I see in the back end where there's a place for “short description”, but for the life of me I can't see where it's visible to my customers!
Am I blind??
It's visible in “Quick View”
Also that's what they should be seeing if they click on a list of products in a category. On that page they see the short description and on the product detail page they see the long description.
[quote name='kingsleypress' timestamp='1362169625' post='156778']
Also that's what they should be seeing if they click on a list of products in a category. On that page they see the short description and on the product detail page they see the long description.
[/quote]
Correct, if your category layout is set to 'Products Without Options' as default. The Short Description is only visible in Quick View otherwise, if Quick View is enabled.
If you click the icon on the left of this image on your category list page, you'll see the Short Description. You'll find the icon next to 'Sort by' and 'X per page' dropdowns on the products list page.
Thanks guys,
I think the reason I didn't see it, is from the start, I disabled “quick view”. It just seemed to me that it was a distraction and could cause confusion to customers (in that any of 2 possible outcomes could occur depending on where they clicked the product). Further, I can't imagine anyone EVER adding to cart from this window. Why would you do that when more information is available in the details page? Too much clicking/canceling. More straight forward to go right to the details window.
Then again, I'm new to all this and might be missing something. I'd be curious what the real world experience of other store owners is.
I don't use quick view either for the reasons you mentioned. When I first saw the feature I thought it was kind of neat, but then quickly decided it would not be something that would cause more conversions on my store. Which is, after all, what this is all about.
Set up the quick view as an analytics funnel and you can see your conversion rate from the add to cart from the product page and add to cart from quick view. I haven't done this historically but have recently set it up so I can see whether or not using Quick View increases or decreases conversions. I'd tend to agree that it would decrease conversions but there's only one way to know for sure.
I have also seen this short description push straight through to Google Organic Search, we elliminated most of the short descrptions because we don't have the man-power to write for over 400 products right now, but hope to use this in the future.