A description too short to answer anything

The symptom

The product page has a photograph, a price, an Add to cart button — and under it, one sentence. Sometimes the sentence is the product name again.

It usually is not laziness. It is what happens when a catalogue is imported from a supplier feed that carried a name and a price and nothing else, or when the first fifty products were written properly and the next four hundred were not.

What it costs

Whatever the description does not say, someone has to say instead.

• Support answers it, one customer at a time. Dimensions, material, what fits what, what is in the box. Every one of those messages is a description that was not written once.
• Most people do not ask. They compare with the competitor whose page answered the question, and the sale is lost without leaving a trace anywhere you would look.
• There is nothing to rank. A page whose text is the product name has no content to match against anything but the exact name — which is the one query where you compete with every reseller of the same item.
• Feeds inherit the gap. Google Merchant Center, marketplaces and comparison engines take the description field. Thin in, thin out.

The threshold matters less than the trend. Merchlint uses 200 characters by default, which is roughly two sentences — deliberately low, because the aim is to find pages that answer nothing at all, not to grade prose.

How to check it yourself

WooCommerce has two description fields, and this check measures the long one — post_content, the tab under the product. The short description is post_excerpt.

wp db query "SELECT p.ID, p.post_title, CHAR_LENGTH(p.post_content) AS len
  FROM wp_posts p
  WHERE p.post_type = 'product' AND p.post_status = 'publish'
    AND CHAR_LENGTH(TRIM(p.post_content)) < 200
  ORDER BY len ASC"

CHAR_LENGTH counts characters, not bytes — which matters as soon as the text contains anything outside ASCII.

How to fix it

1. Sort by what the products earn, not alphabetically. Twenty descriptions on products that actually sell are worth more than four hundred written in catalogue order. This is the whole reason Merchlint ranks by revenue.
2. Write the answer to the question support gets. Open the last twenty messages about that category. The description writes itself from them, and it is the text customers actually need.
3. Put the facts in attributes, the reasons in the description. Dimensions, material and weight belong in structured attributes where filters and feeds can read them. The description is for what the numbers do not say.
4. Do not paste the supplier’s text. Every other shop selling that item pasted the same paragraph. Duplicate descriptions are their own problem, and the Pro add-on has a check for it.

When it is a false positive

• Descriptions built with a page builder. Elementor, Divi and similar sometimes keep the visible content outside post_content, so the stored field is short while the page is full. Check one product’s page before working through the list.
• Catalogues where attributes carry everything — fasteners, electronic components, spare parts. A bolt does not need two paragraphs; it needs a correct spec table.
• Products deliberately kept minimal, such as gift cards or a single-line digital download.

In all three cases, hide the finding once and it stays hidden across scans and plugin updates.

How Merchlint finds it

Merchlint reads post_content for every published product, strips whitespace, and counts characters against the threshold. The threshold is a setting, so a catalogue of technical parts can lower it rather than live with a permanently noisy check.

The finding shows the length it measured and the threshold it compared against — so you can see at a glance whether a product is at 12 characters or at 190, which are very different problems.

Confidence: F — fact from the database. A length is compared to a number you chose.

Where order data is available, findings are ranked by what each product earned over the past twelve months, so the first twenty on the list are the twenty worth writing.