A product page checklist, judged against your rivals

How to set up the comparison

Pick one product type you sell in volume and find the closest equivalent on each of three rival sites. Same category, similar price point. Open all four pages on a phone and on a laptop.

For every checklist item, write a short note for each page and a simple rating: behind, level or ahead. Quote what you see. "Five images, including one in use" is evidence. "Good imagery" is an opinion that will not survive a disagreement.

If you are unsure which rivals to pick, our guide on choosing which rivals to compare helps.

Keep the notes in one sheet with a row per checklist item and a column per site. When you come back to it after making changes, you can rescore your own column against the same evidence rather than relying on memory, and you can see at a glance where rivals have moved too.

Imagery and copy

• Image count and variety. Product alone, product in use, scale or detail shots, variants. Do rivals show something you do not?
• Image quality on mobile. Whether a shopper can zoom, and whether images hold up the page while they load.
• First lines of copy. Does the copy say who the product is for and why it beats alternatives, or does it restate the title?
• Specifics. Dimensions, materials, care, compatibility. Missing specifics push shoppers to rival pages that have them.
• Answers to likely doubts. Sizing, fit, assembly, what is in the box.

Price, delivery and returns near the buy button

• Price clarity. Is the price shown clearly, including any variant pricing?
• Delivery cost and timing visible on the page. Or does the shopper have to find the delivery page?
• Returns terms visible on the page. A short line near the button often does more work than a full policy page nobody reads.
• Stock and options. Are out-of-stock variants clear before the shopper picks them?
• The call to action. Is the add-to-basket button obvious, consistent and reachable with a thumb on mobile?

This cluster is where rivals most often differ, and where small copy changes can matter. For more on delivery specifically, see free delivery thresholds compared.

Reviews and trust

• Reviews on the page. Shown, summarised or missing, and whether shoppers can filter to the critical ones.
• Recency. Old reviews only can look like a product nobody buys any more.
• Responses. Does the shop reply to problems in public?
• Guarantees. Stated in one line near the price, with terms a shopper can find.

Not every trust signal is worth copying. Our post on trust signals worth copying covers which to adopt and which to skip.

Speed, mobile and the technical basics

Run each of the four pages through PageSpeed Insights. It reports lab data, which is useful for debugging, and, where enough visits exist, field data from real Chrome users for mobile and desktop. Compare like with like: your page's field data against a rival's field data, not your lab score against theirs.

Also check the page title and description as they would appear in search, and whether the product has structured data. Our JSON-LD tool helps you produce product markup.

Mobile first, then desktop

Do the whole checklist on a phone before you do it on a laptop. Most product page problems that cost sales show up on small screens first: images that need pinching, delivery details pushed far below the button, size guides that open in awkward overlays, and buttons that sit under a cookie banner.

For each of the four pages, note how far a shopper has to scroll to see the price, the delivery line, the returns line and the first review. If a rival shows all four on the first screen and you show one, that is a concrete, fixable gap. Mobile experience is a separate category in our comparisons for exactly this reason: a page that works well on a laptop can still lose a shopper on a phone.

Turning ratings into action

List every item where you rated yourself behind. Rate each one low, medium or high on effort and impact. The low-effort, high-impact items are your quick wins, and on product pages they are often copy, imagery order and placing delivery and returns lines near the button.

Findings from public pages are observations, not proof of what drives sales. Test the changes that matter most rather than assuming the rival's version is why they sell more.

If you want this done across eight categories rather than one page, an Intel loop compares your store with up to three rivals you choose, and every score carries quoted evidence. The guide on reading a comparison scorecard explains how to read the results.