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The Hardest Thing to Sell Online Is a Smell

6 min read

Every category has one thing a screen cannot carry. Find it, and you know what the product page is really for.

Fragrance is the clearest case of a problem every category has in some form. The single input that decides the purchase — what it actually smells like — cannot travel down a wire. No photograph, no swatch, no amount of art direction closes that gap.

Most fragrance storefronts respond by leaning harder on the things that do travel: bigger images, more atmosphere, a longer brand story. It rarely moves conversion, because none of it answers the question the buyer is stuck on.

What works is treating the product page as the substitute for the tester strip. Write the note structure out — top, heart, base. Say how long it lasts, and on what. Say how it behaves in heat, if heat is what your customers live in. Put the certifications where the doubt occurs rather than in a footer. Let reviews speak to longevity and projection specifically, not to whether the parcel arrived quickly.

The generalisable version: in every category there is one deciding input the screen cannot transmit. For fragrance it is smell. For furniture it is scale and firmness. For insurance it is what happens at claim time. For a restaurant booking it is the room. The page's job is not to be beautiful — it is to answer that one thing so completely the buyer stops needing to hold it.

Work out what yours is before redesigning anything. Most product pages are busy optimising the parts that were never in doubt.

Tell us what you're trying to build.

You don't need a finished brief. Tell us what the business does, what you're trying to achieve and what isn't working. We'll take it from there.

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