Five product page fixes that pay for themselves.

The product page is where the decision happens. Everything before it is traffic and everything after it is admin. These are the five things we check first on any store, in the order we check them, and none of them require a redesign.

We are not going to attach percentages to them. Anyone quoting you a specific uplift for a generic change is selling you someone else's data. What we can tell you is which problems show up most often, and why they cost you buyers.

1. Put the buy button where the thumb already is.

On a phone, the price and the add to cart button should be visible without scrolling. This sounds obvious and is broken constantly, usually because a large hero image, a trail of breadcrumbs and a long product title push the button below the fold.

Most of your traffic is on a phone. If a visitor has to scroll to find out how to buy, you have added a step to the one action the page exists for.

2. Let people look at the thing properly.

Customers cannot pick the product up, so the images have to do that work for them. They need to be sharp, they need to zoom, and they need to show what a buyer would look for if the item were in their hands: scale, texture, the back of it, how it sits when worn or used.

Small, soft or purely styled images are the most common reason a page gets attention and no orders. The visitor is interested. They just cannot get close enough to decide.

Count them as well as judging them. A product carrying two photographs is asking the buyer to imagine the rest, and buyers who have to imagine usually leave to think about it, which is the polite version of leaving.

3. Answer the shipping question before it is asked.

Delivery cost, delivery time and the returns policy should be readable near the buy button, not on a separate page and not revealed for the first time at checkout. Every buyer has those three questions and they ask them before they commit, not after.

A cost discovered at checkout is worse than the same cost stated on the product page, because by then it reads as a surprise rather than a fact.

4. Put the proof where the doubt is.

Reviews at the very bottom of the page are reviews most visitors never see. The doubt appears next to the button, at the moment of deciding, so that is where the evidence has to be: a rating near the price, real customer photographs where you have them, and the full reviews still available further down for the people who want to read them.

The same logic covers everything else that settles a doubt: the guarantee, the sizing, the material, the answer to whatever your customers email you about most. If it exists to make somebody comfortable buying, it belongs where they are deciding, not in a tab they were never going to open.

5. Make it fast, especially on a phone.

A slow product page loses buyers before it gets the chance to persuade anyone, and the loss is invisible because those people never appear in your reports. Oversized images, scripts from apps you no longer use, and fonts that load late are the usual causes, and all three are fixable without touching the design.

Start with the images, since they are usually the heaviest thing on the page and the easiest to reduce without anybody noticing the difference. Then look at what your apps are loading on a page that does not need them.

Where to start.

Open your best selling product on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and go through the five in order. The problems are rarely subtle once you look at the page as a buyer instead of as the person who built it.

When you want the whole funnel looked at rather than one page, that is what we do. See how we improve conversion.