There is no correct length. There is a point below which a description stops answering questions, and most stores we checked sit under it on most of their products.
We measured product descriptions on 100 Shopify stores in October 2026. Catalogue data could be read on 97 of them. This guide gives the numbers, a way to check your own store, and a list of what to add to a thin description.
What we found
- The median store's typical description is 69 words. We took the median description length in each store, then the median of those.
- The middle half of stores run from 49 to 125 words.
- At the median store, 36% of products have 80 words or more.
- At 43% of stores, most products reach 80 words.
- At 80% of stores, fewer than 85% of products reach 80 words. That is the line our audit counts as a gap.
The 80-word line is our own threshold, not an industry standard. We use it because it is easy to measure the same way on every store.
Small stores did better
The description check was a gap at 57% of the small independent stores in our sample. For mid-size brands it was 95%, and for large brands 85%.
Small stores have small catalogues. The median small store in our sample had about 68 products. A catalogue of that size is easier to keep complete than a large one.
Why length is a stand-in for facts
Word count is easy to measure, and that is the only reason we use it. What a reader needs from a description is facts.
A shopper deciding between two products asks practical things: what it is made of, how big it is, whether it suits the use they have in mind, and how to look after it. An AI shopping agent answering the same shopper works from the same text. If the description doesn't say what the product is made of, an honest agent can only say that the store doesn't state it.
A 40-word description can hold four facts, and a 200-word description can hold none. So treat the count as a prompt to look, and judge each description by the questions it answers.
Check your own store
1. Count your top 10 (5 minutes).
Open your ten best-selling products. Paste each description into any word counter. Note how many are under 80 words.
2. Read one as a stranger (2 minutes).
Take the shortest of the ten. Without looking at the photos, try to answer from the text alone:
- What is it made of?
- What size or capacity is it?
- Who or what is it for?
- How is it cared for or used?
- What is in the box?
Each question the text can't answer is a fact to add.
3. Check the whole catalogue (5 minutes).
In the Shopify admin, export your products to CSV. The description is in the Body (HTML) column. Sort by the length of that column to find the thinnest. Empty descriptions come first, and those are the ones to fix before anything else.
What to add to a thin description
Work through these five lines for each product. Skip any that don't apply.
- What it is, in one plain sentence. The product type and the main material or ingredient.
- Measurements. Dimensions, weight, capacity or size range, with units.
- Who it is for and what it is for. The use, the setting or the person.
- Care or use. How to wash, store, charge or apply it.
- What is included. Parts, accessories, quantity in the pack.
Here is the shape, with a made-up product. It is an example only, and none of these details describe a real item.
Before (15 words): Our best-selling everyday mug. Beautifully made and perfect for your morning coffee. Order yours today.
After (62 words): A stoneware mug with a matt glaze outside and a gloss glaze inside. It holds 350 ml and stands 9 cm tall, with a handle wide enough for three fingers. It suits coffee, tea and soup. It is safe in the dishwasher and the microwave. Each mug is sold singly. The glaze is applied by hand, so the colour varies a little.
The second version is still under 80 words. It answers every question in the list above, and that matters more than the count.
Where to start
Start with the ten products that sell most. Those pages get the most visits from shoppers and from agents. Then fix every product with an empty description. Leave the long tail until those are done.
What not to do
- Do not pad. Adjectives add words and no facts. "Premium", "stunning" and "high-quality" answer nothing.
- Do not paste the supplier's text. The same paragraph will be on every other store that sells the item.
- Do not add claims you can't support. If you are not sure the product is waterproof, don't say it is. A wrong fact is worse than a missing one, because customers act on it and so do agents.
- Do not hide facts in images. A size chart that exists only as a picture can't be read as text. Add the key measurements to the description as well.
What our numbers can and cannot tell you
- The sample is 100 stores chosen by hand: large brands, mid-size brands and small independent stores in the US, UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand. It is not a random sample of all Shopify stores.
- It is a one-day snapshot from 3 October 2026.
- We read the first 250 products in each store's public product feed. On 2 stores the feed could not be read.
- Word count measures whether text is present. It does not measure whether the text is good.
- We counted the description field only. Facts that a theme shows elsewhere on the page, such as a specifications table built from metafields, are not counted.
- We did not measure whether longer descriptions lead to more sales, and we make no claim about it.
The full tables and method are in the study report.
A free check for your store
Our free agent-ready quick check runs six checks on a store URL. One of them reports the share of your products with 80 words or more and your median description length, next to the figures above. It is an Agent Skill: a set of instruction files that an AI assistant such as Claude, Codex or Gemini CLI loads. We make it. It tells you what is missing and does not rewrite anything.
Get the free skills sampler (21 skills)
The paid Store Ops Pack for Shopify store owners ($29, 6 skills) includes a product description rewriter that works from the facts you give it. Each skill is also sold on its own for $5.
Figures are from our October 2026 study of 100 Shopify stores, 99 of them measurable. The sample was chosen by hand and is not random. More guides are on the guides page.