Ecommerce Images

Decades of experience has taught retailers that the way a product is displayed exerts a great influence on the customer's purchase decision. As a result, physical retailers spend a lot of money on frontage, display shelves, in-store advertising, and the like.

The online equivalent is the imagery and layout of an ecommerce website. When putting together images for ecommerce, here are some issues to keep in mind.

Use High Quality Images
The word quality has become a buzz-word. If ecommerce websites had their way, each of them would have award winning product photography. With tens of thousands of products being the norm, high quality exclusive photography often becomes unaffordable.

I was part of an experiment where customers were shown two sets of images of the same gourmet chocolate. The first had vibrant, high quality, images, and the other had low-resolution, tiny, images of the same chocolate. The reaction to the poorer images, as expected, was negative. What was eye-opening was that customers regarded the chocolates depicted with low quality images as being stale, old, or damaged!

Clearly, the quality of the image influences the customer's belief of the quality of the product itself.

Present Multiple Images of the Same Product
Even if the product is as simple as a book, customers would prefer to look at the front cover, back cover, and spine at the very least. And when the product is something like a handbag, you might need a dozen different photographs to communicate the physical appearance of the product.

If most ecommerce websites display identical images of a product, but you display original images, there is a good chance that customers will want to visit your site to get a better view of the product. And when they view the product on your site, there is a good chance that they will purchase the product on your website.

Let Customers Magnify, Rotate, Change Color or Otherwise Manipulate the Image
This is where technology comes into the picture. In the case of some products, e.g. jewelry, customers might want to get a really close look at the product. Another example would be the collar of a shirt, the exact shape of which might only be visible upon magnification. Your website should enable customers to magnify a part of the product.

In addition to magnification, customers might want to be able to manipulate images in other ways too. Some products might require to be rotated. Complex gadgets such as high-end cameras are ideal candidates for 3D image rotation.

Think of it this way: how would a customer at a retail store examine a product? I have seen that people purchasing a camera often turn it this side and that, to see it from every perspective. If we acknowledge this as a customer need, then our ecommerce website must make sure that it fulfills the need.

One more useful method of image manipulation relates to products that are identical in all respects other than color. Many ecommerce websites display the different colors on different webpages. It would be helpful if the customer could instantly compare the colors with the click of a mouse. One click, and the red dress turns into a blue dress. Alternatively, multiple product images could be displayed, in all available colors, next to each other on the same webpage.

This goes back to first principles: make sure that your ecommerce website facilitates the customer's chosen purchase process. Adapt to the customer; do not make the customer adapt to you.

Load the Images Fast
To an extent this advice contradicts earlier advice. As you include a greater number of high quality images, and the ability to manipulate them, your webpage will take longer to load. This could lead the customer to abandon your ecommerce website.

Use a faster ecommerce hosting, store your images on dedicated servers, optimize images for faster loading, or use any other method you can to load the images faster, without losing out on quality or functionality.

Conclusion
Though it might sound clichéd to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, no one can doubt the importance of high quality and helpful images on an ecommerce website.