PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:
Most retailers use the generic manufacturer description of the product on the packaging for the product description.  This kills sales in three ways:

• Makes it obvious to the customer that this item is not unique to your store.  They might automatically go price hunting after they see a generic manufacturer description.

• People like “real world” opinions about an item.  This is why if someone gets a referral from a friend an item is good, they will buy it without hesitation.  Generally speaking, product descriptions use unnecessarily embellished language and generic "marketing talk."  These are old marketing techniques which mislead and end up disappointing customers.

• People don’t commit to reading them.  If your site is full of “fluff” descriptions, customers will look at the picture of a product and skip over the descriptions.  Their time spent looking at the product drastically goes down if they don’t read the description. 

   

If you’re trying to capture a sale, then your description must engage the customer, not bore them.  Having better descriptions gives search engines more content to crawl on your page, increasing your SEO competitiveness.  They also give people more of a reason to link your product pages or send the page to a friend, once again increasing SEO competitiveness, increasing traffic and increasing exposure.

In the end, through the use of pictures, descriptions and video you are trying to make your site come across as unique, trustworthy and having character. 

It's best to photograph and video products with action, or products which aren't well represented by their single stock picture.  If you sell for example hockey skates, you don't necessarily have to make a video or whole "real life" photo set for each different hockey skate.  People looking for that type of thing usually know what they want, and the differences between the product are small.