Product images can make or break your online shop’s success. You can hire the best designer in the world to create a killer design, but when images are bad, sales will be bad. It’s the first thing a customer will look at. In this post, we’ll go over a number of things you need to consider when adding product images to your e-commerce site.
Table of contents
- The importance of good images
- Not just for people, but for machines as well
- Product images set a mood
- Quality of your product images
- Ability to zoom
- Any color you want as long as it is black
- Alternate views or products
- To wrap things up
The importance of good images
Over the years, there’ve been many studies that show the online consumer values high-quality product images. Customers trust credible online stores to have a way to view or experience the product online. They want to see product in all available colors and from all different angles. Online shoppers can’t touch the product so they have get everything they need from your description, images and videos. So, they better be good!
And in the year of the pandemic, the surge in online shopping has made it shoppers even more aware of good product information and images. With shops closed, they need to be able to see your products in the best light on your site.
Recent research from Periscope (a McKinsey brand), shows that many shoppers make the move to online for the first time. What they value most is good product descriptions and clear images.
“The need for informative product descriptions and clear product images at a time when consumers couldn’t see, feel or test products in a store ranked as one of the top three factors for a great online browsing experience in all the countries we surveyed, increasing in importance by 12 to 23% from pre- to post-shutdown.”
Not just for people, but for machines as well
Today, great images aren’t just consumed by people but machines as well. Increasingly, search engines and other platforms can ‘read’ images to make sense of what’s on them. As a result, they can provide you with a search result. So, you could take a photo of a cool pair of shoes your friend bought and have the search engine tell you where they came from and what they cost. Or, they can do a live translation of a road sign in a foreign language. This is called visual search — and it’s gaining speed!
The technology for this is getting better by the day and machines can read evermore complex images. But here, again, clear images of high-quality is increasing the chance of a machine understanding the image.
Product images set a mood
Product images are a big part of every type of online store. But sometime, you find e-commerce site with big images that just don’t do justice to the products the company sells. The images of the featured products simply don’t ‘pop’. If you want to stand out for the thousands of other stores, your photography needs to do that as well.
One of the things you could try is to use photos of people using the product. Or the product in use. It doesn’t matter if you sell coffee machines or dresses. If you add people, your product will look friendlier and people will see themselves using your products.

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