Free product description generator for a stronger first draft.

Ashgrove Kitchen Co sell a stoneware casserole dish through their own shop and one marketplace listing. The facts going in: 3.5 litres, oven safe to 250C, dishwasher safe, 2.9kg empty, 32cm across the handles, 14cm tall with the lid on, glazed inside and out, and not suitable for induction or any direct hob heat. That last one is the fact deciding the purchase, so it goes first rather than into a specification table.

The description: 'Oven only, not for the hob: this is a 3.5 litre stoneware casserole for slow cooking in the oven and carrying straight to the table. The glaze runs inside and out, so a tomato sauce that has caught on the base lifts off without scouring and the dish will not hold the smell of what you cooked last week. At 32cm across the handles it fits a standard 60cm oven shelf with room to lift it out in gloves, and at 14cm tall with the lid on it clears the shelf above in most built-in ovens. It weighs 2.9kg empty, a good deal more than an enamelled steel dish of the same size, so it holds heat for the whole meal and is heavier than some people will want to lift full.' Underneath: a spec list with capacity, dimensions, weight, maximum oven temperature, materials, dishwasher and freezer suitability, and a plain line reading 'not suitable for hob, induction, grill or microwave'. Then 'in the box: dish, lid'. Then one line on care.

It holds because it answers the questions in the order a buyer asks them, and because it does not hide the weight. Every feature is followed by its consequence: the glaze means it cleans, the width means it fits, the mass means heat retention and also means heavy. Saying a product is heavy loses a few sales and prevents the returns and the one-star reviews the omission would have produced.

The copy it replaced was the maker's own: 'Crafted with care from the finest natural stoneware, this beautiful casserole dish will become the heart of your kitchen for years to come.' No dimensions, no weight, no temperature, and the hob restriction sitting in a table below the fold. It is also the identical text on every other site selling the piece, so a search engine has no reason to prefer this listing over the cheapest one, and a shopper comparing two tabs finds the same paragraph twice and decides on price. The weaker version reads better in isolation and loses on both of the jobs a description exists to do.

Do not write the description before you have the facts. Dimensions, weight, materials, compatibility, what is in the box, care instructions, country of manufacture. A generator handed a product name and nothing else will produce fluent copy with plausible specifics invented inside it, and a wrong dimension on a product page is a return, a refund and sometimes a consumer protection problem. Collect the numbers first; the writing takes half the time once they exist.

Skip it entirely for regulated categories until you know the rules. Supplements, cosmetics, medical devices, children's products, electricals, anything with a safety mark or an allergen or an efficacy claim: the wording is constrained by law and by the marketplace, and generated copy will reach for exactly the health and performance claims that are not permitted. The same applies to comparative claims and to anything implying a certification you do not hold.

If the product is genuinely a commodity, the same fixings or filters everybody stocks, long description copy is rarely where the sale is decided. Buyers filter on the specification, the price and the delivery date. Get the attributes clean and complete, make the title precise enough to match how people search for it, and write two useful sentences rather than three hundred words nobody reads.

And if you are about to run a catalogue of several thousand items through a generator, stop and template instead. Bulk generation produces pages varying in phrasing but not in substance, and thin near-identical descriptions across a large catalogue are worse than a clean structured specification block. Write proper copy for the products carrying the revenue, use a structured template driven by your attribute data for the long tail, and spend the recovered time on photography, which decides more purchases than any paragraph.

Length follows the size of the decision, not a word target. A familiar low-cost item, where the buyer already knows what they are getting, needs the decision facts and little else, perhaps 50 to 100 words with a clean spec list. A considered purchase, furniture, tools, anything expensive or awkward to return, supports 200 to 400 words plus specifications, because the buyer is genuinely researching and every unanswered question is a reason to leave. Technical products can run longer still, provided the extra length is answering real questions rather than restating the benefit.

Structure matters more than the count. A first line carrying the fact that most often stops a purchase in your category. A short block of prose translating features into consequences. A scannable specification list holding every number, because that is what a comparing shopper reads and a number buried in a sentence is a number they cannot find. A 'what is in the box' line, which prevents a specific and very common support email. Care and compatibility notes last. Written that way, the reader wanting one fact gets it in seconds and the reader wanting everything can keep going, without either being served at the other's expense.

Your own product page is the only place you control fully, and it is where the full version lives: prose, specifications, images with alt text, and structured data describing price, availability and identifiers so the listing can appear correctly in search results.

Marketplaces impose their own shapes. Titles are capped, often at a couple of hundred characters and sometimes at far fewer, and the cap is enforced by truncation, so the front of the title has to carry brand, product and the one attribute people filter by. Bullet fields have their own limits and are usually the part actually read. Shopping feeds truncate the description in display, which means the first sentence has to work alone. Social commerce shows a fraction of the text under an image and no specification table at all.

Write the full description once, then cut it down deliberately for each destination rather than letting the platform cut it for you. Keep the decision fact in every version, because it is the one thing whose absence causes a return. And keep the attributes identical across all four, since inconsistent dimensions between your own site and a marketplace listing is a dispute waiting to happen.

A spec sheet lists attributes and leaves the reader to work out what they mean. It is complete, checkable and inert. An advert asserts a feeling and skips the facts, which works in a channel where the job is to interrupt somebody and fails on a page where the reader has already arrived and wants to know whether the thing fits under their counter. A description is the join between the two, and each half fails alone: specifications on their own give no reason to choose you over a cheaper listing of the same item, and atmosphere on its own produces the support emails and returns the page existed to prevent.

The practical division is prose for persuasion and lists for facts, with every feature in the prose attached to its consequence. A material only matters because of what it does: it wipes clean, it will not warp, it fits a standard shelf, it can be left outside. Where the honest consequence is unwelcome, heavy, needs assembly, hand wash only, say it in the prose rather than hiding it in the table. Buyers forgive a limitation stated up front. They do not forgive discovering it after delivery, and the review they leave is about the description, not the product.

Check every number against the physical product or the supplier's document, and be sceptical of anything the draft supplied on its own: capacities, tolerances, temperatures and compatibility statements are exactly what generated copy invents most convincingly. Then read your last month of pre-sale questions and returns reasons. Each recurring question is a fact the description is failing to surface, and moving that fact up the page is the highest value edit available to you.

After that, deduplicate. Run a phrase from the draft as an exact search and see whether it already appears on twenty other retailers, which is what happens when manufacturer copy leaks into the draft. Rewrite anything matching. Check the description still reads sensibly when only the first sentence is shown, since that is what feeds and search snippets often display. Make sure the attributes in your structured data match the visible text, because a mismatch between the two is both a trust problem for the shopper and a feed problem for the marketplace. Then leave the page alone long enough to judge it, and change one thing at a time when you do.