Your product pages are your highest-value pages. They are also, on most stores that have just moved, the pages that got the least new work, because the copy came across from the marketplace and looked fine.
It is not fine, and the reason is one difference in the reader.
The reader arrived in a different state
On a marketplace, the person reading your listing had already made three decisions. They had decided to shop, decided to shop on that platform, and decided to look at your category. They arrived warm, with the platform's trust behind the transaction, and with a back button that led to twenty similar options.
On your own store, a stranger arrived from a search result or a link. They have made none of those decisions. They do not know who you are, whether the site is real, whether they will get their money back, or how long delivery takes.
Your listing copy was written for the first reader. Everything below is what the second one needs and did not get.
The five things that change
1. It has to establish that you are real
The marketplace supplied this for free, and it is the thing sellers most consistently forget to replace.
A stranger deciding whether to enter card details is looking, consciously or not, for signals: a business that has an address and a name, returns terms they can find, delivery information before checkout rather than after, a way to contact a human, and evidence that other people have bought.
None of those is an SEO task and all of them decide whether the page works. A product page with perfect copy on a store that reads as anonymous does not convert.
2. It has to answer the questions the platform's structure used to answer
Marketplace listings sit inside a scaffold: standardized shipping information, a returns policy in a known place, a review system, size and material fields the platform enforced.
On your own page you have to supply all of that, and where you supply it matters. The questions people ask before buying should be answered on the page rather than on a policy page they have to go and find.
You already know what those questions are, because buyers have been sending them to you for years. That inbox is the single best source of product page copy you have.
3. It needs to be written, not listed
Marketplace descriptions frequently read as specification dumps, because that is what works in a context where the reader is comparing twenty similar tiles.
A page arrived at cold needs to do something else first: say what the thing is, who it is for, and what makes it different, in prose a person would read. The specification block still belongs there, further down.
And the title has to change. A keyword-stuffed marketplace title reads as spam in a search result, and the search result is where the click is decided. One clear descriptive title, written for a human.
The full version of this transplant is covered in our guide to turning a marketplace listing description into a product page.
4. It has to be unique, and this is a real trap
Two situations produce duplicate content on a store and both are common.
The same description across a range of variants, where twelve colorways each get an identical page. From a search engine's point of view these are near-identical pages competing with each other.
Supplier-provided copy, where a store selling stocked products uses the manufacturer's description, which every other store selling it is also using.
The fix in both cases is the same: write something that only you could write. What you know about the product, who it suits, how it compares to the alternatives you also sell, what people say about it.
And if you also still sell the same product on the marketplace, your listing and your product page will be near-identical to each other, which is one of several complications in running both. Our guide to selling on your own store while still on the marketplace covers the wider version of that.
5. It has to link somewhere
A marketplace listing was surrounded by the platform's own navigation, related items and category links. A product page on a small store is frequently a dead end.
Link up to the collection it belongs to, sideways to genuinely related products, and out to any guide that helps someone choose. That is how a visitor who is not ready to buy stays on the site, and it is how a search engine understands the structure.
What to prioritize, given that you cannot rewrite everything
Most stores arrive with more products than time.
Start with what actually sells. Your order history from the marketplace tells you which products earn their rewrite, and it is usually a short list.
Then whatever a collection page sends the most people to.
Then the ones with the most buyer questions attached, because those are the pages where the answers are missing.
Leave the long tail as it is for now. A store with fifteen properly written pages and eighty transplanted ones is in a far better position than one where all ninety-five got equal attention.
The two checks worth running
Show the page to someone who has never seen your business and ask what it sells, who it is for, when it would arrive and what happens if it is wrong. If they cannot answer all four from the page, the page is incomplete.
Read the title as it would appear in a search result. Would you click it? Does it promise something the page delivers?
Both take five minutes and both find more than an audit tool will.
Where this sits
Product pages are the pages that convert and, for most stores, they are not the pages that bring in the broad queries. That work happens on collection pages, which is why this cluster treats them as the first build.
If you are still deciding whether any of this is a project you want, our pillar on whether you should move at all is the place to start, and our article on what your day-to-day actually looks like afterwards is the honest version of the work involved.