Nothing frustrates online shoppers more than seeing a thumbnail or other small photo of a product and clicking on it to take a closer look, only to see a grainy or blurry image pop up. Even if a photo is clear, customers will likely want to see the product from various angles; and if they can't do that, they'll go to a different site where they can.
Think about when you walk into a brick and mortar store and you see a product you want to buy. You don't just look at it on the shelf and make your decision. Whether it's a demo model or the real thing, you pick the product up, turn it around, turn it upside down, feel the weight of it, check out all the details, and generally size it up against similar products you've looked at.
When you have excellent-quality product photos on your website, you allow shoppers to (virtually) do just that kind of assessment. They can zoom in on details and really get a feel for a product even if they can't physically feel it. Add 360-degree photography and video into the mix, and it's the next best thing to being able to handle the products.
Good photos will get people into your e-commerce store; excellent photos will get people buying your products.
Video Usage = Stacks and Stacks of Cash
E-commerce site Stacksandstacks.com uses both manufacturers' videos and their own in-house product videos to sell houseware items. According to the company's marketing director, Cathy McManus, shoppers are 144% more likely to add a product to their cart if they've watched the product video than if they haven't.
The company pays a flat monthly fee to video production company Invodo to create and host the videos; comparing the videos' impact on sales to the monthly fee, McManus says the company is close to getting a 10-to-1 return on investment.
The products that are best for the video treatment, the marketing director says, are the ones that have any complexity related to them, like installation, or ones that are able to fold or move in a way that is not apparent in photos or text.
McManus also expects the videos to cut down on the rate of customer returns and complaints, because customers better understand the product prior to purchase.
Fashionable Photography
Amazon is so dedicated to stellar product photography that the online shopping behemoth has a 40,000-square-foot building in Brooklyn that has been transformed into a giant photography and videography studio for taking fashion photos and creating videos for its three clothing-specific stores: Amazon Fashion, Shopbop, and MYHABIT.
Broken up into 28 individual bays, the space includes styling areas, photo and video studios, and editing suites that all work toward making Amazon's fashion offerings appear more glossy and less like they came from a stock photography site. On average, about 19,000 photos are shot there every day, of which about 2,400 end up on the Amazon sites.
