How to build a strong About us page

If you check your analytics on a smaller plant webshop, the About us page is almost always in the top three most-visited pages — often second only to the homepage. Visitors arrive there for a reason: they want to know who's behind the shop before they hand over their card details. Most reseller About us pages fail this test entirely, with stock photos and empty mission statements. This article is the antidote.

Why About us matters more than you think

The pattern shows up in nearly every smaller plant webshop's analytics: visitors arrive on the homepage or via an ad, click around a category, get to a PDP — and then go check About us before they buy. They're looking for a reason to trust you over the bigger competitor in the next tab.

This is the only page where you get to answer the question they're actually asking: "who's selling me this plant, and should I believe their delivery promise?" Every other page is about the product. About us is the only page about you. Waste it on a generic mission statement and the visitor's tab closes.

Two visitors comparing your shop to a faceless competitor will reliably pick the one with a real face and a clear story. That's not a soft preference — it's a measurable conversion lift, and it costs nothing but a couple of hours and a phone camera.

What belongs on the page

Six elements, in roughly this order. None of them are optional on a smaller shop.

1. Real faces, real names

A photo of you — and your team if you have one — on a normal day, in your actual workspace. Not a styled studio shot, not a stock image of "a woman with a laptop", not a logo. Names with the photo. If it's a one-person shop, say so: "I'm Lisa, I run this shop from a greenhouse in Aalsmeer."

The single highest-impact swap most resellers can make on About us is replacing a stock image with one real photo of themselves. It changes the page from generic ecom to a specific human running a specific business.

2. The why — your honest reason

Two to four short paragraphs answering: why does this shop exist? Not "passion for green" — what specifically? You inherited a love of plants from a grandparent and turned it into a side business. You worked at a wholesale grower for ten years and saw an opportunity for direct-to-consumer. You moved into a place with no garden and got obsessed with houseplants and started selling the ones that worked.

Specificity is the whole game here. A real story — even an ordinary one — outperforms a polished mission statement every time. Visitors aren't looking for poetry; they're looking for a coherent reason this shop exists.

3. Behind the scenes — actual photos

Two to four photos of the operation. Your workspace, your packing area, the boxes ready to ship, the plants getting their final water before they go out. Phone photos are fine — better than fine, they read as authentic. Polished agency photography on About us actually backfires; it signals corporate distance, not transparency.

Plant-shop specifically: a photo of plants being unpacked from supplier deliveries, or a shelf of pots ready for re-potting, says more about how the operation works than any paragraph.

4. Sourcing — where the plants come from

One paragraph on how you source your plants. This is where Everspring earns a mention, but the framing should be yours: "We source through Everspring's grower network — Dutch growers, short supply chains, fresh stock weekly. We pick the products that fit our shop, not what's pushed at us." Or whatever the truth is for your operation.

This paragraph does specific work: it preempts the suspicion that resellers buy unknown stock from anonymous wholesalers. Visitors who know about plant supply chains will care; visitors who don't still notice the confidence in the answer.

5. The customer-service commitment

One paragraph on what happens after they order. Not policy boilerplate — the human version. "If a plant arrives unhappy, message us. I'll either send a replacement or refund. No 14-day forms, no photos-from-three-angles, just a quick fix." Or whatever your real promise is.

This paragraph closes a fear that most plant-buying customers have: what happens if it dies in transit? Putting the answer here, in plain language, removes a barrier that the shipping policy buried at the bottom of the footer never reaches.

6. Values — only if real

Sustainability, peat-free potting mix, recycled packaging, donations to a tree-planting programme — include them only if they're real and you can substantiate them. Empty greenwashing claims do worse than no values section at all. If you switched to recycled cardboard mailers in March 2024, say so with the date. If you don't have a sustainability story yet, leave the section out and add it when you do.

What absolutely doesn't belong

• Stock photo of "a woman with a laptop" — this single image is the most overused About us asset on the internet, and visitors recognise it instantly. Replace with anything real, even a slightly imperfect phone photo.

• "For years the most reliable plant shop in [country]" — claims like this are unverifiable, read as marketing fluff, and undercut everything else on the page. Drop them entirely.

• Empty mission statements. "We believe in connecting people with nature through carefully curated greenery" tells the reader nothing. Cut it.

• Founder's biography in third person. "Lisa founded GreenShop in 2021 with a vision of…" reads like a press release. First person is more direct and matches the tone of the rest of the page.

• Long company history paragraphs. Visitors skim. If you have a long history, a short timeline (3-4 dates with one line each) beats a wall of prose.

Length and format

Aim for 400 to 700 words of body text plus 2 to 4 real photos. Anything longer than 700 words gets skimmed past the second photo. Anything shorter than 400 feels thin.

Keep paragraphs short — three to four sentences each. Use H3s between sections so a skimming visitor can land on "why we started" or "how we ship" without reading the whole page.

Where it lives in the menu

About us belongs in the main menu (left side, often as the second or third link) or prominently in the footer — not buried behind a hamburger. If you treat it as a top-three page, link to it like one. See Menu structure for the full menu logic.

Reviews and About us reinforce each other: a strong About us page makes the review block more credible (visitors believe the reviews are real because the operator is real), and reviews make the About us claims more credible. If you're working on both, do them together. See Customer reviews.

Next action

Open your About us page. Read it out loud. If any sentence sounds like it could appear on a hundred other plant shops, cut it or rewrite it specifically. Then take a phone photo of yourself in your workspace and replace whatever generic image is currently on the page. That's it for today — those two changes do more for trust than a redesign.