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Your website is the front door to your company, make sure first impressions have customers opening the door, and not turning away in disgust

Yearning for more sales for your startup? Of course you are.

The quality of your photography can make or break your sales, online. More often than not, many owners ignore the importance of having great product imagery, thinking that you must be a pro to get the best photos.

That is definitely not the case. All you have to do is gain some good understanding of what passes for a superb product image and put this into practice.

This article provides three points that are often overlooked by most ecommerce owners when it comes to shooting the most epic product images and optimizing them for websites.

Are you ready to generate new traffic, maintain current numbers and bring back lost customers? Implement these three ideas each day and after a month, take stock, evaluate, find out what worked best for you and reveal the results.

How high quality product images help you sell more?

Naturally, humans are visual creatures drawn more to images than text. In essence, your website will make that first impression on your visitors based on how it looks and not what it sells. Regardless of the fact that a great design and an aesthetically attractive color scheme is vital, the secret to distinct company visuals lies in your product photography.

The product imagery is the only way Founders can enable their website visitors to see and perceive the looks of product in real life. Your product images must portray your confidence in what you are selling, so that the target customers can also trust what they are buying from you.

Here are our some major points.

Improving the sales pages

So now, a customer has landed on your site, poked around for awhile and finally clicked on a product. This is the defining moment and you better be having an incredible product page for your customer to hit the buy button.

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You obviously want to ensure that the page is popular and displays only the necessary information.

Use multiple photos

Once your set up is ready, you can begin shooting your product images. Keep in mind that since your target customer can not touch or physically see the product, you ought to help them visualize your merchandise in their minds. Taking multiple photos is the best way to do this.

Be sure to take photos of your product from different angles and positions-front, back, sides, top, below, etc.

In addition, capture close-ups of special elements of your merchandise. Many times, shop owners ignore this feature once they activate a zoom function.

However, it is worth noting that the zoom function is usually controlled by the website visitor who chooses where to hover or click in order to see where they want. With close-ups, you are in control, and can direct them to where they ought to be looking.

360-degree view

According to a research carried out by DueMaternity, conversions from items that featured 360 degree views increased by 27 per cent when compared to two-dimensional product photos. Elsewhere, when Golfsmith.com added 360 degree spin photography to their product pages, conversions increased from 10 to 40 per cent.

Make it big and beautiful

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to the product category page.

The image on your product category page is the hero image.

It should be appealing, zoom-able, of jaw-dropping quality and be positioned over the fold. This is particularly true when the product photo is a critical part of the decision-making process — as represented in this case study by the Nielsen group.

Hyundai Netherlands used larger product images and it worked for them. The company also used Visual Website Optimizer to undertake a multivariate test which increased requests for test-drives by 62%.

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On the other end, small product images are anathema to a visitor. Many times, they look bogus and are often a turn-off for online shoppers. When it comes to photography, the bigger the image the better it is.

In essence, your base image should be about 1600px on the lengthiest side. This size is ideal and will optimize your product photos for mobile, and since mobile commerce accounts for more than 30 per cent of eCommerce sales, you should put emphasis on this customer segment.

The 1600px size is also big enough to incorporate a zoom function.

The best thing with the zoom function is that it can also display the base image, unlike the ‘zoom’ on a website. A zooming function should give the impression that the viewer will zoom-in, and this can only happen if the base image is actually bigger than the template used.

If your website has been coded accurately, then your base image will be resized automatically to suit the various templates. If your template is square, then your square base image will be resized correctly. If your template is rectangular, your base image has to be in the same ratio as your template.

Product Description for Real People

The product text should not be restricted to cold or hard facts and detached impersonal phrases.

Of course, your customer needs to know all about the product’s size, fabric, style, fit and other important details. Be sure to include interesting facts of your product in the description as well.

Also Read: Indonesian state-owned businesses jump into e-commerce game

And since you are selling your merchandise to real people, present your products in a way that they can understand. Do giveaway with the manufacturer’s product copy and customize a really captivating story comparable to a pleasant sales person. All in all, remember a great product description is a creative art that calls for more practice.

People photos (must be real people)

For a long time, people photos have been used as a way of presenting a company’s image on the web. This is usually done using portraits of the company’s executive team to enable users to relate with the otherwise faceless company to real people. There are some corporations that have gone a step further to present photos of everyone on their team.

In this kind of scenario, the pages are usually long but despite this, most users scroll down the long page to the end. However, their attention becomes lesser as they move further down the page.

Users on such a page will spent more time viewing the portraits than reading the bios, even though biographies consume much more space when added. This means that most users are always in a hurry and only take a quick scan through the team’s overview, because they find looking at photos much faster than reading all the entire paragraphs.

The main message in this case will be about real people who actually work at a given company. Generally, your users will ignore stock photos of unspecified or “generic people”. To excite your customers, be sure to offer a highly engaging experience by focusing on meeting all their needs.

Use product details

In a given study, thumbnails of bookcases received more attention than those of flat-panel TVs (which were majorly ignored).

The results of the ecommerce category pages revealed that only 18 per cent of  users used to view the items was spent on photos, while 82 per cent of the time spent was on the text. Averagely, each product’s thumbnail received 0.9 fixations, whereas the description got a total of 4.4 fixations.

Use information-carrying images

It is important to note that online users pay great attention to information-carrying images which display content that is useful to the project at hand.

Most users ignore images that are purely decorative, and do not add tangible content to the category page. Be sure to invest your resources in great photo shoots. A professional photographer can add a real fortune to your site’s business value.

Zing it up with a short time product video

As your customer cannot touch or feel your merchandise, including a demo video would go a long way in displaying your product in all of its glory. A captivating video can add a significant recall value and on the other hand, instructional videos are of greater importance especially when you’re trying to sell items that are complicated.

Zappos recorded a significant increase in sales (between 6 to 30 per cent) after using video demos on their product pages. In the same way, Stacks and Stacks discovered that shoppers who checked out videos on its product category pages were 144% more likely to add them to cart.

Enable live chat

As much as answered FAQs can help make your product page user-friendly, there’s no fault in investing in other polite support executives as well as an enabled live chat feature to enhance your online customer’s experience.

In a given report by BoldChat, 65 per cent of all online shoppers in US went for a live chat and this percentage increased from 50.4 per cent in 2009.

Need for speed

By now you must have been inspired to take multiple shots of your products, put a live chat feature in place, as well as prepared a high-end video ready to be embedded on your product page.

Great going!

But without the capabilities to handle high page-loading time, the various features might leave your product page overwhelmed. In the pursuit of using photography to drive maximum sales, do not ignore your page’s loading time.

Also read: How Singapore’s top 2 e-commerce portals fared during Chinese New Year

A recent study by QuBit revealed that on average, a homepage takes 3.50 seconds while product pages, which are the slowest, take twice as long to load their homepages.

Encourage Your Customers to Spread the Word

There are ways you can customers willingly share your product page. Use icons that allow your customers to share the interesting facts of your product on social media platforms.

In addition, whenever possible, provide incentives for their generosity in sharing. Who knows, you might just Pinterest your way to a more-than-you-can-handle publicity.

Photography is one of the best ways site visitors can interact with your product without it being physically present. By implementing the above tips, you can expect the most from your online ventures.

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