A product description is the shop assistant nobody can ask.

Open a product page on almost any small D2C site and you will find a version of this: “Premium quality cotton kurta. Comfortable, stylish and perfect for every occasion. Made with love.” It could sit under any kurta from any brand in the country. It tells the customer nothing they couldn't guess from the photo, and it leaves every real question unanswered.

Those questions don't go away. They turn into a WhatsApp message, an abandoned cart or an order that comes back in a week because the size was wrong.

Write what the photo can't show

The photo already shows the colour, the shape and the print, more or less. The description is for everything a photo leaves out:

• What it feels like, and what it is made of.
• How big it is, in numbers.
• What it is like after the fifth wash, or once the jar has been open a month.
• What comes in the box, and what doesn't.
• Who it is for, and who should buy something else.

If a line repeats what the picture already says (“beautiful blue”), it is taking up room a useful fact could have had.

Start with the doubt

People buying online in India carry the same handful of doubts, and they are mostly about risk. Will it fit. Is the colour really like that, or is it the lighting. Can I return it. Is cash on delivery available. When will it reach my pin code.

Find the doubts for your own products the way we suggested for an FAQ page: scroll back through a month of customer messages and copy out every question about a product, in the customer's words. The question asked ten times belongs in the description, near the top. Answered there, it stops being asked.

Every question in your WhatsApp chat is a line your product page forgot to write.

One fact beats four adjectives

Comfortable, stylish, premium, high quality. Four words in a row and the reader believes none of them, because every competitor uses the same four. We called this nervous copy: adjectives piled up where a fact should be.

Take a mango pickle. “Authentic, delicious, homemade taste” is what every jar says. “Raw mangoes cut by hand, cured in groundnut oil, and less salt than you'd expect” is something a customer can check when the jar arrives. If they check and it is true, they order again. That is the whole job.

A good test: could a competitor paste your description under their product without changing a word? If they could, it describes the category, and the customer already knew about the category.

Give the numbers

The most useful line on a clothing page is often the dullest: the model is 5 feet 6 inches and is wearing a medium. On a food page it is the weight in grams and the date it was packed. On a bag it is the size in centimetres and whether a laptop fits.

Numbers feel unglamorous to the person writing and reassuring to the person buying. They also do something adjectives can't: they let a customer imagine the thing in their own hands, in their own kitchen, on their own body. Put them up beside the price, where a thumb finds them.

A shape that works

On a phone, most people read the first two lines and the bullet points, and open “read more” only when they are already close to buying. So:

1. The first line says what it is and who it is for. “A cotton kurta for office days, cut loose enough to sit in for eight hours.”
2. Three to five facts, as bullets. Fabric, size, weight, what is in the box. Each one checkable.
3. How to use or care for it. Cold wash, dry in the shade. Refrigerate after opening.
4. The doubts, answered. Fit, returns, delivery time. Short and plain.

Then stop. A product description that reads like a brochure has usually forgotten the customer is about to pay.

The fiftieth product

Writing one good description is easy. The trouble starts with a catalogue of two hundred. Somewhere around the twelfth, the writer runs out of adjectives and starts repeating them, and by the fiftieth every product is premium and perfect for every occasion again.

Two things help. First, a fixed list of facts for each kind of product (fabric, fit, wash care for clothes; weight, ingredients, shelf life for food), filled in before anyone writes a sentence. Second, a first line written by hand for every product, saying what makes this one different from the one beside it. If nothing does, the first line can say who it suits better. Our website content page says a page that sells five things sells none; the same goes for a description that could describe five products.

Avoid pasting the supplier's text, or the copy from the marketplace listing. It is the same text your competitors are pasting, and it was written to describe the product to a seller, not to a customer.

This week, open the page for your best seller on your phone. List the five questions customers ask about it most, and count how many the page answers in its first few lines. The ones it misses are your next edit.