How to Optimize Ecommerce Product Listings on Mobile

You’ve got a great product! It fills a niche! It’s beautiful and productive.

… but how do you convey all that to the masses most effectively? How do you ensure that the people who need your goods and services are actually enticed by the advertisements, product spotlights, and PR information you put out into the world?

While there are many potential answers to the above questions, the one that rises to the top is this: optimizing your product listings. This is, hands down, the most important aspect of ecommerce marketing – and one that, unfortunately, many people get wrong.

Why? Because optimizing ecommerce product listings is hard. Individual shop owners and even large organizations believe that because their product is good, it can “speak for itself.” While understandable, this belief is wrong, because there’s simply too much competition.

If you want to rise above the rest, it’s critical you have a dedicated, informed approach to each Amazon product listing, Shopify product listing, Etsy listing, you name it. That includes the optimization of listings for mobile devices as well as desktop, and optimizing social media images that either funnel to those listings or are increasingly the listing in and of themselves.

Moreover, optimizing ecommerce product listings means understanding how to maximize product photography, video production, the thoughtful use of models or stop motion, copy … and more.

Today’s post will discuss all of the above, starting with how to optimize imagery. We will then consider the roles that copy, video, and platform-specific best practices play, as well as whether a product catalog is appropriate for your organization.

By the time you’re done, you’ll know all about how to optimize ecommerce product listings for maximum brand building, visual appeal, and sales. Let’s dive in!

Optimize Your Imagery for Mobile and Desktop

First and foremost, make sure your images are optimized. Some of this work is done by human hands, while more and more of it can be relegated to AI, which is smarter and faster at many of the rote tasks we used to have to do ourselves. (A little freaked out about this? Don’t be.)

{{studio-ad="/external-components"}}

Whatever approach you take, you should always put image optimization at the top of your listing optimization checklist. Again, this is true whether we’re talking about an Amazon product listing, Shopify product listing, or anything else. From your own website to ecommerce giants to social media, the following steps will help you optimize your approach to sales across your omnichannel empire.

1. Get the Size Right

Size matters. Pictures that are too large hurt your brand when they:

• End up blurry because they get compressed by ecommerce or social media platforms
• Look crummy in thumbnails because you didn’t create a specific image to meet the smaller size
• Slow down your load time and website performance
• Make impatient customers bounce in search of listings that are faster and more responsive

Images are often too large when you source them from stock sites that don’t let you choose the size (think Unsplash, whose default is to download images in the size they were uploaded, often between 5,000 and 7,000 pixels) or when you take them with a high-powered digital camera that has incredible resolution.

While this is great, it’s important to size them down before using them on mobile.

The same is true for images that are too small. They are problematic when they:

• Get pixelated to fill a space that’s larger than they are
• Quickly lose resolution when scaled up
• Are resized in graphic design programs (think Illustrator or GIMP) that aren’t equipped to do a good job

That’s not to say you can’t change the size of images well, though! If you’re looking for a quick way to resize images, our free image resizer tool will do the trick. It can scale photos down and up with equal crispness and vibrancy, securing your brand while reducing the amount of rework you have to do shooting new pictures that fit the bill.

You should also be careful when cropping. This is often necessary when trying to meet the vastly varying dimensions of different platforms. For instance, YouTube cover images and website hero images are both landscape, while mobile listings and Pinterest are both highly vertical (portrait) channels. What’s a company to do?

The best bet is to take professional quality product photos that can accommodate a lot of adjustment. For instance, if you take photos that center the main object (say, a hand holding a tube of face cream) in the middle third, with an interesting background, then you can accommodate both landscape as is and portrait by cropping off the left and right thirds.

Bottom line: correctly sizing your photos just takes a little planning.

2. Make Images Responsive

It’s incredibly important that your images are responsive. Today’s is a highly mobile world. According to Statista, “The number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions worldwide reached almost 6.4 billion in 2022, and is forecast to exceed 7.7 billion by 2028.”

That’s not just a fun fact; a huge percentage of people today shop online using phones and tablets: “At least 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months,” says OuterBox, adding that “It’s estimated over 50% of all eCommerce purchases during the 2022 holiday season were made on a smartphone.”

Moreover, says the same source, “mobile traffic and desktop traffic are both at a dead even 50%, meaning half of all website traffic is coming from a mobile device.”

If your product listing strategy is still prioritizing desktop over mobile, then you’re getting left behind by competitors who are taking a well-rounded approach.

What’s the point? That images must look good in responsive environments such as an Amazon product listing or a Shopify product listing. You upload these pictures once to Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, or wherever else, and you want them to look good on a desktop, phone, or tablet. That means they must be big enough to ensure optimization of product listings for mobile devices, but not too big, or they’ll render blurrily on mobile.

Confused yet? The best approach is to use platform-specific guides to help, well, guide you. Luckily, we’ve done all the work for you, so feel free to bookmark our in-depth tutorials for Etsy, Shopify, and Amazon.

3. Change Colors to Increase Your Media Library

Some companies struggle to create a visually appealing storefront with a variety of branded listings that all play nicely together but look good on their own.

First and foremost, this is one of the best reasons to choose real images over stock photos, because they’re so much more likely to adhere to your brand. Second, it’s a compelling reason to get good at changing out the backgrounds of your products and using different colors to highlight different events or seasons.

Why? Because you can make your listings much more appealing to shoppers if they fit the time of year. When shopping for Christmas presents, buyers want to see sparkly silver, gold, red, white, and green backgrounds. At Mother’s Day, they’re looking for pastels and florals. Summer means turquoise waters, palm fronds, and sunny yellows. And so on.

If you and your competitor have a similar product, but they’re targeting customers seasonally and you aren’t, you’re likely to lose out. Optimizing your image for the time of year will both snag that audience segment back and increase your media library without you having to stage new shoots.

Win-win.

4. Add Text

Text over images can be a great way to optimize your photos and make them stand out more. You can use text to share your mission and values, the main ingredients of a product, its main uses, or the reason someone should want to buy it.

Text also adds a compelling visual element that can help fill in negative space. If you are trying to minimize the number of images you have to take, then it’s very helpful.

Let’s return to the example of the hand model holding the tube of cream. In that image, you can use text on either side of the image for landscape photos or square product listings. On mobile, where the standard portrait dimensions (3:4 and 9:16) require a much taller image, text can help fill in the top and bottom.

5. Show Your Products in Use

There are infinite ways to show your products in use, and people love to see them. These include ideas such as:

• Packing a backpack or unpacking a box of art supplies
• Pulling on a sweater or putting on a watch
• Cracking open a soda or using your bamboo spoon to make stir fry
• Jumping on a pogo stick or using exercise equipment

… and so forth. Optimizing your product listings for ecommerce can be as simple as showing people “See?? Look how great this is!”

Let’s switch our attention now from static images to another of the online sphere’s most beloved media: video.

Get Your Video Right

Video is another facet of optimization of product listings for mobile devices and desktop alike. Good video is sharp, clear, and direct, with excellent sound quality and highly branded colors, logos, and text. It is also accessible, entertaining, educational, and fully prepped for search engine optimization.

Sound like a lot? As soon as you get a good routine down, it won’t feel overwhelming at all. Accordingly, here are some of our favorite tips to make video creation as easy as possible:

1. Include People in Your Branding

If there are people in your video, make sure they are as well branded as the products. Remember, they carry your image to the masses just as surely as a tube of rose oil does, so make sure they:

• Dress in colors and styles that match your brand
• Speak in ways that follow your brand voice
• Only showcase your products, otherwise wear and use neutral, unbranded products

2. Entertain and Educate

Remember that videos for product listings are extremely to the point. People are “in” your storefront, browsing your listings, because they have a specific need they’re trying to meet. They’re in a hurry and would love nothing better than to be convinced your product is The One For Them so that they can check it off their list and move on.

Accordingly, don’t think of your product listing videos as a brand-building exercise. Save the gags, slow-building action, and “Do you ever wonder if … ?” scripts for YouTube, your website, or your Amazon “About Us” page.

Instead, create a video that is short and sweet. Show your product in use, from multiple angles, in multiple colors, and with voiceover or music as appropriate. List off the main points for consideration and what makes the product different from your competitors, and leave it at that.

3. Use Overlay Thoughtfully

Don’t use text or graphic overlay except where necessary. Use a minimal amount for branding, sticking to your color palette, and where necessary, highlighting the main points of your video. Mostly, though, you should leave the screen free of words to accommodate the next step.

4. Make Your Video Accessible

You want the hearing impaired to be able to enjoy your video as well as anyone else. Use transcripts to make your video accessible by showing any narration across the bottom of the screen. This can complement the text you use on your video, but ideally, you will avoid cluttering it up with too much text overlay.

5. Choose Compatible File Types

Save your videos in file types that render well on any device type and platform. Check an individual ecommerce site’s specific requirements to see what it supports before recording where possible. For instance, Etsy accepts video formats such as .MP4, .MOV, FLV, AAC, AVI, 3GP, MPEG.

Other platforms have their own requirements. Do a bit of research to see which ones work where, so you can limit the amount of converting by recording videos that work for all platforms. This kind of research isn’t hard, but it can be time-consuming. Many entrepreneurs and organizations elect to get help from a professional in creating videos for exactly this reason.

6. Select an Enticing Thumbnail

You want people to click on your videos, so make sure your thumbnail image is clear, compelling, vibrant, and without a lot of visual clutter like text. Remember that it will have a play button over the center, so account for that when testing different images – and be sure to size them correctly for best effect!

Wordsmith Your Title and Description Well

Whether it’s an Amazon product listing, Shopify product listing, or anything else, correct optimization of product listings for mobile devices and desktop means a good title and description. These not only reach real humans and factor into whether or not they click, they also matter for SEO. Be sure to:

• Use appropriate keywords
• Create a short but compelling title that tells the shopper everything they need to know about the product
• Use bullet points in your description

These requirements become more specific when we look at the individual platforms, so let’s do that now.

Platform-Specific Optimization Techniques

How can you further optimize your listings to meet the requirements of Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy? Here are our favorite tips.

Amazon Product Listing Optimization

For Amazon, make sure you:

• Understand the bullet point limitations for mobile: While you get five of these on desktop, you only get three on mobile. That means it’s critical you put the three most important first.
• Use A+ content well: This is always important, but on mobile it is even more so, because it shows up before bullet points in your listing.
• Don’t forget the product description: This also shows up before the bullet points on mobile, so treat it accordingly.

Shopify Product Listing Optimization

On Shopify, you’ll want to pay special attention to SEO. That means:

• Use internal linking anchor text: Shopify store architecture is a lot like any search engine, where SEO helps build your relevance. Make sure your internal links have appropriate keyword-rich anchors.
• Rename unnamed images: On Shopify, you can’t rename images to give them better file names. Accordingly, you should trash any that have default photo names and reupload ones with keyword-laden titles.

Etsy Product Listing Optimization

For Etsy, getting found on a marketplace that is essentially its own search engine is hard. You can improve your odds if you:

• Use all 13 tags: Tags really do matter to listings, so don’t forget them.
• Choose the right categories: Etsy is very niche-based, so spend some time figuring out which category your listing really falls into.
• Offer free shipping: While many users complain about this, the reality is that free shipping gets you ranked higher in search. Where possible, use it.

Once you’ve nailed your product listing optimization strategy, there’s one more component left: storing your digital assets.

Use Listing Insights from soona

If you've ever wondered how well your listings are performing visually, you're not alone. Unfortunately, until now, there's been no way to gather such metrics. With soona, though, that's all changing.

Our Listing Insights tool is a game-changer, removing the subjective "I hope that's good enough!" approach to photos and replacing it with a true, numbers-based ranking of how well your digital assets are performing out there in the world. With Listing Insights, you can stop worrying about whether your product imagery is reaching people and start doing something about it in a data-driven way.

Listing Insights is the first tool of its kind to measure the impact of your creative on Amazon (and coming soon to Shopify), helping to ensure that the assets you use really are working. Those that aren't, you can edit or replace as needed, while those that are can serve as a fantastic template for your next shot list.

Ready to learn more about soona's tools? We invite you to get in touch today with any questions or join the waitlist to learn more about Listing Insights when it's ready for widespread release. If you're a current user, you can get access to it sooner, so don't wait!