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FREE
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For small and medium Business.
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Are Poor Product
Presentations Losing You Sales?
By Kerry Plowright
Product presentation and imagery are critical elements
in the online sales process. It
is essential you have good, clean and well presented product images on
your website. While it will not guarantee sales because of many other
factors involved in the purchase process, bad product presentation will
definitely chase your prospects to other sites.
Poor quality product presentation results in customers
losing confidence in you and faith in the quality of the product. The
ability to make your product look desirable, will help keep the customer
on your site and improve your chances of converting them into a sale.
A picture says a thousand words and a good one can make many more in
dollars.
So how do we go about getting really good product shots?
There are two parts to this, acquiring the product image, and
then how you prepare and present it.
Sourcing or shooting product images.
Most small businesses take product shots themselves while pay
professionals to take the photographs for them or simply get them from
their suppliers.
Depending on what you're selling, it may be possible for
you to avoid the task of creating product shots. If you are buying from a
supplier, they may have already done the hard work for you. Contact your
supplier and ask them if they have any product photography. If they have,
ask them for a copy of it on CD-ROM, or maybe you can take the images from
their website directly. Most suppliers won’t have a problem with you
using their images, because it will help sell their products. But, make
sure you do ask, or you might find yourself on the end of a legal letter.
However you do it, the product shots must be of good
quality and consistent. What do I mean by consistent? This means
continuity. There is nothing
worse than looking at a page of products, with the product images all over
the place. A good layout
requires consistent:
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Image
size. This
applies to both thumbnail and large images.
It’s almost impossible to make all your images in exact
proportion. What we suggest is that the width of all the images should
remain the same.
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Proportion
and placement. That
is, image placed left or right of the description, above or below.
ezimerchant does a great job of applying a theme. Make sure you
experiment with the different styles.
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Deep
etching/borders. Deep
etching images is great. But
either they are all deep etched and look good, or you give them a nice
clean 1pt border. I suggest the latter, even if you deep etch. I cover
deep etching in my next news letter.
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Angle.
Ideally, try to shoot your products from the same angle and
position. This isn’t
always possible, but if you can, it adds that little extra
professional touch.
If you have professional taking the photographs they
should already be applying these rules. If you are getting images from a
supplier your options are limited and hopefully you have good consistent imaging.
However, lets assume you want to save money, take the photographs but
still want a great result.
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How
to take great product shots without spending dollars
Lets assume you want to avoid spending dollars but want a good result!
Let me show you how to produce great product shots without spending
too much. This is the
patented (kidding!) Australian back yard photo studio.
What
you need.
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Large cardboard box.
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Digital Camera
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White Sheet
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Sunshine
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The image above is my own
photo studio. With a free
cardboard box, an old sheet and some free Aussie sunshine, I can produce
quality product images. My
powerful studio light (the sun) is difficult to move.
So I move the box instead, making sure the sun is always directly
behind me. I have cut the sides from the front of the box, and have placed
it on a small table so I don’t have to bend over taking photographs or
swapping products in and out.
After placing the sheet over the box, I place the product to the front
and make sure no folds or creases are in the cloth where the photo will be
cropped. The sheet does not
fold behind but hangs or curves, removing lines and shadows. This is an excellent way to photograph difficult objects with
fuzzy edges
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The example to the right
shows how I partly deep etched the image, but worked the contrast to
lighten the background. I then cropped and added a 1pt black key line.
I’m not trying to sell the dog here, but the Jacket.
The furry pieces on objects like this are virtually impossible
to deep etch out of a coloured background, hence the white sheet.
For an individual to make a purchasing decision, they need
to see the product and have trust in you as an online retailer.
Dodgy presentation will not gain the trust. |
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I want to use a real example of the process. In
my box studio illustrated above, I have draped a white sheet to
photograph green cardboard product containers, I took several
photographs.
The
first image is the product and how it would look without a
white/coloured background. The second shows the raw image of
the product shot with the white sheet in my 'box studio'. The
third image is cleaned up with some deep etching. You can see how
a clean image can make a difference.
For
a family of products, I make sure to shoot from the same angle and
apply the same proportions to each image through cropping and
sizing in an image application. A whole page or website where this
type of continuity is applied, is more pleasing to the eye, more
professional, and keeps the focus on the product.
I
hope this helps in your effort to improve sales. Before I sign off
I have one other issue I want to address that is often confusing,
and that is image size.
What
is the ‘size’ of an image?
When most people think of how ‘big’ an image is,
they think in the physically sense, in centimetres or inches.. in
other words, what they physically see. Of course this means
nothing in the digital environment.
Like fresh air, you can squeeze or expand image pixels by
zooming in or out. However, as you will have noticed, if you keep zooming it
eventually starts to blurr.
The screen you are looking at is made up of pixels. Each pixel is a
little square block with a single colour. This single block of
colour could be one out of approximately 16.7 million colours. But
they are so small that when they come together they create images
and words.
The resolution of your monitor determines how many
pixels make up your screen. A display resolution described as
being 640x480 has 640 pixels across the screen and 480 down the
screen, for a total of 307,200 pixels. The higher the number or
pixels, the higher the screen resolution.
Most monitors today are capable of screen resolutions up to
2048 x 1526. This has
nothing to do with the physician size of your screen, 15” up
21”. Of course if
you select a high resolution, it’s a bit like standing further
away from the screen. You get more on the screen, but the writing
starts to look pretty tiny.
Therefore an image that is 640x480 in size will fill
the screen on a monitor that is set to 640x480. If a higher
resolution was set on the same monitor, like 1200x800, it will
mean the picture takes up only half the screen.
This is a bit like looking through your binoculars close up
at an object, and then zooming back out. The object is still
there, but takes up less of the frame.
For the purpose of websites, forget centimetres and
inches. The digital
world is measured in pixels.
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 About
the Author: Kerry Plowright founded ezimerchant in 1996 and was
the first to offer an affordable, packaged ecommerce solution to
small and medium business. Since then Kerry has helped thousands of
business make hundreds of millions of dollars on the internet and is
arguably Australia’s leading authority on small business and the
internet. Kerry recently sold the ezimerchant business which is now
the most widely used solution in Australia in addition to being sold
in Japan, the USA and UK. Kerry now offers his expertise to selected
businesses desiring to establish or improve their online presence.
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