You’ve seen a bad picture before, right? An old photo of your parents on New Year’s Eve after too much champagne; your 4th grade school picture in that ridiculous frog shirt you thought was cool; your best friend’s first photo as an influence, featuring the sun and the glare of the sun blurring her out of the photo. It’s just plain embarrassing.
Normally, we hide these photos from the world. Why would we want to promote it when even we can’t stand the sight! We want to see people looking beautiful, smiling, and fashionably posing — because a photo can elicit an emotional response in all of us. It’s uncontrollable, and we want this response to be positive. Although this may seem like common sense, many ecommerce businesses today do not adhere to this rule. and the photo retouching service play a big role today for every single eCommerce image to look more better and natural.
There are millions of products visible to us on our smartphones, tablets and laptops, and unfortunately, not all of the product images we see are good ones. In order to optimize your audience as we head into the year 2020, it’s important to assure your products are being displayed the right way. In this article we try to discuss about important of image editing for ecommerce business.
The Importance of a Great Product Image & Image editing for ecommerce
Think of the last eCommerce site you visited — what products stuck in your memory? Were they ones with interesting descriptions? Did you even read the descriptions? Was it the product name? Do you even remember the product name? Or maybe it was the price — price does play a considerable factor in consumer decisions. However, a price is limited by the product display it represents.
If the accompanying image is grainy, unprofessional, or out of focus, it can lead to buyer hesitation, even if the price is affordable. By providing consumers with a clear, organized, and in focus view of what they are buying, there is no reason for the consumer to feel hesitation on adding that item into their cart.
The Mobile Perspective
Grab your smartphone, unlock it, and look at your home screen. Do you see all the applications (apps) on your phone? Each app you have is represented by an image. It is a visual representation of tools, marketplaces, social media platforms, games and tools. By default, our lives have been conditioned to utilize images to identify actions of our everyday life — check your account balance, check the weather, add or subtract, type a note, play Candy Crush. Images play a huge role in our identification of tasks in our everyday lives.
Beyond this, mobile presents consumers with unmatched accessibility to eCommerce businesses. A consumer can click their thumb on their web browser icon, type a search, and start viewing products all from the discomfort of their morning commute on public transportation, in the waiting room of their dentist’s office, even while in the bathroom…
Because of the abundance of consumer engagement on mobile devices, online retailers are provided an abundance of tools to organize their products and layouts of their website to be mobile-responsive. Meaning, the search result pages or product category page layouts are well-fitted to the small screens of a mobile device. However, what can’t be fixed, are the images themselves.
By having great product images for your eCommerce business, you properly utilize the tools and layouts your website uses. Furthermore, you optimize the small-screen availability of a mobile device by presenting interesting and relevant products directly in eye sight. Product images will take up the most space on a mobile screen. You do not want to waste that space (and that opportunity for engagement) with unprofessional images. This will elicit a negative response from your consumers.
Editing Your Images
There are a few common principals to a great photo, whether it be personal or, eCommerce/product-based. One big aspect is: keep it simple. Keeping it simple lays the foundation for the remaining principals. Avoid having hands or other items in the frame with the product of sale. You want the product to be the lead in the decisions that occur during the do-I-buy, do-I-not-buy tango.
The second principal of a great photo is: be mindful of the background you use. Don’t be cute with your product display — make sure the product stands out and don’t distract the consumer with artful backgrounds of sandstone or waterfalls. Keep the product the focus, because ultimately, that’s the reason both you and the consumer are there.
A third principal to follow is to highlight the product. This could be as simple as improving the brightness or darkness (depending on your image background) to make the product pop on the screen. Brightening images can get rid of that grainy, unprofessional feel of an image, creating more trust for a consumer.
The fourth principal to follow is: look for symmetry. When displaying a product, make sure the image of it is symmetrical, Symmetry elicits the feelings of evenness and order. Both of these feelings create positive responses to the viewer of the image, which is only a benefit when trying to engage a viewer you wish to turn into a consumer. Symmetry also circles back to both the first and second principals mentioned above. Symmetrical images also create the perception of simplicity, and it can be enhanced by having a background that adheres to that symmetry.
A final principal that will only help to enhance your consumer experience when interacting with the images of your eCommerce business, is: provide multiple angles of the product. Creating a 360 degree portfolio of a product, while also keeping in mind the four principals mentioned previously, will provide more opportunities to elicit positive responses from consumers, and also enhance the trust they have in the product, leading to a higher conversion rate potential.
Final Thoughts
As you’ve reached the end of this article, our hope is you have learned more about the power of images in eCommerce, the effects they have on consumers, their importance on mobile engagement, and the right way to create/edit an image for your business.
Good luck!
