Product Image Optimization: Why Optimizing Product Images is Important For Your Online Store

When it comes to online marketing, product image optimization can dictate the pace of your marketing campaign. This is why people can experience bad sales despite hiring the best designers to create killer designs. As expected, it’s the first thing customers look at when they come across your website; hence, the need to leverage top-notch product images. This article will focus on telling everything you should know before adding product images to your e-commerce site. Read on to find out more.

The Importance of Good Images for your online shop (Implementing Product Image Optimization)

For a long time, we’ve seen several studies’ results point to the role of high-quality product images in influencing consumers’ online activities. Most customers easily trust online stores that offer them a way to view or experience the products before making their purchase. Nobody wants to make a purchase without seeing their products from different angles and in different colors. Since online shoppers can’t feel or touch the product before authenticating their purchase, they’ll instead choose to see everything they can about the product.

With the pandemic raging, there’s no better time to leverage online shopping than now. There’s a current surge in online shopping, which has caused shoppers to be more aware of product images and information. Of course, people need to see different angles of your product before making their purchases, and with shops closed, online pictures have become the only easy way to find out more about these products.

Trust Google Image Search – Optimize Your Image For What People Search For!

Beyond People, Machines Would Also Need Detailed Product Images 

Thanks to advancements in technology, there’s a need for image designers to consider machines when designing images. Search engines and other platforms are increasingly learning both to ‘read’ images and make sense of what’s in them. They combine this information to provide your search results. This is why you can now take a picture of a cool pair of shoes, upload them on search engines, and learn about their cost and origin. Travelers can even translate road signs on the go. Popularly referred to as visual search, this trend is increasingly gaining popularity.

Guess what! We see a consistent increase in this technology, with machines learning to read more complex images. Then again, with clarity and good quality, there can be an improved chance of machine understanding an image.

Product Images Can Set The Mood

No doubt, product images make up a big part of every type of online store. However, time and again, you see big e-commerce stores who’s online photos don’t do justice to their products. The truth is that standing out in a very competitive industry starts from your images. One strategy that’s becoming a trend is using photos of people using your products. Irrespective of what you sell, adding people to your products makes them look friendlier and more usable to your target customers.

One reason why uploading products in use drives so many results is that it allows people to picture how the product will suit their needs. It’s the closest customers can get to in-store experiences. If you must stand out in your competition, you must be ready to allow your customers to feel like they are seeing and feeling the products physically before purchase. Some firms even go as far as adding small videos to demonstrate certain features of their products.

Zooming Ability

Before clicking to buy a product, customers naturally want to take a closer look at every detail about the product. That’s why online stores are adding the ‘zoom’ feature to their sites. But there are several frustrating instances where the zoomed image remains the same size (sometimes smaller) than the size in the original product image. The frequency of this occurrence is because most online shops tend to directly import product images from their manufacturers without running the images through the required test. Surely, this reduces user experience.

The best thing to do in situations where there are no proper product images is to create one. These days, even iPhone cameras can provide decent images with the right qualities to serve as zoomable product images. Online stores like Shopify include features that you can leverage to DIY your photography. Most of these sites also have outstanding guides that point you to how you can create amazing images for your online store.

Any Color You Want as Long as You Paint It Black.

Times are changing. Thanks to modern advancements, you can now get your products in many colors. Of course, customers want to see your product’s different color options in the same way as your ‘main’ color variant.

For example, if a customer wants to purchase a blue sweater, probabilities exist that they’ll want to see the sweater in their preferred color. However, online stores have learned to not only show the colored squares. Many of them now show a thumbnail of the product in another color.

Of course, in addition to showing different color options available for the product, stores now have detailed photos and videos of the products. This is especially applicable to products with one primary color and a few other colors.

Alternate Views

Before making your purchase, you want to see the different angles of your product. Taking Blue Tomato as an example, you’ll find images of their sweaters being used from the front and the back, with other additional details. With this, customers can see different angles of the sweater.

The same applies to customers that are looking to purchase items like furniture online. Such customers would want to see the different angles of the item. Whatever the situation, it’s always about feeling like you are having an in-store experience. This is why many stores offer a video of the product being used in order to let customers see how the product looks from different angles.

Wrapping Things Up Around Product Image Optimization

There’s no doubting the fact that product images are becoming more important. Therefore, you’ll need to ensure the proper optimization of your product images if you have an online business. Apart from improving customer experience, it also helps to show your products in the best light. Therefore, your customers will appreciate it if your product images:

• Your Product Images are of the best quality
• Product Images have the zoom option
• Show the product in different available colors. (set variations)
• Show the product from different angles. (making sure the potential customer knows what he’s getting)

We hope that this article helps you know the truth about why your products need proper online images optimization.

Check out the rest of our marketing blog