Why Quality Photography Is Important for Your E-commerce Business
Let’s suppose you already know how vital good-quality images are for your online store. Even if that’s the case, it’s always worth going over some of the key things you should know about e-commerce photography and why it’s important.
Nowadays, you couldn’t even fathom selling anything online without using photos. However, not all photos are created equally, so we’re here to run down what effective e-commerce photography should look like so that you can use it to your advantage.
Keep reading to find out everything you need to know.
What do you need to know about e-commerce photography?
We’re going to structure this post into six tips, which we’ll break down for you in detail. These are 6 relevant business statements that you should be working on in your online store through your images.
#1 – Build trust
You can have the most detailed product sheet possible, but your e-commerce product photos are what provide the customer with a realistic representation of the item.
The biggest handicap of e-commerce is that there is no way to present the product to potential buyers like in a store. Since customers can’t touch the items for themselves, a good collection of well-lit images, with good resolution and taken from different angles, is the best alternative you can offer.
Make a small investment in the quality of your images and the customer will feel confident about the quality of your products.
#2 – Inspire and project
It is always a good idea to include photographs in which you can see the product being used, in what we could call context-of-use images.
Images with a neutral background are useful because they allow browsers to see the product properly, but if you place the item in a situation the user can put themselves in, you’ll get them to picture themselves using it.
Imagine that you sell wooden floors online. As beautiful as the raw material may be and as elegant as the texture is… they’re still wooden planks. But, if you add an image of a living room with that same wooden floor, in a well-decorated home with a child playing barefoot, what we’re selling is no longer wood, but a home in which the browser will want to live.
#3 – Complement the information
As the saying goes, an image is worth a thousand words, but if you put the right text on the photo itself, you can multiply the effects of both.
People retain visual information much better, but this can be somewhat subjective, as viewers will naturally focus on one part of the image over another. To direct users’ attention, a few small texts highlighting the characteristics, measurements or, simply, quality seals will help make the set more attractive.
This is a simple trick that gives off the sense of an infographic.
#4 – Get more shares
We live in the age of public and private social networks. We share everything, on platforms ranging from Instagram to WhatsApp.
On these sites, multimedia content — videos and photography — are the way to achieve a bigger and better impact. That’s why it’s important to make your products look desirable, so that customers will want to share with others what they’ve bought or are going to buy.
#5 – Stand out from the competition
When the products you sell are your own work, it’s vital to take good care of the way you present them. This way, when the potential buyer compares your product to your competitor’s — and rest assured that they will, because that’s what people do —, your product will leave a better impression.
Of course, if you’re a retailer and you’re selling the same item as others on the net, it’s even more important to invest in your own quality images. Mainly because most of your rivals will be using the exact same photographs: the manufacturer’s. It’s difficult to stand out when you don’t bring anything else to the table, so the only card you’d have left is the price.
This is essentially what happens on marketplaces like Amazon. The product sheet is the same for all sellers, so the cheapest seller comes out on top.
#6 – Generate traffic
Indeed, a good, optimised photograph will become an asset for your e-commerce business’ SEO. It will appear in searches and will therefore be a source of potential organic traffic.
Here what matters, even more so than the quality and uniqueness of the image (different from other websites), are small optimisations such as adding keywords into the file name and having alt text that also includes these search words.
Alt text is an attribute that displays a description of the image if it doesn’t load for whatever reason. It also allows screen-reading tools to describe images to visually impaired readers. By including this, you can improve your SEO and make your page more accessible.
Before we finish, there’s one last detail you should watch out for: the size of your images. A very big file affects SEO, usability and accessibility, so use images with lossless compression, which provides the same visual experience with added benefits.
