The four lines, in order
- What it is, in concrete nouns: 'a spreadsheet that tracks every invoice and shows who is late, by how many days.' Not 'a solution for your billing workflow.'
- Who it is for, in one sentence: 'freelancers who bill by the project and chase payments themselves.'
- Who should skip it - the line most shops never write, and the one that builds the most trust per word on the whole page.
- What happens right after buying: 'you download a file, open it in any spreadsheet app, and type your first invoice.' Certainty about the first minute sells the product.
Why 'who should skip it' sells
- Every buyer's real question is 'is this for someone like me', and only an honest exclusion proves the inclusion was honest too.
- It filters out the refunds before they happen - the buyer who was never going to be happy reads the skip line and leaves, which is the cheapest outcome for both of you.
- It signals confidence. Shops that sell to everyone read as shops that believe in nothing.
Write yours in ten minutes
- Describe the product to a friend out loud, and write down the nouns you used - those nouns are the description; the adjectives are not.
- Name the specific person it is for, and if you cannot, that is a product question, not a writing question.
- Write the skip line: which buyer, told honestly, should not buy this?
- Write the after-buying line as an instruction: download, open, first action.
- Delete every sentence that could describe a competitor's product equally well. Those sentences are doing nothing.
What to cut
- The adjective stack - 'powerful, intuitive, seamless' - which reads as the sound of a page with nothing to say.
- The feature list with no outcomes: what the buyer buys is what changes, not what the file contains.
- Any claim you cannot check from your own records. Write the checkable version or write nothing.
The free tool for this
There is no calculator that answers this one honestly, so here is the free set: eight calculators for rates, quotes, invoices, splits, prices and fees. They run in the page and send nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
Listing Lab walks a product through this exact structure - titles, descriptions, the skip line, the checkable claims - before it goes live. Listing Lab is $11. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
How long should a description be?
As long as the four lines need, and no longer - for most products that is a short paragraph or two. Long descriptions work only when every line is answering a real buyer question; padding is visible from the outside.
Does the skip line cost sales?
It costs the sales that were coming back as refunds, and it buys the trust that makes the right buyer finish. A shop that says who should not buy is a shop whose yes means something.
Read next
How to write a product title that people actually find, What to fix first when a product listing gets no attention.