Introduction

Business-to-business websites have to answer a lot of questions from prospective customers and must address a variety of user needs: both those of novice, first-time visitors and those of educated users who know the product space well. The typical B2B buying cycle has several stages, starting with an initial phase where users research their company’s problem to find possible product solutions, and then moving into a phase where they compare product options from multiple vendors and assess which solution fits their needs best. Users at different stages of the conversion funnel need different levels of detail about products and solutions.
To raise the interest of first-time visitors during the initial research stages, B2B sites need to present a compelling argument for why their products best serve their prospects’ needs and focus on high-level benefits rather than just on features and details. However, content that describes the problems solved by a product (rather than a laundry list of features or marketing slogans) helps draw initial interest, but that content won’t always close the sale.

Once prospects are interested in a product, they will want clear answers to make sure that the product fits their specific requirements, so they can also compare against competitors. Product-specification lists need to go beyond the product benefits and high-level descriptions, and include clear, specific, realistic details that can speak in detailed terms about all of the important aspects of how a product works, its physical characteristics, and how it integrates into larger systems. These details are not only useful for late-stage decision makers; complete specifications also help draw in users in the earlier research stage because they provide specific, valuable content that’s beneficial for SEO. Incomplete, vague, or misleading spec pages frustrate users, forcing them either to call your customer-support line for answers (which is an expensive proposition for your company, and frustrating for your users), or, worse, walk away from your site entirely.

It’s much better to provide the specifications directly on your site, without forcing prospects to email or call (or, as many people do, turn to Google — who knows what they’ll find there). First and foremost, talk to your users and find out which specifications matter to them. Ensure that your content speaks to both the decision-makers at your customer’s companies and to the technical users that tend to collaborate on the decision-making process and make recommendations for which product to ultimately purchase.

Guidelines for Creating Product Specifications

Think about the following basic attributes or your product, and include these basic details in the format most applicable for your industry and product:

  1. Footprint (i.e. the physical size for physical products or resources consumed by software products)
  2. Ingredients (what key components, parts, technologies, or materials are used)
  3. Requirements and integrations (environmental conditions, consumable physical resources, system requirements, and integrations with software or other physical products needed to form a complete solution to your prospect’s problems)
  4. Performance (measurements of desired capabilities, behaviors, operation, and output, as well as any waste byproducts that are produced in operation)
  5. Tolerances and durability (allowed level of deviation from listed specs, error rate, resistance to environmental conditions)

Due to the sheer variety of important key details from industry to industry and product type to product type, the checklists below do not contain every possible type of specification of interest for all industries, nor do they apply to every product. They are meant to provide your team with a framework for deciding which information to include on your product pages. Wherever possible, reach out to your customers with surveys, talk to your customer-support and sales teams about which questions they answer the most often, or test the content on your website, and find out which specific details users need to know to make a purchase decision. Include those details in your product-specifications pages.

Below we provide starter lists with typical specifications for physical and software products. These lists are aggregated from the commonalities we found in testing B2B sites from a broad range of industries with their target business customers. Although these lists do not include every possible individual specification, they offer common inclusions that are worth adding to your spec list. Be sure to review it with your internal subject-matter experts and with representative users to determine whether all of these specs are appropriate, helpful, and exhaustive for your product.

Physical-Product Specs: A Starter List

Type of Specification

Examples and Notes

Detailed physical dimensions of products

  • Engineering diagrams with measurements
  • Physical space required for installation
  • Ventilation space needed for safe operation

Weight of item

  • Variations for both loaded and unloaded weights (such as a vehicle loaded with fuel or payload)

Physical connections with other products

 
  • Interconnects
  • Ports
  • Diagram of physical layout of ports and connectors, including dimensions, so users can determine if there is enough physical space for convenient hookup

Key components

 
  • Types and grades of materials used for critical components, such as:
    • Metals
    • Plastics
    • Wiring
    • Tubing
    • Insulation
  • Manufacturer and product names of key hardware components produced by third parties, such as:
    • Engines
    • Processors
    • Robotics components
    • Power supplies

Resistance to common environmental conditions for your products
  • Water and particulate matter (typically listed in International Protection codes, such as IP68)
  • Temperature
  • Scratching
  • Physical impact
  • UV
  • Chemicals and corrosives
  • Atmospheric pressure
  • Any other typical exposures your product may meet in use

Operational qualities
  • Operating temperature output (how hot the product gets while in use)
  • Sound-pressure levels (how loud the product is while in use)

Resource consumption

 
  • Power
  • Water
  • Raw materials

Capacities
  • Consumable resource storage
    • Paper trays
    • Fuel tanks
  • Byproduct holding tanks
    • Sewage
    • Runoff
    • Dust
    • Trash

Performance characteristics
  • Measurement conditions and margins of errors for performance metrics
  • Details on durability, longevity, tolerances, and failure rates
  • Key metrics, such as:
    • Speed
    • Power
    • Displacement
    • Tensile strength
    • Hardness
    • Mechanical, chemical, or electrical properties that impact performance and utility
    • Output quality and speed (especially for items like printers, manufacturing equipment, etc.)
    • Duty cycle
    • Runtime

Safety and exposure information
  • MSDS (material-safety data sheet) information
  • UL certification

 

Damen.com product comparison and specifications table
Damen.com allows users to select between metric and U.S. units on its specs and product-comparison tools for dredging equipment. However, in this example, the line-graph “meters” for the two bottom specifications are confusing, because the blue segment is presented as a portion of a larger unspecified gray segment (the gray segment corresponds to top orange option, which is the main product on this page).
Acrylink product specs table with standards information and links
Acrylink.com’s specifications table shows the standards used to measure each spec, along with a link to more information about each standard from the organization that manages that standard. The table also shows ranges of typical performance for some of the data (such as ±0.1% listed on the Solids data). The table has some excellent characteristics: the left-column specification labels are left aligned, bolded, and easy to scan. However, the dark grey background reduces the amount of contrast with the text, making this harder to read, and some numeric specifications don’t include the unit of measure within the cell (such as Hardness, SIR, and Thermal Emittance).

 

Rethink Robotics specifications tables
Rethink Robotics has a useful product-specs list that covers all of the 5 major categories: (1) physical footprint (and software resources), (2) ingredients (such as the third-party processor), (3) requirements (power consumption), (4) performance (efficiency ratings), and (5) tolerances (both the tolerance to power supply fluctuations, and listed ranges for some specs). Also, by breaking the lists of specs into discrete chunks located in different tables with clear header descriptions, this layout helps users jump through a lot of complex information to find the content important to them. The zebra-striping on the table enables users to follow text across table rows efficiently. However, the legibility of this design could be further improved by increasing the contrast between the specification text and the table background. And the right alignment of the first table column makes the specifications less scannable.

Software-Product Specs: A Starter List

Type of Specification

Examples and Notes

Integration and compatibility with other systems

 
  • Detailed information on APIs and other forms of intersystem communication and data exchange

Feature parity

 
  • Feature inclusions between versions or product tiers
  • Plug-in, application, and API-access differences between versions or product tiers

System requirements
  • Operating system
  • Memory requirements (and typical usage)
  • Storage space needed (and typical usage)
  • Bandwidth available (and typical usage)
  • Web or application-server software
  • Database type, version, and any configuration requirements
  • File servers
  • Programming languages installed (such as PHP, Python, or Java)
  • Libraries, frameworks, and components (Rails, Node.js, etc.)
  • Package managers (such as Bower, npm, etc.)
  • Any other middleware required

 

 

 

IBM Software product specification page
IBM.com’s specifications page for the Sterling B2B Integrator software features full details on all the requirements needed to run this product, including application-server software, package managers, programming languages needed, hardware, and so forth. It helpfully chunks this content into sections, and thus supports spec review in the product-comparison phase of the purchase process. It also offers print-friendly and PDF options, which are sometimes needed for collaborative decision making. The design of this page does, however, suffer from several egregious flaws: (a) the anchor links (for Application Servers, Installation, Java, etc.) below each table add visual noise and potentially confuse users; (b) the mysterious unlabeled icons in the Components columns only present detailed information about component support upon hover; (c) The Filter boxes at the top left corner of each table require users to type a filter value instead of allowing them to select one; (d) the yellow background color for some table columns makes them stand out, but it’s not clear why and in what way they are different from other columns.

 

Format Guidelines

  • Ensure that all specifications are available on the website in HTML format, not just in PDF documents such as data sheets. PDF is a poor format for viewing online since it is built for printing and sequential access. However, in many technical industries, the PDF version is also expected to be available, so be sure to offer the same information in both formats.
  • Use industry-standard units and realistic measurement conditions.
    1. Offer the ability to toggle between metric and U.S. units, if appropriate.
    2. For any specs that use a standardized measurement (such as an ISO specification, ANSI standard, etc.), provide a link to the body that manages the standard, to show what it measures and the testing protocol.
    3. If you have an independent agency verifying compliance with standards, include the name of the agency and a link to its site.
  • For long, complex specification lists, break the content into meaningful chunks to help users jump to the appropriate section quickly, without having to exhaustively review every row in a long table. Consider separating the content into several tables, with clear subheader text indicating the category of information found in each table.
  • Support horizontal scanning in long tables by using borders or zebra striping for alternate rows. These features are especially important with numeric data.
  • Support vertical scanning of terms in the leftmost column by:
    1. Left aligning text labels
    2. Frontloading text labels with the strongest information-carrying terms
  • Increase legibility by using text colors and styles that provide sufficient contrast against the table background color.

Conclusion

Since each industry and product type varies so drastically, creating an effective spec list for complex B2B products can be a challenge. Focus on providing specs in five key areas: footprint (either physical size, or virtual resources), ingredients (such as materials and key components), requirements (resources needed or other required products), performance (both in desired output performance such as speed or capacity, and in byproduct output, such as waste, heat, or temperature), and tolerances (common error and failure rates, environmental sensitivities, and margin of deviation from listed specs).

Learn more about product specifications in the latest edition of our B2B Usability Report, which includes 188 guidelines and 301 screenshot examples.