Companies have spent years under-investing in instructions, treating them as an afterthought at worst or, at best, a one-and-done activity that is necessary but not worthy of sustained attention.
As e-commerce becomes the dominant sales channel – this year 21% of retail purchases are expected to take place online – it expands markets and creates opportunity, but it also shines a light on product instructions like never before.
In E-Commerce Good Instructions Are A Strategic Necessity
- Negative reviews publicly expose bad product instructions and impact your ability to sell. In a 2023 analysis of 226 000 reviews on self-assembly products, ‘ease of assembly’ alone explained 18 % of the variance in star ratings.”
- Product returns are an economic disaster, with the associated costs of customer support, retrieving the product from the customer and the probability of not being able to sell it again. Online returns now average 24.5 % vs. 8.7 % in-store.
- Your brand, not a retailer, is first line support and good product instructions can reduce the amount of purchase support your customers need.
- Market expansion has been super-charged by e-commerce making the need to have multi-lingual instructions crucial to guarantee sales and a good customer experience. Most of our customers come to us needing to add not just one or two languages, but eight, ten, twelve.
- Speak the languages of your customers, not just your markets. Just as products now flow freely across borders, so do people, and that means your instructions might need to be in more than just the language of the market but reflect the local diasporas. Selling in Spain? Include English and German. In Germany? Add Turkish.
- Regulations change to reflect changing market conditions, particularly in Europe. The GPSR was a direct reaction to explosion of e-commerce. It includes compliance points around several elements of instructions like language, assembly diagrams and accessibility.
- More brands then ever selling are similar products. Global sourcing means that it is easier than ever to source products, but when every marketplace lists a plethora of near-identical products, great product instructions can be a key tool for a brand to differentiate itself.
Product instructions shouldn’t be seen as paperwork but as a post-purchase opportunity to turn a buyer into a reviewer, a recommender, and a repeat customer. And a strategy to reduce the cost of returns and customer support.
How Can StepAlong Help?
StepAlong works with digital-native, D2C brands and manufacturers to turn instructions into an asset, not a liability.
- Mobile-first, multi-language instructions for web and PDF.
- Translation automation in 32 languages, with editable and sharable output for easy revision.
- GPSR-compliant by design – you instructions multi-format, multi-lingual, accessible and with supporting text for assembly diagrams.
- Get new products ready easier by sharing with suppliers and teams—no more Word or InDesign chaos.
- Faster time to market. Add a QR code to the packaging, then finalize online while the product ships. (Ideal for many product categories—check your compliance needs.)
- Less printing, more flexibility. Reduce costs and keep content up to date with just-in-time delivery of instructions.
- AI generated troubleshooting. AI analyzes reviews and customer support tickets to identifies problems, suggest improvements publish them to Troubleshooting section of the instructions (in development).
