Have you opened an ecommerce site or are you planning to? You should know that images are very important and products with blurry, inconsistent, grainy and small images can lose potential customers.
The photographs you post on your ecommerce site must be of the highest quality, truthful, and able to convince the potential customer, just as if they were in a physical store and could touch the product. But we all know that a photographic shot is not always perfect and you have to "help" it a bit, correcting imperfections, colors, lights, defects. In this there is nothing wrong.
Also keep in mind that the customer's perception changes depending on the device he uses: phone, computer and tablet have different color and brightness settings and also the mode of use affects the result.
All this doesn't take away from the fact that product images, if they are more beautiful and appealing than those of competitors, already represent a competitive advantage.
So here are our 10 tips for your ecommerce site images.
- Quality
Make sure your images are of the highest quality and optimized for the web. Don't use photos taken with a cell phone, but rather use the help of a professional photographer, who is able to adjust exposure times and lighting direction.
- Weight
Quality images are heavy, even tens of MB, and penalize navigation. Lightweight images increase the speed of the site and that's why optimized and professional photos are the best choice for your ecommerce site: even if you reduce the weight they don't lose quality.
- Originality
You're probably not the only one selling a certain product and an image of it will already be online. Don't be smart...don't appropriate other people's images. If the manufacturer provides you with them, they will certainly already be of excellent quality and available to several retailers, otherwise show originality and take the best pictures of what you are selling.
- Ambientation
It is good to have a bare image of the product, but also offer a vision of the environment for the customer becomes the cue to identify with it and proceed to the purchase.
- Perspective
When you're in a store, a pair of shoes you pick up and look at them from the side, top and bottom, or do you? Replicate all of these angles on your site, always within reason. But remember: every object should be seen from different angles and every product acquires value if it has an image gallery.
- Zoom
There are products that are enhanced by showing their details: textures, seams, closures, edges, reliefs, engravings... Don't take everything for granted: even in the store the customer carries out a thorough examination and the more details you offer, the more convincing you are. Explanatory photos help the customer to get a clearer idea and decide on a purchase.
- Uniformity
When you choose a style try to maintain it: if you choose a particular background make it your strong point, the feature that sets you apart. You can use different backgrounds depending on the product categories but try to maintain consistency within them. Remember that in an ecommerce site a white background is always preferable. If you advertise your products on other channels, such as Instagram, colorful backgrounds or compositions will capture more interest.
- Update
The products undergo changes too, sometimes they are almost imperceptible but some different details are always there. Customers are very careful: make sure that the image on the ecommerce site reflects exactly the latest model of the product.
- Archive
Keep an up-to-date archive of your images. At first you may feel that you can keep everything under control by dividing your images into folders on your computer. As time goes by you will realize that you can no longer keep up with the different versions of the images, you will struggle to find them and often risk making mistakes. A Media Hub can help, it gives you confidence and saves you a lot of time.
- Image encoding
The name of the images is very important so choose an encoding consistent with the product, avoiding generic names that then risk repeating. Also in this can help a Media Hub because it allows you to catalog images, add descriptions, tags, categories and especially know the status of life: date of shooting, modification date, where it is published and much more.
In conclusion, if you have an ecommerce site remember that images play an important role because they create an incentive to purchase and drive customer expectations. They are like the window of your physical store and no one would enter a store where they find products in a mess and full of dust.
Improve the quality of your images and your business will improve as well!
