Low traffic, high bounce rates, and abandoned carts all point to one BIG red flag for retailers: lost sales.

Sound familiar?

If so, you aren’t losing sales because your products are bad.  

You’re losing them because your product content is.  

For some, it’s a difficult reality to face.  

Others know it’s an industry-wide issue and they’re just working as best they can with the tools at their disposal.  

A surprising number of retailers aren’t even aware of the money they’re leaving on the table due to bad product data management.

Whichever group you fall into, it’s time to acknowledge you can’t keep working with the same routines.

Your teams, customers, and competitors demand more. It's time you did, too.

This article breaks down what bad product content really costs retailers and how they can fix it to improve PDP conversion, outperform competitors, and keep customers coming back to buy again.

Why Is Product Content So Important in E-commerce?

If you’re new to these concepts or just looking for a refresher, your product detail page (PDP) is perhaps the most important element of a sale outside of your product doing the job a customer needs it to do.  

Who wants to deal with warranties and returns, right?

Think of your product detail page (PDP) as your digital shelf. It’s where discovery, decision-making, and conversion all happen together. At least, when they’re done well.  

If your product content is unclear, inconsistent, or incomplete, it’s not just a bad look, it’s a bad buying experience. And that costs you sales.

Our goal for your business is to improve PDP conversion, capture more repeat business, and offload manual tasks so that you can scale your operations without increasing headcount.

Let’s get into the details.

What Is Bad Product Content?

Bad product content is anything misleading, missing, erroneous, or plain poorly formatted.

From the customer perspective, if one must guess or go on a scavenger hunt to learn more about the product, chances are they’re dropping out of the experience altogether and shopping somewhere else.

That said, what does bad product content look like to you and your team?  

E-commerce, digital, and merchandising teams spend endless hours putting together product detail pages to give a full picture of a product’s capability, uses, and background. However, not all of them are created equal.  

Often, a supplier doesn’t provide you with the necessary data to build a full product page.

That means you’re on your own in tracking down the right product details, and a 20-minute task just turned into an hour-long excursion.

We spoke with one retailer recently that had to physically go to a brick-and-mortar location to photograph a product label for the required information for their e-commerce site.

Crazy, right?

That’s simply how fragmented and manually intensive this process is for retailers across the globe.

Let’s dig a bit deeper. Poor product content includes:

• Incomplete or outdated attribute fields

• Duplicate or inconsistent SKUs

• Generic titles like “Black Shoes” or “Shirt”

• Missing localized descriptions for key markets

• Lack of variant-specific details (e.g. material, fit, use-case)

• SEO-unfriendly formatting

• Rejected listings due to marketplace compliance issues (looking at you Amazon, Shopee, and Lazada)

Each of these issues directly impacts your discoverability, conversion rate, and speed to market.

It goes further than customer sentiment and staff workload. It’s costing you real money, big time.

How Bad Product Content Hurts Your Bottom Line

Your goal is to give customers the confidence to complete their purchases. Without it, they’re unlikely to hit that Add to Cart or Buy Now button on your product page.

Let’s discuss elements of SKU optimization and how bad product content hurts your bottom line.

Lower Conversion Rates on Product Pages

Shoppers won't make a purchase unless they feel confident about what they are buying.

Missing specs, unclear descriptions, or mismatched images lead to cart abandonment.

How many “You left something in your cart” emails has your marketing department send today to salvage a sale?

How many margin-cutting discounts and coupons are you offering when you really didn’t have to in the first place?

The flip side: a fully enriched PDP simplifies the decision-making process and enhances the shopping experience with accurate and customer-centric product data. The result is an increase in add-to-cart rates. Trustana users see an average of 6% increase in Add-to-Cart conversion rates after implementation.

Poor Organic Search Rankings (SEO & AEO)

Google, TikTok Shop, and Shopee’s search engines all prioritize rich, structured, and unique content. Without it, your SKUs are virtually invisible when it comes to search queries.

The flip side: Enriched content with long-tail keywords and contextual descriptions will lift organic traffic and put your products in front of customers that are ready to buy right now. Trustana users see as much as a 25% uplift in organic traffic thanks to AI-optimized titles, descriptions, and SEO keywords.

Slower Time-to-Market

Manual entry, spreadsheet backlogs, and slow QA processes delay launches and miss opportunities.

The flip side: AI-powered enrichment reduces time-to-market by orders of magnitude compared to humans. For example, a highly-skilled person can complete around 20 PDPs in a day, Trustana completes more than 100 in the same timeframe. As product catalogs grow, the results compound and it becomes clear that the only true way to scale PDP enrichment is with Trustana.

Non-Compliance with Marketplaces

Amazon, Walmart, and Lazada each have different formatting and attribute requirements for any retail that wants to list on their marketplace.  

Miss too many and your SKU gets rejected, never seeing the light of day on a marketplace.

The flip side: Marketplace-compliance avoids rejections, suspensions, or lost product listing days. Trustana is the leading AI-powered solution for SKU optimization. The platform adapts product information to meet the specific requirements of each marketplace, seamlessly distributes enriched product content across channels, and maintains brand consistency wherever your products appear.

How to Fix Bad Product Content (Fast)

The good news? Bad product content is fixable and often way faster than you think.  

Whether you're a growing retailer, distributor or marketplace, there are a few practical steps you can take to turn underperforming product pages into high-converting assets.

Let’s review them.

Audit Your Product Detail Pages Regularly

Start with a structured review of your catalog using the following checklist:

• Are product titles clear and keyword-optimized?

• Are descriptions complete, benefits-focused, and free from technical jargon?

• Are images high-resolution, mobile-optimized, and diverse (e.g. lifestyle, zoom, 360°)?

• Do pages include reviews, ratings, and user-generated content?

• Are variants (size, color, etc.) properly grouped and easy to navigate?

Even spot-checking your top 100 SKUs can uncover systemic content issues worth correcting.

Remember 80% of your revenue is driven by 20% of your SKUs.

Shameless plug: Trustana automates this entire process at scale with the power of AI, incorporating the highest converting keywords into your listings, generating high-quality images, and importing customer reviews from outside sources, all with the click of a button.

Centralize Product Information for Consistency

Fragmented product data across teams and systems leads to inconsistent messaging.

Consider cleaning up your data and centralizing it in single source of truth for all your internal stakeholders to access. Whether via a lightweight spreadsheet process or through a product information management (PIM) system, all content updates should pull from a single source of truth.

This improves speed to market, ensures customers get a consistent shopping experience, accurate content across every channel where your products appear, and gives you control of product content syndication.

Shameless plug: Trustana seamlessly integrates with the most popular Marketplaces, PIMs and ERPs among retailers to complement this process and enhance your existing workflows.

Prioritize Enrichment by Impact

Focus your enrichment efforts where they’ll generate the biggest lift:

• High-traffic, low-converting pages

• Seasonal or promotional SKUs

• Products with high return rates (often linked to unclear content)

Start with simple wins that seem too tedious to address ad-hoc, like adding missing specs, optimizing titles, or swapping generic copy for benefit-led content. Then expand to deeper enrichments like SEO meta tags, structured data, and multimedia.

Shameless plug: Trustana achieves all this and more in a single platform that is intuitive, responsive, and constantly evolving to deliver the best results for retailers who want to stand out among the competition.

Involve Cross-Functional Teams Early

Product content isn't just a problem for e-commerce, merchandising, and digital teams.  

Poor customer experiences impact everyone in the org, from warranties and returns to operations and customer support.  

By building cross-functional alignment early, you can avoid setbacks, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines.  

For example, having your SEO lead and your merchandising team define attributes together helps ensure your content is both discoverable and relevant.

Use Localization Strategically

If you sell in multiple regions, go beyond translation. Localized content should reflect regional naming conventions, sizing, imagery, and cultural context.

Example: A “jumper” in the UK is a “sweater” in the US. Using the wrong term can kneecap search performance and increase confusion among customers.

In short, you need to speak your customers' language throughout the buying journey.

Shameless plug: Trustana lets you localize content to any geography in any language, truly allowing you to sell at scale to a global audience.

Test, Optimize, & Iterate Based on Performance

Finally, treat product content like any other conversion lever: test it, measure it, optimize it. Then, you’re ready to scale it.

Track metrics like:

• Add-to-cart rates

• Conversion rate by PDP

• Bounce rate from product pages

• Organic impressions and CTR from search engines

Then, A/B test changes (e.g. image updates, copy rewrites, spec enhancements) to isolate what’s working and what’s not.  

Even small changes, like rewriting the first line of a description, can have a measurable impact on improving PDP conversion.

The Bottom Line: Bad Product Content Hurts Business

Improving product content doesn’t require a full platform overhaul. It requires focus, prioritization, and repeatable processes.  

Start small, build momentum, and use data to guide a culture of continuous improvement.

Are you ready to see how Trustana can transform your business through better product content in as few as 15 minutes? Get a demo.

For more information on product content enrichment, check out the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), and answers, we receive below.