When customers shop online, they cannot pick up a product, examine it closely or see exactly what it looks like in person. Your product images have to do much of that work for them.
Good product photography is therefore much more than making your website look attractive. The right images can help customers understand exactly what they are buying, answer questions before they are asked and give shoppers greater confidence to place an order.
Poor quality, inconsistent or limited product imagery can have the opposite effect. Even if the product itself is excellent, customers may hesitate if they cannot see enough detail or get a clear idea of what they will receive.
Improving your product images can be one of the simplest ways to improve the overall shopping experience and potentially increase ecommerce sales.
Image Quality Matters
The quality of your product photography can influence how customers perceive both the product and your business.
Images should be clear, sharp, and large enough for customers to examine the product properly. Blurred, pixelated or poorly lit photographs can make even a high-quality product appear less appealing.
High-resolution photography is particularly important for products where details matter, such as clothing, furniture, jewellery, tools, equipment and technical components.
However, there is a balance.
Uploading unnecessarily large image files can slow down your website, particularly on mobile devices. Images should therefore be properly resized and optimised for the web so that you can provide good image quality without sacrificing website performance.
Modern image formats and effective image compression can help achieve this balance.
Show Products from Multiple Angles
A single photograph is rarely enough to properly demonstrate a product.
Think about what a customer would do if they were examining the product in a physical shop. They might pick it up, turn it around and look at the front, back, sides and underneath.
Your product page should try to recreate that experience.
Depending on the product, this could include:
- Front and rear views
- Side views
- Close-ups of important details
- Packaging
- Connections, controls or fittings
- Internal components
- Different colours or finishes
The more useful information you can provide visually, the less the customer has to imagine.
Multiple images can also answer questions that would otherwise result in the customer contacting you – or simply leaving the website.
Let Customers Zoom In
If you provide high-quality product images, customers should also be able to examine them properly.
Image zoom allows shoppers to look closely at materials, finishes, textures and smaller details that may not be obvious from the standard product image.
This can be particularly valuable for products such as clothing, jewellery, furniture, machinery and specialist equipment.
On mobile devices, customers increasingly expect to be able to tap or pinch an image to enlarge it.
The important thing is to ensure that zooming actually reveals additional detail. Enlarging a low-resolution image until it becomes blurred does little to improve the shopping experience.
Use Lifestyle Photography
Standard product photography is important, but lifestyle photography can help customers imagine actually owning or using the product.
Instead of only showing a product against a plain background, show it in a realistic environment.
Furniture can be shown within a furnished room. Clothing can be photographed on a model. Garden products can be shown outdoors. Tools and equipment can be photographed while being used.
Lifestyle images help provide context while also making product pages more engaging.
For many products, the best approach is a combination of both.
Use clean, consistent photographs to clearly show the product itself and additional lifestyle photography to demonstrate how the product looks or works in the real world.
Give Customers a Sense of Scale
One of the biggest difficulties when shopping online is understanding the actual size of a product.
Dimensions can be provided within the product description or specifications, but customers do not always find it easy to visualise measurements.
Photography can help.
Showing a product next to a familiar object or being held or used by a person can immediately give customers a better understanding of its size.
For example, a bag photographed on its own may appear larger or smaller than expected. Showing somebody carrying it gives the customer an instant sense of scale.
For furniture and larger products, showing the item within a room can achieve the same result.
Dimensions should still be clearly displayed on the product page, but visual scale references can make those measurements much easier to understand.
Keep Your Product Imagery Consistent
Consistency is particularly important when customers are browsing categories or comparing several products.
If one product has a white background, another has a grey background and another has been photographed at a completely different angle or size, the category page can quickly look untidy.
Try to establish a consistent approach to your main product images.
This might include using the same:
- Background
- Image dimensions
- Product positioning
- Camera angle
- Lighting style
- Amount of space around the product
Consistent photography helps create a more professional-looking ecommerce website and makes it easier for customers to browse and compare products.
Additional gallery images can then provide different angles, close-ups and lifestyle photography.
Images Should Help Customers Make Decisions
It is easy to think of product images as simply something that accompanies the product description.
They should actually be doing much more.
Every image should help answer a potential customer’s question.
What does the back look like? How large is it? What is the finish like? What does it look like when being used? What is included? How does this colour look in a real environment?
If an image can answer one of these questions more effectively than several paragraphs of text, it is worth including.
This is particularly important for more expensive or complex products where customers are likely to spend longer researching before making a purchase.
Better Images Can Reduce Uncertainty
A customer who understands exactly what they are buying is generally more confident about completing an order.
Providing high-quality photographs, multiple angles, detailed zoom, lifestyle images and clear scale references can remove some of the uncertainty associated with buying online.
It may also help reduce situations where a product arrives and the customer says, “It wasn’t what I expected.”
Better imagery therefore has the potential to improve more than conversion rates. It can contribute to a better overall customer experience and potentially reduce avoidable returns.
Make Your Product Images Work Harder
Improving ecommerce sales does not always require adding new functionality or completely redesigning your website.
Sometimes it is about presenting the products you already sell more effectively.
Review some of your most popular product pages and look at them from the customer’s perspective.
Can you clearly see the product? Can you zoom in? Are there enough photographs? Can you understand its size? Can you see how it would look when being used? Are the images consistent with the rest of the website?
If the answer to some of these questions is no, improving your product imagery could be a relatively straightforward way to improve your ecommerce website and give customers greater confidence to buy.