Images and photos have always been one of the top contenders to optimize your website's UX and conversion rate on the whole. One cannot think of an eCommerce website without images and photos on it. Whether it is a banner, Category, Landing page or a Product image, you need photos everywhere on your eCommerce store. But before you start uploading images on your site, what if I tell you "You might actually kill your conversions with images"? You might be left thinking "why your sales stopped while it was doing really well". Yes, there is possibly a chance that you are committing one of these 7 mistakes to block your conversions because of the images on your eCommerce site. Keep reading because we are going to discuss 7 such wrong ways of using images and photos on an eCommerce site. Hopefully, this list will help you to stay away from committing some big blunders and save your conversions.
9 Ways Images Kill Your Conversion Rate
Stock image repositories are one of the very important resources to get the images for your site. However, sometimes they backfire and it starts to seem that you were better off without these images.
It's more likely happen that your customers might have already seen the particular image on some other website(s). Such images hardly contribute in creating a brand awareness and encouraging visitors to make a purchase. Moreover, while the idea behind the image is not yours, you don't have enough ground to project a selling point using it. What’s the solution? Don't be excessively obsessed with stock photos for your eCommerce site. On some scale, stock images provided by the manufacturers are somewhat useful, however, they do not seem any good for other utilizations like banners, landing pages, and category images. At least not in their stock form. In case if you want to use some stock photos, crop them to represent the focused ground only. Perform enough editing to project your viewpoint with the image.
On an average, almost every online shopper zooms a product image and tries to see the minute details of the product. Well, that's predictable when shopper can't touch the product, they would depend on the images to get the every possible detail. Ideally, every product image should be large enough to allow the shoppers to zoom in the image without losing the quality of the view. Each time your images become pixelated on zooming by the shopper, you would possibly lose a sale. What’s the solution? It's clear and simple, use high-quality product images with enough pixels to provide a zoomed view without loosing the quality of the view.
Image source: emmiebean
Images are important for your eCommerce store only when they are serving a purpose. Placing an image somewhere on your site just for the sake of filling up space is a conversion killing approach. Such images with no real purpose distract your customers from making a purchase decision. What’s the solution? Just remember that every detail, element, and images on your site are for a purpose. You are not wasting your server's storage space or enlarging your page load time to show something that is not relevant at all. Every graphic used in the form of the category, landing page, banner or product image is for one goal- Driving conversions by creating brand awareness. So, if an image on your site is nothing just a burden on your page that can't be
explained even with a caption, remove it instantly.
Caption: Darveys uses relevant images on its web-store Description: Use of relevant images on Darveys site
No matter how well you have got your eCommerce site organized and how luxurious product you sell, if images are poor, blurry, or casually edited, they are going to curb your conversions for sure. The kind and quality of images on an eCommerce store represent the quality of the product itself. One cannot think of much good about a site showing a skewed image on the home page itself. What’s the solution? It’s better to skip the images that are blurred, poor, and horribly edited. You are better off with your text description than such images.
If you are so into showing a photo of customer support executive, show some real photos. The fake employee photos are nothing but a clear sign of “You don’t have a customer support executive”.
Moreover, the stock customer support photos are found on hundreds of more websites like you. They are so overly used that they give an instant bad impression of your customer support. What’s the solution? Hire a professional photographer, and get some really good looking photos of your real customer support employee(s). Never use fake photos of your employees. You have your own real ones with you. You just need a camera and some photography skills to get right images for a right purpose.
Of course, when they don't trust your fake employee's photos, how would they trust fake customers' photos. Most of the times, websites use crowd shots to represent their happy customers. Sadly, such crowd photos do not convey a message in the real context. Furthermore, if customers find it's a fake photo that you got from some other website or stock repository, you will get nothing but a bunch of lost conversions and trust among the customers. In my first point itself, it was explained that over-reliance on the stock or fake photos is a conversion killer. If you A/B test the website and product pages with such fake images on one and real images on other, you would find how much difference they create. What’s the solution? The ultimate solution is being real with what you have got. Never rely on stock images or fake graphics to show your happy customers. Instead, try to get in
touch with your old customers as ask for a testimonial with their photos. They would be pleased to share their it.
It's a fact, Images do slow down the page loading. Despite all the image optimization and using the content delivery networks etc, images on any web page take a lot more space (storage) than a textual content. Especially on eCommerce sites, when you can't compromise with the image quality at any cost, the page load time is at a stake here. So, it's you who have to decide, if an image that you are putting on your web page is worth the usage. For example, you can take off an image that is not performing well, or have become outdated or old enough. Such images probably have no chance of giving returns anymore. So, they are not worthy enough to put your page load speed at stake for them. But please note, that images doing well are also not worth keeping if they are slowing down your page loading and causing bounce backs. Probably you must find a way to compress the image without losing the quality or take it down if it's not worth enough the cost of the page speed. You can A/B test your page with and without the image to find out the effect on the conversions.