Wherever you sell online, your product images are one of the most crucial elements in determining whether or not you make the sale. The more visual information you can give your visitors in the form of detailed images, the more comfortable they feel buying your products.
Ultimately, good quality, consistent product images will enhance user experience, boost conversions and reduce returns. Check out five simple tips for great product images from Remove The Background:
1. Make your images unique
It will almost always pay to invest in quality images of your products. If your competitors all use the same suppliers’ images, providing your own, higher quality, more detailed images is a great way to make your offerings stand out from the crowd.
Shoot your own – It’s not as difficult as you might think to create great-looking product images yourself. A small investment in equipment will more than pay for itself with the increased sales that good images will bring.
And despite what you might have heard, you don’t have to have the most expensive camera to take competent product shots. Much of the work can be done afterwards in Photoshop – something you can easily outsource.
Hire a photographer – Plenty of product photographers will collect and return your products or shoot ‘on-location’ for a day or two for a reasonable price. It typically costs less than £10 per image if you have enough products to shoot. Keep the cost down by outsourcing the post-production yourself.
Edit your suppliers’ images – If your budget doesn’t stretch to either of the above, you can dramatically improve your images, not to mention your website by getting your suppliers’ images edited so that they’re consistent.
2. Keep your image use consistent
Nothing ruins website design more thoroughly than product images in a multitude of formats. Decide what kind of images you need and keep your image use consistent throughout.
Main image - It’s important that your products’ main images look good when viewed together whether it be on category pages, search, order confirmations or your marketplace listings. Consistency is key.
Main images should contain no interfering elements, just the product. Remove backgrounds and make sure images are the same size, with the object aligned consistently in the frame. If you have both landscape and portrait images, make all images square. If you sell clothing, it’s good practice to use an ‘invisible mannequin’ shot.
Alternative view images - Extremely important when your visitor has shown interest in your product and wants to study it more closely. Include shots from multiple angles and make sure every relevant detail is displayed.
3. Make sure your images are large enough to gain full advantage of website zoom features
Any feature you use to give your customers the ability to zoom in on your products is useless if your images are too small. Clicking to zoom is a clear sign of interest from your customers – they want to see detail, so make sure you give it to them!
Images should be no less than 1000 pixels on both sides, and up to a maximum of 3000 pixels.
4. Check your colours
When selling apparel or other products where colour is of high importance, it’s always a good idea to give the colour balance a check. Correct colours will increase trust and reduce returns. If you’re shooting images yourself, set the camera white balance and make sure you don’t mix lighting sources.
5. Consider using watermarks
And lastly, if you’re going to invest time and resources creating great-looking product images, it’s worth taking steps to stop them being pinched by your competitors. Placing a watermark in the background can do the job. However, you should be aware that certain marketplaces such as Amazon do not allow this.
The likes of amazon don’t want watermarked images so they can use them whiteout the overhead of producing their own when they undercut you and steal your custom.
You only have to order something popular on amazon and buy through the market place then go back and they’re not showing or amazon is selling cheaper, they’d look foolish using your image watermarked I’m not sure but I think they claim some right to them.
Though not a lover of eBay, at least they offer the option of watermarking your images.
Just my two pence worth.
Other than that, there are some good tips.