Product Photography Strategies: Boost Your Conversion

Can product photography really boost your sales conversion rate on Amazon?

Optimizing product images is one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase your traffic. Especially when you are in a highly competitive niche, quality images play a pivotal role and draw lines between sellers.

Eye-tracking studies show that visitors of online stores and product pages are first engaged by visual elements which makes them more likely to stick around and explore. It will remain the only way to attract the attention of a wandering shopper and will play a huge part in making a successful listing in 2021.

Many times people go back to certain products just to see the aesthetically pleasing pictures or show it to someone as a reference product. Your product will pop up in their minds whenever a need arises disregarding any negative reviews on their own if the product images are amazing. That’s the power of photography!

Table of Contents

Toggle

7 Facts – Consumer Behaviour

Average attention span of your customers is 6-8 seconds, you literally have seconds to grab customer attention (Fadi Fouladgar, Marketing & Management Consultant).
First impressions are important and images are processed by customers 60,000 times faster than text (disruptiveadvertising.com).
Online shoppers want products to be brought to life with images (78%) and product reviews (69%) (bigcommerce.com).
78% of online shoppers want more images from eCommerce sites (bigcommerce.com).
93% of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in whether or not they make a purchase (justuno.com).
52% of shoppers abandon sites and do not return because they dislike the overall aesthetics (justuno.com).
38% of people leave a website if they find the layout unattractive (disruptiveadvertising.com).

Essentials to Perfection

Our target is not just to work on customer engagement but to induce customer emotions whenever they look at our products. Upload a maximum number of photos and follow the general guidelines below:

Main image/base image should be:
- Striking
- Have white background
- Blown up, option to zoom in
Width should be 500 mega pixels (or more) and length should be 1000 mega pixels (or more)
Product should take 85% or more of the image frame
Listing Images should be:
- Highlighting product features and comparisons
- Lifestyle, action shots, product should be in use
- Different angles of the same product
- Product labeling for quality assurance
- Products on models, show people enjoying the product
- Scale-able shots that help people understand sizing
- Technical specifications, product information and measurements like size charts

Image Sequence. (i) Put yourself in customer’s shoes and think the order in which you would like to see product pictures. Main photo should be about your product only and listing photos should show different sides, measurements, packaging and components (ii) You can also work on a story line of pictures for example in health improvement category, start with pictures of a person in problem then move to its use/application and finally reaching the satisfaction stage. Show that customer attains happiness and their worries go away after they use your product.

Crisp Images. You might need to use a photo editor to make sure the right color balance, brightness, cropping or resizing images to yield an attractive product outlook.

Follow the Footsteps. See how leading products in your category or another category have displayed their product photos.
All Sides. Show all sides of your product to increase trust levels of buyer, show that you are not withholding any information and you have pure intentions in informing customers everything related to the product for them to make the right choice.

Packaging. Only include it in photos if it’s relevant to the product otherwise, pass. Example can be of fragile products with safe packaging to give comfort to the shopper that the product will reach them safely.

Enhanced Brand Content (EBC). It’s an option available to add extra content (images or text) in a template form and this will appear as soon as you apply for a brand on Amazon. Please click here if you want to learn in detail about Enhanced Brand Content (EBC).

Talk to Your Customers. Can we? You can’t persuade customers yourself, apprise them about product features and let them know the history of your brand (if any) as you cannot interact with them at the time of purchase. Let these 3 things talk to your customers and be an advocate on your behalf:

Product Descriptions
Product Images
Product Videos

Things To Avoid

Background. Main image should be in pure white, do not experiment with different colors or by introducing models in your main image.
Amazon Policy. Your images are likely to be taken off or product ranking will be affected if you don’t follow Amazon guidelines.
Clarity. Images shouldn’t be blurry or fuzzy.
Packaging. Product shouldn’t be shown in packing unless it has some relevance.
All in One. Let the customer focus on just one object, your product. Avoid scattered products or parts of products.
Amazon Logo. Do not try to be smart by placing Amazon’s logo to attract shopper’s attention or make your product look trustworthy. You will be caught eventually!
Misleading Images. We do recommend editing images and make them presentable to customers but they should be realistic and should not raise expectations as customers will draw comparisons with what was promised to them online and what got delivered to them in real time. You are likely to receive negative reviews, increase in returns or decrease in seller’s rank as a result.
Format. Make sure you do not use formats other than TIFF, JPEG, GIF and PNG.
Product Identifier. File names must consist of the product identifier (Amazon ASIN, 13 digit ISBN, EAN, JAN or UPC) followed by a period and the appropriate file extension e.g. B000123456.jpg)
Characters. Spaces, dashes, or additional characters in the filename will prevent your image from uploading.
Drawings & Illustrations. Not allowed.

Substandard Photos – Consequences

Product Value. People will judge during the first interaction, the value of the product in terms of moeny they are about to spend and whether the product they see resonates with the price.

Brand Value. Images lead viewers wondering about legitimacy of your product, brand and your company. Good quality images give an impression of a strong company at the backend.

Professional Photography – Benefits

Years of experience using professional and sophisticated equipment in a studio environment.
Constant client feedback improves their skills. The range of their scope is more by working with small, medium and large enterprises.
They develop a better perception of what an end-user is targeting. End-user is essentially not looking for a professional photograph, they are searching for a product they can touch just by looking at it.

Photography Packages

You will have to dedicate a separate budget if you want impeccable photos that bring life to your product. You have plenty of options available online and can work with individuals and companies. They usually charge per picture or have bundle offers available, you can find plenty on fiverr for $10, $20, $50 per picture based on the profile of the photographer. However, quality is not always guaranteed with freelance photographers.

Go check our details for Starter, Standard and Extreme product photography packages by clicking here.

Metrics Tracking

Click-Through Rate (CTR). It is calculated as total clicks divided by total impressions and anything around 0.5% and above is deemed as good CTR (www.sellerap.com). Captivating and appealing images will tempt a browsing shopper to at least click which can ultimately help in improving your seller’s rank.

A/B Testing. Once you upload images, try split testing them by switching your main image with one of your listing images to see which one performs in terms of number of clicks or conversions.

Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS). Your ACoS strategy needs to vary according to your product and you need to decide if your product requires high/low visibility. Monitor your ACoS once you upload high quality product photos, typically ‘good ACoS’ for a seller means low ACoS for maximum profitability. Your product page and price are half the equation in creating a conversion. Your product page will only achieve greatness if you have high quality product photos.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Monitor the conversion rate after changing images, see how visitors convert into repeat visitors and finally into customers.

Decoding Shopper Mindset

At times we neglect most common things, lets dive deep into the basics of online marketing.

R.I.P. Customers look at Reviews, Images, and prices. Only price and images are directly in your hand, you can’t write reviews yourself. If price and reviews are integral in making a purchase then images stand as the biggest factor someone clicks on your product.

Break Down The Buying Process. What do you do when you are buying a product in a shop? Let’s say a ceramic mug. You go into a store, look at the mug, pick it up, see it from all sides and buy it. Can shoppers do the same while purchasing online? They are deprived of their basic right to feel the product. For this reason alone, we need to realize that customers will always look at online products dubiously and will scrutinize, cross-check, verify in whatever way they can.

Classic AMZ Seller Mindset

Experienced Sellers. It’s painful to see sellers with superior quality products, great reviews and product descriptions displaying poor images suffer with conversion rates. Competition is getting fiercer, soon people will be ignoring the products altogether with single or low quality pictures.

Skills. Some people underestimate photography, take it lightly and want to save the cost. They fail to understand that it is not just photography skills at play, it is it’s unique combination with marketing knowledge that makes it a key ingredient in the recipe of success.

An Investment. Is it expensive? Yes it is! Like all other quality services. A mature seller’s question should be, is it worth it? Will it bring about any change in the conversion rate? You can always determine the per-unit cost and spread it over to the number of units to make the impact feel less.

The Risk. Some customers try different products just for fun while others are not interested in experimenting. You have to satisfy the risk averse, by handing out as much detail to win their trust and we also need to address the risk takers by showing them powerful promising product photos that tell them that their purchase will provide a different and better experience they were looking forward to.

By Products

Quality images are your asset and you can use them in advertising on different platforms to drive audiences and run online campaigns alongside:

Facebook pages
Instagram
Website
Twitter
Emails

Take Away

No matter how good your product is, it WILL NOT SELL if your product images are not promising and this factor will remain a sales booster next year.

Our team actively works with Amazon Sellers and eCommerce websites, feel free to contact our experts if you need support in your product launch journey.

Michelle zhang