousand people a month land on these product pages currently, and 1.7 percent of them buy. The product tests better than anything else in the category. I just don't think the page is telling anyone why.”
He was right, and he already knew it. The traffic was fine. The product was genuinely good. The page was a spec sheet wearing nice photography and fancy UI.
The instinct in that situation is usually to add more. More features, more bullet points, more reasons to buy. But a longer spec sheet is still a spec sheet. None of it answers the one question every buyer is silently running while they read.
What Is The Buyer Actually Asking?
There's a principle at the centre of conversion copywriting that's easy to nod along to and hard to actually apply. Flint McGlaughlin, who runs MECLABS Institute, frames a value proposition around two questions the buyer is asking whether you answer them or not: what's in it for me, and why should I buy it from you.
Notice what's missing from those questions. Neither one is “what is this product made of.”
A feature is a fact about the product. A benefit is what that fact does for the person reading. The gap between the two is translation, and most product pages leave that translation to the customer. “420D ripstop nylon” is a fact. “You can throw it in the boot of your car for five years, and it won't tear” is what the fact means. The buyer can get from one to the other, but every time you make them do it, you lose a few of them.
That's the mechanism: people don't buy products, they buy a better version of their own situation. A feature only sells once it's been connected to the outcome it produces. Until then it's just sitting on the page being true.
The customer-side version of McGlaughlin's question is even simpler. Read each line on your page and ask it out loud: so what? What does this mean for me? Keep asking until the answer is something the buyer can actually feel. That's the So What? test, and it's the way we should be thinking.
Where Does This Show Up On Your Product Page?
Once you start looking, untranslated features are everywhere. Here's where they hide most often:
Raw specs in the description (material, dimensions, capacity) with no line telling the buyer what those specs let them do, so the reader has to work out for themselves whether the product fits their life.
Feature names borrowed straight from the manufacturer or the engineering team (“dual-density foam,” “tri-fold construction”) that mean something internally and nothing to a first-time buyer.
Benefit claims that stop one level too early (“breathable fabric”) without naming the outcome the buyer actually cares about (“you stop sweating through your shirt on the commute”).
A page full of bullets that all describe the product, not one that addresses the objection running in the buyer's head: will this hold up, will it fit my space, is it worth the extra money over the cheaper one?
A headline that states a category or a feature (“Premium stainless steel cookware set”) instead of the result the buyer is paying for (“food that cooks evenly, on pans you'll still own in ten years”).
Every one of these states an attribute and leaves the buyer to translate it into “what's in it for me.” They all share the same root: the value proposition is failing at the line level. The page is talking about the product when the buyer only ever cared about themselves.
What If Every Line Had To Earn Its Place?
Most founders write product copy by asking “what should I say about this product?” That question produces a list of everything true about it. The list is accurate, it's thorough, and it's exhausting to read, because it hands all the work to the customer.
The more useful question is the one the buyer is already asking silently: so what? What does this mean for me? Run that against every line on the page. If a feature can't answer it, the feature isn't selling, it's just taking up space. If it can answer it, you've found a sentence that actually moves someone toward the cart.
That one question turns the work from describing the product into translating it. And translation is exactly what the buyer was going to have to do anyway. You're just doing it for them, before they decide it isn't worth the effort.
Where Would I Start This Week?
Pull your three best-selling product pages.
List every feature and spec line on each one.
Then run each line through the So What? test, rewriting until the answer is an outcome the buyer can feel rather than a fact they have to interpret.
That alone will take about thirty minutes, and it will change how the pages read.
Then go and find the exact words, because you should not be inventing the outcomes. Read 20 to 30 recent reviews and search your support inbox by product name. Your customers are already describing what the product did for them, in language better than anything you'll write at your desk.
Two things to look for. The review line where someone describes their life after the purchase (“I finally stopped checking it every five minutes”) is your headline, not your spec. The support ticket that asks the same question over and over (“will this actually hold up if I leave it outside”) is the objection your page never answered. If your own reviews are thin, mine your closest competitor's Amazon reviews instead. Same customers, same language, and it's free.
Every spec on the page is a claim the customer has to translate into “what's in it for me” by themselves.
“The brands that win do the translating for them, in the customer's own words.”
This Week's Free Resource
Ten common spec-sheet feature lines rewritten as benefit-driven copy, side by side, plus a fill-in template you can run on your own pages this afternoon.
Thanks for reading!
Conal Brady
Ecom Luxx
P.S. Learn more about Ecom Luxx and our GrowthOps™ Partnership below:
