Image management

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One of the main reservations shoppers have about buying online is that they simply cannot touch and try out your goods in the way they can in a high-street store. That’s why your product photography is so important as your pictures are the closest visitors can get to your products before they buy.

So you need to make best use of the potential within your eCommerce system to replicate the experience of shopping in a bricks-and-mortar store as closely as you can.

This means providing visitors with all the visual content they need so that, should they decide to go ahead, they already have a very good idea of what to expect when the item arrives in the post.

But not only that. No matter how persuasive your text, your customers will still defer judgement until they’ve thoroughly checked out the photographs of your item. So it therefore goes without saying that you should showcase your products in the best possible light and use the highest quality images you can afford.

Your product photography is a powerful selling tool and a good eCommerce web design solution will allow you to make the most of it. When deciding between the different systems available you should look for some key features, as detailed below.

Providing alternative views of your item from different angles, including close-ups of detailed features, can really convey a sense of what the customer will get for their money.

This is what makes the facility to upload multiple product images such an important component of any back-office eCommerce system. Without it, you’ll be restricted to just one product image on your product details pages, making it harder for customers to make an informed purchasing decision.

And with certain types of merchandise, multiple images will enable you to give an even wider view of the product by, for example, showing a photo of the product packaging or a shot of the item together with its components, accessories and anything else that’s included.

Genuine prospective customers normally like to take a closer look at your product. So make sure your eCommerce system allows shoppers to enlarge product images. When used with good quality photography, picture enlargements can do much of the selling by bringing out the finer details of your product and highlighting the quality of materials and workmanship.

Features that allow visitors to zoom in on the item or scroll to rotate it can really add life to your products. For certain types of online retailers these features can add significant value to the shopping experience, but for others they are an unnecessary waste of marketing budget.

Online retail sites can be a particular bugbear to visitors with slow Internet access, such as dial-up and mobile broadband users, as eCommerce pages usually contain more than their fair share of images.

A good eCommerce web designer will be able to advise you on the best way to optimise your images for download performance. Not only that, but they should be able to offer you a fast and reliable server to host your site and have coding practices in place to minimise the time to load your pages.