The use of photography in eCommerce

A successful ecommerce site has many elements that work together to make it successful. An effective user interface, speed, perceived trust, price, variety, etc. Depending on your budget you can choose an off the shelf system or custom build an ecommerce platform that best combines these elements for your specific purposes.

There are a few things though, that a 3rd party or even a custom solution can’t do for you. One of those things, often left up to your agency, your marketing department or even yourself, is the photography of your product.

Product photos would rate as the one of the most influential factors in positively converting a user from a browser to a buyer. Your agency has probably designed you an amazing site, the concepts presented gleam with polished product shots taken on shiny white surfaces and even have the reflections like the Mac Store (probably because the images were borrowed for ‘illustrative purposes’ from the Mac Store…) and you were very happy with the result. The reality may be that you get your images from any source you can, they are different sizes, ratios, colours and angles. There may be so little consistency that once you populate your new site it suddenly looks exactly like your old one.

Without being able to hold, feel or touch the product a customer relies completely on the images provided. In a bricks and mortar store they’d be able to convince themselves as they hold the product and form an emotional attachment with it on the spot. Online you have to at least try to give them a similar experience. Multiple angles, a zoom function, different colours, highlight special features and sell the product through the images.

Photography isn’t hard or expensive. A product shot that is better than the existing product shot you have on your site is one step closer to a successful sale. Every opportunity you can give a customer to experience the product from more than one perspective is one more opportunity they may take to purchase. Take a look through some ecommerce stores, see how easy it is to take a decent product shot and look for yourself how much easier it makes it to trust the site and the product.