Yesterday, I audited a buying guide on an online shop’s blog. Something crucial was missing. I keep seeing the same mistake across e-commerce blogs:
No date.
Imagine you’re the customer:
You’re trying to decide which product to buy from a post comparing models, prices and features. But you have no idea whether it was written last month or in 2021.
And now the content that was supposed to remove uncertainty has created another question.
“Can I actually trust this?”
That question costs you money:
– The customer leaves your site to check whether the info is still current.
– They open another retailer, Reddit or YouTube.
– They postpone the purchase.
– They start questioning whether the prices, models and recommendations on your page are outdated too.
The fix:
Show the date.
And if you don’t want customers seeing how old the article is, that’s a content maintenance problem worth fixing rather than a date worth hiding.
An e-commerce blog isn’t there to collect pageviews. It has a job: help someone move from “I’m researching” to “I know what to buy.”
First published on Eva Domijan Linkedin
