Photography is important in eCommerce – get it right!

A quick post today, but a very important one about images on your eCommerce website.Images are realllllly important in eCommerce and can sell your products before the customer has even read the item description.

So let’s brake this down in to two simple categories of image:

1. Cut out – a product on a white background
2. Lifestyle – the product in a situation e.g. a chair sat by a table

So when should you use what? well, there’s no set guidelines for this. Some websites will use all lifestyle, some all cut outs and some a mixture of both.

Uses for cut out photography:

• Clean, consistent look
• Items probably don’t need a specific context in which they are shown
• Can also be good for print advertising such as catalogues

Uses for lifestyle photography:

• Puts products in to a context – e.g. a chair inside a kitchen might evoke “oooh, that chair would look great in my kitchen!”
• Can include multiple products (a good way of cross selling) – e.g. a sofa with some cushions on it: “ooh, those cushions looks great with that sofa, lets buy those too!”
• Can look nicer with some products, it’s important to see what looks right on your website

Things to avoid:

• Awful reflective lighting
• Wonky pictures
• Pictures taken on your bed or carpet – seriously, it looks really unprofessional
• Lots of different shapes and sizes on the same page – it looks odd
• Low resolution images – people want to be able to see the product

How to improve your imagery:

• Set a standard for the website – of quality and size requirements.
• Decide where you are using lifestyle and where you are using cut-outs.
• Ask suppliers if they can give you images – often suppliers spend a large amount of money on getting professional pictures taken.
• Take your own photographs – this doesn’t have to be expensive but can require some investment. A half decent camera and light-box set up could cost you below £600, and there’s plenty of resources online which will help you to take decent photographs yourself.
• Hire a photographer – expensive but can really make your products look great, especially if they are unique.
• Invest in some image manipulation software (Photoshop is the best but the cheaper Photoshop Elements is also useful, Gimp is OK if you’re on a tight budget). This will allow you to tweak images, from simple cropping to airbrushing any imperfections.

Ok, so this turned out to be a not so quick post, but seriously – this is important. Bookmark this, share it with your friends and try to remember it, it will really help.