E-Commerce Product Image Optimization Tips to Boost Online Sales
Online shopping is more popular than ever and the trend continues to grow each year. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, online consumer spending reached $1.119 trillion in 2023, and e-commerce transactions represented 22.0% of total retails sales.
One of the most important and influential selling aspects of e-commerce websites are the product images. In order for your small business to compete in the e-commerce world and drive sales, it is vital to ensure you are utilizing the best practices for e-commerce product images. Consider these e-commerce product image tips to help boost your small business store’s online sales!
Table of Contents
1. Capture and Use Multiple High-Quality Photos from Various Angles
Since customers are unable to see the item they are buying in person, high-quality photos are essential to help drive e-commerce sales. High-resolution images of your product shown from several different angles not only draw in visitors, but help potential customers feel more comfortable making a purchase.
Ensure your photos are high resolution and do not have distracting backgrounds or harsh shadows. Consider using a product photography light box which can help you obtain studio quality lighting for your photos.
Additionally, high-resolution images, paired with a quality e-commerce website design, will typically allow customers to utilize zoom features to zoom up on certain sections of the high quality image. If your image is low resolution, this feature will be a very unsatisfactory experience for your potential customer.
2. Show Your Product In Use
In addition to standalone images of the products, capture photos of your product in use. A consumer can better envision using a product themselves when they see it being properly used in an image. To boost e-commerce sales, try displaying images of your target audience using your product to help your potential customers make a more conscious purchasing decision.
If you have multiple customer personas for a specific product, make sure each persona is represented by the product photos displayed.
3. Crowdsource Images from Past Customers
As a bonus tip, you can easily crowd-source images from your past customers. For e-commerce websites we build, we leverage automated email follow-ups to encourage customers to write a customer review and include photos/videos within their review. If a customer uploads a review without a photo, they receive a thank you but also a soft ask and quick and easy upload link to add their photo.
This crowdsourced image strategy allows you to massively scale the number of photos you're generating without having to coordinate a photoshoot!
4. Implement Tasteful Image Edits
Do not forget that properly editing your images is just as important as capturing them. Proper edits include cropping, touch-ups, lighting adjustments, compression, and more. Of course, do not overdo the edits, as you want to make sure that your product is clearly and accurately represented by the product photos.
We personally use and recommend Adobe Photoshop as well as Lightroom for any edits needed for your product photos. However, if you're slightly less tech savvy, you might want to try out Adobe Express which can do basic image edits and graphics without graphic design knowledge and at a fraction of the cost.
5. Optimize Images for SEO
In order to improve your small business visibility and increase traffic to your e-commerce website, search engine optimization (SEO) is critical. Optimize your images for SEO by including a product description with each image. Also, ensuring your image file names are optimized and adding descriptive alt tags to each image will help search engines better understand what your images are displaying, boosting your search engine rankings for relevant search queries.
Keep in mind that search engines look at the text around the image (e.g. captions, nearby paragraphs of text, alt tags, etc.) to glean context for the images. As such, if you want to boost the effectiveness and visibility of your images, make sure your text content complements your images and is helpful for your visitors.
Be sure that your e-commerce website also features an image sitemap which can also help boost the discovery of your products via Google’s image search.
6. Optimize Images for Responsive Design
According to CapitalOne, 57% of online shopping is done on mobile phones, and that figure is constantly growing. When viewing your e-commerce site on a mobile device, images not optimized for responsive design will cause your website to lag and load slowly which can lead to a lost sale. Compress product images before uploading them to ensure faster load times and a smoother user experience. Faster load times also impact your overall search engine rankings as of summer 2021 as a part of the Core Web Vitals.
Contact Our E-Commerce Design Experts
At Igniting Business, we strive to help your small business e-commerce website succeed. For more e-commerce website tips, or to learn more about our e-commerce website design services, contact our team today or sign up for our free monthly newsletter packed full of e-commerce tips and tricks.!
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