No matter how much of an appreciation you might have for the written word, chances are you’re not going to pull the trigger on an online purchase without an image of the product. Your customers are the same way. Great pictures are the cornerstone of a successful ecommerce store. Without pictures to authenticate your compelling product descriptions, your store will fail to generate engagement, and your conversion rates will suffer. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the importance of pictures in your ecommerce store.

Let’s Start With a Scenario

Father’s Day is coming up, and you forgot to buy a gift for your father-in-law again. You don’t want a repeat of last year. So, you nervously start googling Yankees pint glasses– a safe choice for a gift, so long as they are high-quality. After browsing, you stumble upon a glassware ecommerce store with an appealing design. They’re charging a reasonable price and offer two-day delivery, but the unfocused pictures obscure the finer details of the glasses. Or, worse yet, the pictures are absent altogether. So, you decide to take your business elsewhere.

The pictures on your website bring your marketing strategy, brand presence and conversion rates to the next level. Now, on to specifics.

1. Instantly Clarify Details and Answer Customer Questions

The very first aspect of the product that customers will notice is the image– and with high-quality pictures, this works to your advantage.

There are two main types of ecommerce customers: those who know exactly what they’re looking for, and browsers. Both of these customers will appreciate and benefit from product pictures.

Pictures will do more than grab the attention of customers as they scroll through your website. They also quickly convey important details about products to curious customers. For example, customers shopping on a niche carry-on luggage website would learn everything they need to about a product from looking at the picture. The number of compartments, the color, and the wheel style would all be immediately obvious. After noticing that it fits their needs, customers will click on the product, and do a little more investigating. The product description could then corroborate this information. If everything checks off their list of requirements, the customer will probably make the purchase.

Offering all of this information at a glimpse is the best way to customers that lack patience: most of them. Customers that are eager to purchase and then leave need a simple way to scan for information. Pictures give it to them. So, high-quality images cultivate a streamlined, more accessible shopping experience, which your ecommerce store can provide.

2. Enhances and Shapes Brand Storytelling

The only thing that you should be trying to sell customers more than your products is your brand. An intersection of your ecommerce store’s identity, positioning, voice, personality, and other elements, your branding is imperative.

If your ecommerce store was designed well, then it’s already oozing with on-brand vibes. The color scheme, logo, and fonts should be unified in a way that speaks to your brand’s value. Your product photos can simultaneously work toward the same goal.

The right product pictures will tie into your brand identity by emphasizing the most unique part of your brand. For example, a coffee company that incorporates fruit into the blend might put pieces of the fruit around the bag. This drives home the point: the coffee is health-centric, not loaded with sugar. It also resonates with the values of the target audience. Regardless of your brand personality and industry, there are plenty of ways to strategically approach product pictures.

If you’re successful in cultivating a strong brand presence, the benefits are endless. Customers will view your company as synonymous with the product. Still skeptical? Think about all of the diehard Apple fans out there (the LIES team included) who exclusively purchase Apple devices.

3. They’ll Represent Your Website on Social Media

Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to drum up sales for your ecommerce store. And, fortunately for new, budding and established ecommerce stores alike, it’s free.

Product pictures should be doing all of the heavy lifting in your social media campaigns. When you post a new, featured or on-sale product, the picture of the product will end up as the posted image on the social media channel. The right photo will draw people who may have been entirely unaware of your store. The wrong photo could dissuade customers from ever considering your website again. For the sake of your own promotional efforts on social media, great product pictures are essential.

If your customer base is engagement-oriented, then having great pictures could present other benefits as well. According to industry guru Neil Patel, social media posts that have photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% higher click-through rates– and that’s a lot. Customers who are satisfied with your product may share your post about it– or post a link to your website– on their channel. If other people are praising the product, then social media friends or followers are likely to follow suit.

4. Builds Technical and SEO Value of the Website

From a technical standpoint, images can work wonders on your website’s SEO value. Google’s algorithm recognizes that images add value to the user’s experience, and rewards pages that do so.

This primarily works through strategically written alt text. The alt text of an image describes the content of the photo to Google, so that it can develop a better understanding of the page. Consistently writing this alt text will show Google the big picture about your website.

Taking advantage of this hidden opportunity may have unexpected benefits as well. When your images are optimized properly, they may appear in Google image searches. Customers that are browsing the internet merely to see what’s out there could come across these images, and buy your products.

If you ever choose to pursue paid advertising (such as Google Shopping), then the pictures will be displayed in that feed as well.

5. Establishes Trust With the Customer

These days, online customers are understandably wary of buying from illegitimate ecommerce stores that never ship purchased products. Worse yet, they could take a larger sum of money than initially advertised. While your company is not engaging in these unethical practices, people may think you are when you lack great pictures.

When your website has low-quality, unfocused pictures, it will likely come off as lazy work done by an uninvested merchant. Customers making this assumption will not be completely unjustified in doing so.

Without any pictures at all, your website may come off as wholly illegitimate. In the moment, it may make sense to add a new product without any pictures, if you haven’t yet had the chance for a photoshoot. Customers, however, won’t be sympathetic to that– the obvious conclusion to draw is that you don’t actually have the product.

Images go the extra mile in conveying your legitimate intention to sell (and that you actually have the product in stock) will make all of the difference.

Long Island eCommerce Solutions

Taking quality product photos is an important challenge to overcome, but the road to ecommerce success doesn’t end there. There are many unique (and sometimes hidden) considerations to make in order to build the online marketplace that will convert your target customers. And, the team at Long Island eCommerce Solutions is here to help. We can take care of the entire process, including configuration, product uploading, and blog writing. Contact us to begin building your ecommerce store the correct way!