Owning or managing a blog or an ecommerce site is extremely challenging these days. Ten years ago, there were a lot more barriers to overcome, so less competitors. The main one being the actual website build which could have cost anything from £10k to £100k.
Nowadays, platforms like WordPress, Shopify and Big Commerce make the design and management much more accessible. Pair that with the ever growing social media sites, and the technology in cameras being what it is. You no longer need to spend thousands on equipment to get you started.
It is estimated that there’s between 12 and 24 million ecommerce sites on the internet today. Astonishingly, only 110,000 of them are generating meaningful revenue (source).
Stand Out In A Crowd
In such crowded spaces the key is to try and stand out amongst everyone else. Give the customer a very good reason to choose you instead of XYZ company. Ideally, you’d have a very strong proposition and a market that is hungry for your version of what you’re selling. You also shouldn’t ignore the basics. One of the most important basics is how you present your products to the visitor through your photography.
It’s safe to say that the importance of product photography for ecommerce is hugely underestimated. The majority of ecommerce owners will use stock images of the products. Just like 100’s of other sellers. Whilst stock images are usually taken professionally, if everyone is using them you don’t stand out.
Product Images
Taking your own product images can help you differentiate from everyone else and can help you increase sales. For example. If the stock photographs of an air purifier are just one image of the product in it’s box. One of it sitting in the corner of a room and one of a happy woman breathing in clean air. There’s an opportunity.
You can take similar pictures but you can also think about what a buyer would like to see. A buyer would want to know how easy it is to change the filters. How easy it is to put together. Is it easy to move? How much noise it makes. Whether it needs a lot of space around it. If you can answer any of these questions using product photography you will increase your chances of getting the sale.
Photo Editing Software
If you want to take this a step further, you could edit the images using photo editing software to add height and weight information, add further information about how to change filters and also better demonstrate the filter in action. Waves emanating from the filter make it look like the filter is in action and offer a much better experience. This is an actual case from an ecommerce store selling air purifiers and adding better quality images boosted conversion rate by 1.25%.
Remember, the images on your ecommerce site are a huge part of how a potential customer will judge your proposition. Take the time to think about what a customer wants to see and try and reflect that in the product photography.
If you don’t have the skills the create your own images (and most people don’t as it’s extremely specialist), hire a professional ecommerce product photography company. The last thing you want is for your business to go in to administration because you didn’t stand out from the rest!
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