Clear, consistent messaging for Irish online shops

One shop makes the same promise in five places

A customer never meets your shop all at once. They meet it in pieces. An advert in a search result. The page that advert opens. A product page. An email a week later. The checkout, where the money changes hands.

Each of those pieces makes a promise. The advert says what you sell and on what terms. The page either confirms that promise or quietly changes it. By the checkout, the customer holds five versions of your offer in their head. If the five agree, buying feels safe. If they disagree, even slightly, the customer starts checking. And a customer who is checking is a customer who is not buying.

Clear messaging means each piece says one thing plainly. Consistent messaging means every piece says the same thing. In my experience the product is rarely the problem. The problem is how it is presented, and above all that the presentation changes from one place to the next.

Read it as a relay. Every place the wording, the price or the terms change is a place where the baton can drop.

Worked example: Copper Leaf before anything changes

To keep this concrete, one invented shop will carry us through. Every name and number in it is made up.

Copper Leaf is a small online tea shop in Waterford, at copperleaf.example. Orla runs it. Her bestseller is a strong breakfast tea in a 125g pouch at €8.50. Delivery is €3.95, or free on orders over €30. Customers cannot collect, everything goes out by An Post. Her average order is €24.

Here is her message chain as it stands:

The Google search advert reads: "Loose leaf tea from Waterford. 20% off your first order. Free delivery in Ireland."
The advert opens the homepage. The headline says "Crafted with passion since 2019" over a slideshow of the storeroom. A pop up offers 15% off with the code WELCOME15.
The bestseller is listed as "Morning Brew". Orla renamed it last spring. The advert, her packaging and her emails still call it "Breakfast Blend".
Free delivery over €30 is mentioned once, in the footer.
At the checkout, €3.95 delivery appears for the first time on a basket of €17.

Nothing here is dishonest in intent. Each piece was written on a different day, for a different reason. That is how inconsistency happens, and why the fix is a habit rather than a rebrand.

The first link in the chain is the one between the advert and the page it opens. Practitioners call this message match: the page a person lands on should visibly continue the advert they clicked, in the same words, with the same offer.

The person clicked because of a specific promise. If the page opens on something else, they have to work out whether they are in the right place, and a good few simply press back.

Google rewards the same thing in its own way. Its help pages list the quality of your adverts and landing page among the factors that decide your Ad Rank, the value that decides whether your advert shows at all and in what position.¹ Google describes that assessment as "the usefulness and relevance of your ad and landing page", measured at auction time through expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It adds that higher quality adverts can often lead to lower costs per click.¹

One detail is worth getting right, because it is widely misread. The Quality Score you see in your account, from 1 to 10, is a diagnostic. Google states plainly that it "is not an input in the ad auction".² It reports on the same three things the auction looks at, including landing page experience, which Google defines as "how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad".² The score is a thermometer, not the heating. Fix the page and the advert, and it follows.

There is also a hard floor. Google's destination requirements say adverts must "accurately reflect" where the click leads, and adverts whose display address and final address point to different places are disapproved.³

Before, the advert promises loose leaf tea from Waterford, 20% off the first order and free delivery in Ireland. The first screen of the page confirms none of it. The headline talks about passion. The pop up offers 15%, not 20%. Free delivery turns out to apply only over €30. Both kinds of customer feel misled, and both are right to.

After, Orla sends the advert for her bestseller to the product page itself, not the homepage, and rewrites both together:

Advert: "Breakfast Blend loose leaf tea from Waterford. 15% off your first order. Delivery €3.95, free over €30."
Page headline: "Breakfast Blend. A strong loose leaf tea that stands up to milk."
Just under it: "15% off your first order with code WELCOME15. Free delivery over €30, otherwise €3.95."

Three promises in the advert, the same three promises in the first screen of the page, in the same order and the same words. Nobody has to check anything.

One page, one promise, about the customer

The second rule is that each page makes one promise. A landing page with a welcome discount, a newsletter offer, a spring sale banner, a gift guide and a story about the founder is making five promises. The customer has to pick one, and the effort of picking is friction.

In my experience the most common version of this mistake is a shop that talks about itself instead of the customer's problem. "Crafted with passion since 2019" is about the shop. "A strong tea that stands up to milk" is about the person drinking it. The first is true and pleasant. The second answers the question the customer actually arrived with.

A useful test: cover everything on the first screen except the headline, the line under it and the button. Could a stranger say what you sell, who it is for and what happens when they press the button? If not, the page is carrying too many promises, or the wrong one.

If you want a full method for putting the customer's problem at the centre of a page, I wrote one up in the StoryBrand framework for SaaS and eCommerce. For the step before that, making sure the message fits the market and the business model at all, see the Message Market Model Fit framework.

Worked example: the Breakfast Blend page

Before, the product page for "Morning Brew" opens with a large photo, the name, the price, then four paragraphs about Assam estates, a button reading "Add", a banner for the spring sale and a newsletter box.

Orla writes down the one promise first, a strong breakfast tea for people who take it with milk, and checks every element against it.

Name: "Breakfast Blend", the name on the pouch and in the advert. It stays.
Headline: "A strong loose leaf tea that stands up to milk." It stays.
Price and terms in one line: "€8.50 for 125g. Delivery €3.95, free over €30." It stays, for reasons the section on prices explains.
Button: "Add to basket" instead of "Add", because it says what happens next.
The four paragraphs on tea estates: useful to a few, so they move below the button under the heading "Where it comes from".
The spring sale banner: a second promise. It goes from this page.
The newsletter box: a third promise. It moves to the order confirmation, where the customer has already bought.

The page did not get prettier. It got quieter, and every word left points the same way.

Call everything by one name, everywhere

Customers search with the words they have seen. If your advert says "Breakfast Blend", your packaging says "Breakfast Blend" and your shop says "Morning Brew", a customer typing "breakfast blend" into your search box may find nothing. They will not conclude that you renamed it. They will conclude you do not sell it.

Names drift for ordinary reasons. A product is renamed and the old adverts keep running. A promotion is "Spring sale" in the email and "Seasonal offer" on the banner. Each is small. Together they make one shop feel like three.

The fix is a short naming sheet: one row per product, offer and discount code, with the one name that is used everywhere. Every advert, page, email and checkout message is written from that sheet. When a name changes, every place on the row changes on the same day, or the name does not change.

The same goes for tone. A shop that is warm and chatty on Instagram and stiff and legal at the checkout feels like a hand off between strangers. The small words do a lot of this work, which I went into in the quiet power of UX and microcopy.

Worked example: Orla's naming sheet

Orla lists everything a customer can see a name for. Five rows are enough to start:

Thing	The one name	Where it was different
Bestseller	Breakfast Blend	Shop listing said "Morning Brew"
First order offer	15% off with WELCOME15	Advert said 20%
Delivery	€3.95, free over €30	Advert said "Free delivery in Ireland"
Spring promotion	Spring sale, 25% off loose leaf tea	Banner said "Seasonal offer"
Gift range	Gift sets	Feed said "Hampers"

Each entry in the third column is a place where a customer could have been confused. She fixes the shop listing first, because that is where search happens, then the advert, then the feed.

Prices and terms must match, and in Ireland that is the law

Names drifting costs sales. Prices and terms drifting can also end in court.

In Ireland the rules on unfair and misleading commercial practices sit in Part 3 of the Consumer Protection Act 2007, as amended by the Consumer Rights Act 2022. A trader must not engage in an unfair commercial practice or a misleading one, and the test throughout is whether the practice would be likely to cause the average consumer to make a transactional decision they would not otherwise make.⁴ Three parts matter most here.

A practice is misleading if it gives false information, or if it would be likely to deceive or mislead the average consumer, about matters that include the price, the way the price is calculated and the method of delivery. Where it does that through information, the Act adds that "it is not a defence in any proceeding to show that the information is factually correct".⁵ An advert saying "Free delivery in Ireland" next to a footer saying "over €30" is the textbook case. Each line can be defended, the overall impression cannot.

A practice is also misleading if it omits or conceals material information the average consumer needs to decide, and the Act treats material information provided "in a manner that is unclear, unintelligible, ambiguous or untimely" the same way.⁶ A delivery charge mentioned once in a footer is, in that sense, not mentioned.

An invitation to purchase, which the Act defines as a representation that indicates the characteristics of the product, includes its price and enables the consumer to buy it, carries its own list of material information. It includes the price of the product inclusive of taxes and "any freight, delivery or postal charges that apply in relation to the product".⁷

EU law adds the moment of the contract. Under the Consumer Rights Directive, before a consumer is bound by a distance contract the trader must give the total price inclusive of taxes and, where applicable, all additional delivery charges, and if the trader does not, the consumer does not have to bear those charges.⁸ In Ireland the same list sits in section 106 and Schedule 3 of the Consumer Rights Act 2022.⁹

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) puts it in plain words in its pricing guidance for businesses. For online sales, prices must be shown near the product description, "There should be no hidden charges", and the trader must tell the consumer about additional charges, "for example postal or delivery charges, before they buy".¹⁰ Neither the Act nor the guidance sets out how a free delivery threshold should be shown, so the worked example below takes the plainest route: the delivery charge next to every price, and a running total that includes delivery until the basket passes the threshold.

The CCPC enforces the Act. Its powers include prosecution, prohibition orders from the courts, compliance notices, written undertakings and fixed payment notices.¹¹ Rather than a percentage of turnover, the Act sets criminal penalties: a misleading commercial practice is an offence, punishable on a first summary conviction by a class B fine of up to €4,000 or up to six months in prison, and on indictment by a fine of up to €60,000 for a first conviction and up to €100,000 for a later one. A consumer harmed by a prohibited practice can also sue the trader for damages, including exemplary damages.¹²

Separately, the advertising code of the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland (ASAI) says a marketing communication "should not mislead, or be likely to mislead, by inaccuracy, ambiguity, exaggeration, omission or otherwise", and that quoted prices should normally include VAT and other "inescapable costs to the consumer".¹³ The Act's list of practices banned outright includes bait advertising, inviting customers to buy at a price you have reason to think you cannot supply, and falsely claiming an offer is only available for a limited time to rush a decision.¹⁴

There is a commercial floor too. Google Merchant Center compares the price in your product data with the price on your landing page, and a product whose prices differ may be disapproved, which Google warns can lead to an account suspension.¹⁵ The machine checks message match too.

I am an engineer, not a solicitor. What follows is how I would apply the law in an example, not legal advice. If prices and terms are central to your business, have a solicitor read your chain.

Worked example: Orla's prices, step by step

Orla's facts: Breakfast Blend €8.50, delivery €3.95, free over €30, no collection.

Step one, does a delivery charge apply? Customers cannot collect, so every order under €30 pays €3.95. That charge is material information wherever an invitation to purchase appears.

Step two, the product page. A customer can buy several items, so Orla puts the delivery terms next to the price and keeps a running total in the basket. The price line reads, as before, "€8.50 for 125g. Delivery €3.95, free over €30." The basket shows a running total that includes delivery from the first item. With one pouch in it:

€8.50 + €3.95 = €12.45

Here $€8.50$ is the pouch, $€3.95$ is the delivery charge that every order under €30 pays, and $€12.45$ is what this customer will actually pay. The basket shows €12.45 the moment the pouch goes in, not at the last step.

Step three, the basket crosses the threshold. A customer adds three pouches and a €5.50 infuser:

3 \times €8.50 + €5.50 = €31.00

Here $3$ is the number of pouches, $€8.50$ the pouch price, $€5.50$ the infuser and $€31.00$ the goods total. That is over €30, so delivery drops to €0 and the running total shows €31.00, delivery free.

Step four, the advert. The old advert's "Free delivery in Ireland" goes. If a search or shopping advert quotes a price for one pouch, it either quotes the price the customer would pay for that pouch alone, €12.45 including delivery, or puts the delivery terms right beside the €8.50. Otherwise Orla avoids quoting a single pouch price in the advert at all.

Step five, the feed. The Merchant Center price and the page price both come from one field in the shop, €8.50, so they cannot drift apart. Nothing here is clever. It is the same promise, stated in full, every time a price appears.

The email picks up the same conversation

Email is often written by a different person, in a different tool, on a different day. To the customer it is the same conversation, picked up a week later. The email makes a promise, and the page it links to has to keep it, exactly like an advert.

Three things break most often. The subject line promises an offer the body qualifies. The button links to the homepage rather than the page that continues the offer. And the terms, such as exclusions, end dates and codes, live in the small print at the foot, where the Act's test of "unclear" or "untimely" information starts to bite.⁶

Worked example: Orla's spring email, before and after

Before:

Subject: "Spring sale: 25% off everything"
Body: a large photo, "Our biggest sale of the year", a button reading "Shop now" that opens the homepage.
Footer, in grey: "Code SPRING25. Excludes gift sets. Ends Sunday."
Checkout: a customer with a gift set in the basket enters SPRING25 and sees "Code not valid".

The subject said "everything", the footer said "except gift sets", and the customer finds out at the checkout, the worst possible moment.

After:

Subject: "25% off loose leaf tea until Sunday"
First line of the body: "Use SPRING25 for 25% off all loose leaf tea until midnight on Sunday. Gift sets are not included."
Button: "Shop the spring sale", which opens the sale collection page.
The sale page headline repeats it: "Spring sale: 25% off loose leaf tea until Sunday. Code SPRING25."
The banner on the site and the line at the checkout use the same words, from the naming sheet.

The offer did not change. Its exclusion simply moved from the last line of the email to the first, and from the checkout error to the subject.

What inconsistency costs, in numbers

Small breaks add up. An order only happens if the customer gets through every step. So the share of clicks that become orders is the product of the step rates.

c = r_1 \times r_2 \times r_3

Here $c$ is the conversion rate from advert click to order, $r_1$ is the share of clicks that stay to look at a product rather than leaving at once, $r_2$ is the share of product viewers who add to the basket, and $r_3$ is the share of baskets that become orders. Each rate is a simple ratio of events to opportunities, as in Foundations: ratios and rates, and multiplying them works because a customer has to pass the first step and the second and the third, as in Foundations: probability.

Multiplication is unforgiving. A step that loses a few extra people does not subtract a little from the end result, it scales the whole thing down.

Worked example: Orla's 1,000 clicks

These rates are the example's assumptions, invented to show the arithmetic, not a forecast. Nobody honest can promise you a number before testing. Assume Orla pays €0.80 per click, so 1,000 clicks cost €800.

Before, with the mismatched advert and the homepage, assume 40% of clicks stay to look at a product, 15% of those add to the basket, and 45% of baskets become orders:

c = 0.40 \times 0.15 \times 0.45 = 0.027

Here $0.40$ , $0.15$ and $0.45$ are the three step rates and $0.027$ is 2.7%. On 1,000 clicks that is 27 orders.

After, with the advert going straight to the matching product page and the delivery terms clear from the start, assume 55% stay to look at the product, 16% add to the basket, and 55% of baskets complete, because nobody meets a surprise charge:

c = 0.55 \times 0.16 \times 0.55 = 0.0484

Here $0.55$ , $0.16$ and $0.55$ are the new step rates and $0.0484$ is 4.84%. On 1,000 clicks that is 48.4 orders, about 48.

Now the money. The cost per order is the spend divided by the orders:

\frac{€800}{27} = €29.63

Here $€800$ is the spend on 1,000 clicks and $27$ is the orders before, so each order cost $€29.63$ in advertising. After:

\frac{€800}{48.4} = €16.53

Here $48.4$ is the orders after, so each order now costs $€16.53$ . With an average order of €24, before the change Orla spent €800 to take 27 times €24, which is €648. After, 48.4 times €24 is €1,161.60. Same spend, same product, same price. Only the consistency changed.

The horizontal axis is the step in the funnel, from click to order. The vertical axis is how many of the original 1,000 people are still there. The gap opens at the first step and never closes, because each later rate applies to a larger group. The takeaway: modest improvements at each of three steps compound into almost twice the orders, which is why I look at the whole chain rather than polishing one page.

How to test your own message chain

You need an afternoon, a spreadsheet and the patience to act like a customer.

Walk the chain yourself. Search for your own product the way a customer would, click your own advert, and buy something. Screenshot every step, then follow every button in your last three emails. Do it on a mobile as well as a computer.
Fill in the consistency sheet. One row per promise (product name, price, delivery, offer, code, returns), one column per touchpoint (advert, landing page, product page, email, basket, checkout). Write what each one actually says. Every cell that differs from the row's first cell is a break.
Ask people who do not know your shop. Show five people the first screen of your landing page for five seconds, then hide it and ask what you sell, what it costs and what the offer is. If their answers do not match your advert, the page is not saying what you think it says.
Measure the steps. With consented analytics, count clicks, product page views, baskets and orders for the traffic from one advert, and compute the step rates.
Test the change properly when the traffic allows. Split the traffic between the old page and the new one, decide in advance how many visitors each version needs, and do not stop the moment one looks ahead. How many visitors that takes is in statistical testing: sample size, lift and full factorial designs.

If the review turns up friction beyond the words, a confusing form or a slow page, the wider four layer review in the Clarity Framework picks up where this one stops.

Worked example: how long Orla's test would take

Orla wants to know whether the new product page beats the homepage as the advert's destination. She gets about 2,500 advert clicks a month.

The number of visitors each version needs, to detect a difference between two conversion rates at 5% significance and 80% power, is:

n = \frac{(z_{\alpha/2} + z_{\beta})^2 \left[p_1(1-p_1) + p_2(1-p_2)\right]}{(p_1 - p_2)^2}

Here $n$ is the visitors needed per version, $z_{\alpha/2}$ is 1.96 for 5% significance, $z_{\beta}$ is 0.84 for 80% power, $p_1$ is the conversion rate of the old version and $p_2$ the conversion rate she hopes the new version reaches. The formula is explained step by step in Foundations: sample size.

With $p_1 = 0.027$ and $p_2 = 0.0484$ from the funnel example, the pieces are $(1.96 + 0.84)^2 = 7.84$ , then $0.027 \times 0.973 = 0.0263$ and $0.0484 \times 0.9516 = 0.0461$ , which add to $0.0724$ , and $(0.0484 - 0.027)^2 = 0.000458$ . So:

n = \frac{7.84 \times 0.0724}{0.000458} = 1239

Here $7.84$ is the squared sum of the two z values, $0.0724$ the summed variances, $0.000458$ the squared difference, and $1239$ the visitors needed per version, about 1,240. Two versions need about 2,480 clicks, which is roughly one month of Orla's traffic.

The catch: that assumes an improvement as large as the example's. Half the improvement means about four times the visitors, because the difference is squared. So Orla fixes the legal and naming problems at once, since those are not a matter of testing, and tests only the page layout, with the sample size written down first.

Where to start on Monday

Clear and consistent messaging sounds like branding. It is closer to bookkeeping. Every promise your shop makes is written down once and then repeated, word for word, wherever a customer meets it.

If you do only three things, do these. Send each advert to the page that continues it, with the same words in the first screen. Make one naming sheet for products, offers, codes and delivery, and write everything from it. And state the price and the delivery charge together from the first moment a price appears, because in Ireland that is no longer a nicety.

The rest is walking your own chain as a customer, regularly, and fixing whatever made you stop and check. If it made you stop, it made them stop too.

Selling into Germany or Austria as well? Then the chain is rebuilt in a different register, not translated, as I explain in why a playful English brand voice can cost an Irish shop trust in Germany and Austria.

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Why clear and consistent messaging is crucial for eCommerce success

TL;DR

One shop makes the same promise in five places

Worked example: Copper Leaf before anything changes