Five Techwe are
Feb 5, 2014

Power of Photos for eCommerce Websites

eCommerce websites are a crucial part of eCommerce businesses’ success. If you’re selling products online, it’s pretty easy to measure conversions:  if you get a sale that’s a successful conversion. A lot of things go into designing and implementing a successful eCommerce website, and one of those is quality photography.

High quality images can really enhance your website design and increase the number of conversions, which is the ultimate goal of a eCommerce site. High quality photos of your products will professionally display your products and make online shoppers feel secure and comfortable buying from your site.

Below are some tips that will help you achieve greater success online through quality photography on your eCommerce website.

Pro Photography for eCommerce Websites

Taking your product photos yourself can get the job done, but does it really represent your products to the best of their ability? Unless you have some good photography skills and decent studio setup, probably not.

We would highly suggest hiring a professional or at least semi-professional photographer to take your product photos. Yes it will cost more than doing it yourself, but you will end up getting more online conversions with a higher quality of images. You can also find very reasonably priced photographers if you do a bit of research.

Trust us, it will be worth the investment. We recently added a custom eCommerce website to our web design portfolio that used a professional photographer, and their new website looks incredible.

Sized for Thumbnails & Large Images

Product images should be shot and sized properly for thumbnails, product detail photos, and even larger photos. This includes the placement of the product in the frame and the size of the image before uploading it to your eCommerce website.

eCommerce Thumbnails

Having a high caliber camera will help with these issues. Shooting images with your iPhone or a cheap camera is not a good idea. It might work fine for the thumbnail image, but the detailed images and enlarged images will not look professional.

There should also be consistency in all product shots. For example, if you shoot one product from a high angle view, all other products should match that view. The easiest way to do that is to have a static camera and move products in and out of frame instead of moving the camera to the products.

Different View Points

It’s also important to include different angles of each product and images of the different colors that the product comes in. Take the guess work out of online buying by displaying the entire product. If you’re a store you’re going to checkout the bottom of a shoe, so most likely you’re going to want to see that before buying it online.

Successful eCommerce sites make customers feel like they are actually shopping. Different view points and images of each product color can help make the customer feel comfortable with purchasing your product online.

Product Details - eCommerce

Enlargement Capabilities

Your product photos should also be capable of being zoomed in on and enlarged. If you follow the steps from above this shouldn’t be an issue, but you will want to make sure the content management system or eCommerce plug-in you are using will have this capability.

This is important because it gives your customers an opportunity to get comfortable with the product by examining it at a closer level. Think about when you’re shopping in a store, you like to pick up the product and examine it before buying.

Notice how you can even see the texture in the shoe in the photo below, that might be the difference between selling the product and not selling the product.

eCommerce Zoom

Optimized for Search

The last thing that your eCommerce website’s images should include is search engine optimization techniques.

Make sure that the images are a small enough file size that they do not decrease your page load time significantly. This can become a huge problem if you have a lot of product thumbnails on a page and you have large image files for each product.

Your images should have optimized file names and alt text. Naming an image image001 does absolutely nothing for your search engine ranking. Your images should also have optimized alt tags with search terms as well.

Your images should contain useful, descriptive alt text. That does not mean they should be stuffed with keywords, but they should accurately reflect what is in the image, and where appropriate, they can contain a keyword or a portion of a keyword.

Optimizing your images for search engines can increase traffic to your site, which could lead to more conversions and better search rankings.

High quality photos can really enhance your eCommerce website and will lead to more sales. Using professional photos will help to make customers comfortable and feel confident in their purchases. If they can’t tell what your product is, or if it’s a high quality product they’re going to close out of your site and move on to your competitors.

 

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