A picture is worth a thousand words, and in ecommerce, it’s worth a thousand sales.

High-quality visual content and product images for ecommerce can make or break a sale for online businesses as customers rely on visuals to make buying decisions. 

So, in this blog, we’re going to help you make your online store even better.

We’ll show you eight smart tricks to make your product pictures look awesome. Let’s get started!

What are Ecommerce Product Images?

E-commerce product images are pictures or photographs of the products that are being sold in an online store.

These images are crucial elements of an e-commerce website as they visually represent the items available for purchase.

They provide potential customers with a clear understanding of what the products look like, their features, and how they might be used.

What are the Ways to Enhance Ecommerce Product Images?

We’re going to talk about simple and easy tricks to make ecommerce product images in your online store look super awesome.

We’ll show you how to turn plain images into ones that tell stories and make people excited to buy.

1. Display Every Color and Style Option

When you’re showing your product on the internet, it’s really important to not just talk about its different colors. You should actually show them.

It’s good to have different choices for your product but not having any pictures to show those choices will be worse.

When you have pictures for each version of your product, people can see what it looks like from all sides, in the color or design they like best.

This makes your product detail page even better and can really help your online store sell more things.

Famous apparel brand SHEIN does this effortlessly, showing each of their products in each color available.

This allows the customer to visualize each product in their preferred color or style and boosts their conversions. 

Source: Shein

Product Images for eCommerce store are an important part of your complete Product Content management strategy. Check out our PCM tool that helps optimize your images in bulk.

2. Provide Zoom In Option for Details

Giving your buyers an image zoom feature automatically adds to the customer experience. Users almost always mouse over an ecommerce product image to see if they can zoom into the image to see the product up close, and with more scrutiny.

If they see that your images are in fact not zoomable, they’ll be left very unsatisfied. And what will happen as a result? An increased bounce rate. 

This is why having high-resolution eCommerce product images is very important.

Shein’s product images are zoomable, allowing users to have a closer look at the texture of the clothes and the material. This increases the likelihood of the customer going through with a purchase because they get all the necessary information they need. 

Source: Shein

3. Observe the Basics of Image SEO 

Images, just like product descriptions, need to be optimized for search engines. 

Providing the right meta descriptions can cause your images to rank higher. It’s also important to give your images alt text and title text. 

This data is also important for visually impaired shoppers, who rely on alt text to know what the image is about. They depend on your metadata to tell them what those images are and what they look like.

Beyond alt text and title text, you’ll also want to consider your strategy for using captions with your photos.

The name of your ecommerce product images also matters to search engine web crawlers, so don’t leave the name at “AP977631”. We know it’s much easier to leave it at the name that your computer, camera, or phone assigned to it.

But this can be detrimental to your SEO. Give appropriate file names to each of your images, so search engine web crawlers can know what it is, or what it shows. 

4. Use a White Background for your Products

By keeping a white background for all your images, you ensure consistency throughout. 

White backgrounds are standard in almost every online store, and there are a few very good reasons for that:

• Your products will stand out on a white background.
• Your images will look consistent on product pages.
• You will save money and time in editing.
• You can easily reuse or replace the background on any of your photos.
• Marketplaces like Google Shopping and Amazon now have made it mandatory to have white backgrounds.

You can use software such as Photoshop or Pixlr to manually replace the background of your product photos with a white background, or let services like Pixc do the work for you.

Pandora uses a white background for all its ecommerce product images, which elevates the product and maintains consistency.

Source: Pandora

5. Boost Page Speed with Image Formats

It’s easy to just choose the default save option when you’re creating your ecommerce product images, but knowing the difference between file formats and settings can have a massive impact on your site.

The three most common formats used for ecommerce product images in e-commerce that are supported by most ecommerce platforms are ;

• JPG/JPEG
• GIF
• PNG

I. GIF

These images have a lower quality and take up less space in files. If you’re making an image for small icons or tiny pictures, then using a GIF is a good idea.

GIFs are the only type of image that can move or change over time, like a mini video. But when images get larger, GIFs don’t work as well for showing lots of colors.

II. PNG

They can show more colors and are the only kind of image that can have transparent backgrounds.

But, this advantage means the file size is bigger. If you have to change a picture many times, it’s better to save it as a PNG file.

III. JPG/JPEG

These are the most common formats used by digital cameras and online.

They can show lots of colors, and the way they compress images lets you find a good balance between how clear the picture is and how much space it takes up.

We’ve covered these Image Formats in more detail in our blog: E-commerce Product Images: Best Formats. 

6. Consistency with Each Image

To make your brand stand out and give shoppers a unified experience, it’s important to keep things consistent in your online store.

Whether you’re using flash effects or not, having a background or not, using models or mannequins, the choices you make should be the same for all your products.

A smart way to make things look the same is to get all your product photos from one source.

Most business owners do this in three ways:

1. Use pictures provided by the manufacturer.
2. Get a professional photographer to take your product photos.
3. Take the photos yourself.

Getting images from the manufacturer will make everything look the same and accurate on all your product pages.

But hiring a photographer or doing it yourself also works well. It depends on what fits your business needs, time, skills, and budget.

7. Use 360° Views or High-Resolution Videos

Let your customers have a look at your products from all sides with a 360-degree view. This gives them a complete and virtual look, so they can see every part of what you’re selling.

If doing this on your own is tough, you could hire a company that’s really good at taking 360° product photos. Of course, if your budget allows.

Using videos or moving pictures (GIFs) for your products can also boost how many people buy from you.

Research has found that adding a video to your page can increase how many people find your page through search engines by 157%.

So, if you can create videos and GIFs for your online shop, it’s a great investment in the long run

Check out how this Delta seller on Amazon provides a 360° view of their faucet.

It allows consumers to see each angle of the product, and envision it in their own use. Something like this is guaranteed to increase conversion rate for your store. 

Source: Amazon

8. Optimize your Thumbnails

Tiny thumbnail images are often shown at the bottom of a page, aiming to get you interested in more things to buy. These are called upsells. They’re like add-ons or upgrades after you’ve bought something.

Don’t ignore these small images – they matter a lot. They should be really small in file size, preferably under 70 KB.

Use JPEG or GIF formats and a tool like Pixlr to adjust their size. Name them well and give them alt attributes, just like your main product images.

Optimizing these thumbnails helps with SEO and can boost your profits from each online sale.

Technical Aspects of E-commerce Product Images

Now that we’ve discussed the creative aspect of ecommerce product images, let’s dive into the technicalities of product images for your e-commerce stores. 

1. Dimensions And Resolution

The dimensions of your product image should be a perfect square. All e-commerce platforms follow this format:

• Less than 100 kb
• Square images

Square images are important as they work with each platform, and ensure that images look the same no matter what device they’re displayed on. 

The resolution of your product images should ideally be 1500 x 1500. This will ensure that the resolution is consistent across all of your retailers’ platforms.

So no matter which eCommerce platform they are using, your products show up the same way on all of them.

• The ideal size would be 1500 x 1500. 
• The minimum size should be 1080 x 1080

2. Image Background

Having your brand’s product images with a simple, bright white background helps you stay consistent on all your retailer’s platforms. The background color helps the product stand out.

If the background is a loud color or has a pattern, it becomes distracting to your customers and pushes them to look at products other than yours.

3. File Size

There’s a huge difference between “image size” and “file size”. Usually, people tend to mix them up. When talking about “image size”, we’re referring to the dimensions of an image, for example, 1080 x 1080.

But when we talk about file size, we are referring to the amount of space that the image will require on your server. File size can have a direct impact on your page load speed. 

It can make or break the performance of your site because every single image must be downloaded each time your site is visited. 

Your goal is to keep your images at 1 to 2 MB in size. An image can have large dimensions and still be 2MB or less.

The smaller your image size, the faster your load speeds, meaning a lower bounce rate and happier customers. 

4. Image Filename

We know it suits most of us to just type in a random name to save our images. But this can be detrimental to your SEO.

You have to make sure that your keywords, or at least a variation on them, are included in your image filename, which should be descriptive.

Don’t stuff keywords into the image filename. Only one variation on a keyword should be included, and filenames shouldn’t get cumbersome in length.

Make sure the filename is legible. Meaning; that you should use hyphens or underscores in between words in your filename in order to ensure that the search engines see the individual words.

Don’t leave spaces in your filename, because these will show up as “%20” instead, which may make the filename illegible.

5. Image URL

The advice for image URLs is quite similar to that for image filenames. You might think about using a variation of your keyword in the URL, but overall, the advice remains consistent.

Make sure you have a good structure for your image URLs.

A common folder like /images/ is okay, but if you really want to boost search engine performance, create subfolders for different image types. For instance, you could use something like /images/pants/men’s/.

Using a well-organized hierarchy in your image URLs can help search engines understand your images better. This can result in more relevant search results.

5. Image Alt Attribute

The alt attribute of an image should contain your keyword, but in most situations, it should offer more than just that.

Remember, the alt product attribute isn’t the same as a meta keywords tag, despite how some SEO experts treat it.

The alt attribute is designed for screen readers to help people with visual impairments understand the image. It also acts as a stand-in for your image on browsers that can’t display images.

If you wouldn’t want the alt text to appear as a substitute for your image, visible to your readers, then you might be using it incorrectly.

Use the alt attribute to provide a descriptive substitute for your product image that includes your keywords. Don’t just cram it with keywords as if it’s a dumping ground.

6. Compress Images

Ensure your images are compressed to maintain quick loading times. Slow-loading images can drag down your website’s speed, potentially impacting your SEO.

Google keeps small images handy, but larger ones load from your site. If your image takes too long to load on Google Images, users might not click to see more.

Google usually doesn’t show duplicate images in search results, although it indexes them. Having unique ecommerce product images on your product pages helps with this issue.

While it’s not always possible for every product, consider adding unique images to high-performing pages. It’s even better if your image stands out in search results.

7. Use CDN to increase the Speed of Image Delivery 

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that allows you to increase the speed of image delivery time.

These servers are located around the world to deliver multimedia, such as videos/images to other networks.

CDN reduces the number of network points between the server and the user.

Therefore, it becomes possible to quickly deliver the content that is crucial if you want to load the images or different types of multimedia content. 

Conclusion

Images hold the potential to make your online stores stand out and leave a lasting impression on your customers.

If you’re able to merge all the points we’ve listed above, you’ll be sure to create one good-looking online store that converts users. 

Create an image strategy for your e-commerce site, and deliver the best possible graphics to your users. 

What to do next?

• Read more about our Product Information-related Guides here.
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• Contact our support or Comment your thoughts under the blog section if you have any questions or issues.

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