What does “and more” mean in your product descriptions?

Published on June 02, 2012 What does “and more” mean in your product descriptions?

It’s commonly seen in product descriptions for businesses to write a list of features and put on the end “and more”. That’s fine, if there actually is more!

The problem for many product descriptions is that the list of features is almost as exhaustive as the writer can think of with an “and more” added on the end. In those situations the “and more” can mean “I can’t think of anything else” or “I hope there’s more, I’m sure the customer will think of something”. If there’s only one or two more points to make and they’re not significant, our advice is to leave the “and more” for when there is more to display.

The way to think about feature lists is like writing a newspaper article, people will read them from the top to the bottom and may stop reading the list at any time. So, don’t leave your best competitive advantages for the end of the list. You must also think about targeting your list for the type of person you want to be reading your list.

For example, if we were writing a list of benefits of Ozcart shopping cart websites, there are a huge number of potential features we can list. There are some features that benefit everyone no matter what their industry or level of experience (e.g., customisation of colours and graphics in a base design, professional list of base designs), and there are other features that will appeal to distributors of products (e.g. wholesale prices, order minimums), others that would appeal to small business owners (simple order, stock management) and others that would appeal to larger businesses (exporting orders for larger applications, spreadsheet importing/exporting).

So the place to start with your list is to jot down who you are writing for. This will keep you focussed on making your list relevant for your target audience.

Then, list any “must have” features for your list. The things about the product that make them special.

• If you could only list one thing about this product? What would it be? What’s the main thing that differentiates this product from other similar ones?
• Who would it be suited to (and why)? Make sure that you phrase features in terms of their benefits to users in case your customer doesn’t realise how it would benefit them. For example, “Lithium batteries for long battery life” makes more sense than “high performance Lithium batteries” because people are better able to understand what “long battery life” is compared to “high performance”.
• Once you have your list order it so that you could cut it off at any point and you would be happy that any of your potential readers would get enough information to be impressed by your product.

If your list is very long, you might wish to include a link to a PDF brochure or extra detail page on your product/feature to convey extra information to interested readers. You might also want to consider the use of tabbed product descriptions, which allow you to split your product description content up into multiple parts and customers can click on each tab to find out more – without leaving the page.

If your list is still too long, then go for it – add “and more” and feel confident that you can justify it if a customer puts in a question and asks you what the “more” is.