Where To Find Images For Your Ecommerce Site ?
There is a popular saying in eCommerce world. “A Picture is worth a thousand online sales”. May be it’s just a saying, but it certainly applies to your eCommerce business. Images, pictures, and photos, they are used on every website we find on the internet. Especially on eCommerce websites, they become the most important element. There is a thin line between average and professional images that could easily determine the make or break of your sales. With this in mind, let’s break the points to find out how can we get different images that would be used for different purposes on our eCommerce website.
What images do you actually need? In an eCommerce business you need three types of images are generally the most important ones: √
Product images for product pages.
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Category images for different categories on the store.
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Life style photos for headers, banners, secondary product images and content marketing
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Stock images for blog post, social media, and Ads.
As an eCommerce website, product images become one of the primary concerns. However, the images required for other purposes (category, lifestyle, and stock photos) are equally important. You cannot avoid the need for images in advertising, content marketing, banners and so on. So
let’s find out how can we get these images for the eCommerce business.
Product images- Why so important, and how to get them? On an online store, product photography is one of the most crucial and money spending task. You cannot deny the fact that you need really effective product images for a better eCommerce conversion optimization of the product pages. Product images play a great role in your aim to provide the best product descriptions so that you have the best eCommerce conversion optimization of your product pages.
Product images provide a better first impression Product Images are designed to capture the attention of the visitors. Before reading a product description, it is a product images that help the visitors find if the it is what they are looking for.
According to inc.com “People form a first impression in a mere 50 milliseconds” So, if your product pages are not optimized enough to grab that attention, you might consider checking your product images. A conversion friendly product images display involves: -Providing a clear and high definition image -Providing multiple product images with different angles -Providing the images that load faster -Providing authentic images- not cartoons or graphics
How to get product images? It’s a sure thing that without product images, nobody is going to make purchase on your website. So, you need the product images and this is how you can get them. 1. Get them from Manufacturers 2. Take photos by yourself 3. Hire a freelance Product Photographer 4. Hire an agency
Getting images from the Manufacturer- If your website sells the products manufactured by someone else, you can ask your supplier/manufacturer for the product images. Images from your supplier are generally free of cost. This is what a product image from your supplier might look like.
The product images from your product manufacturer are professional and of good quality. However, you might need to pay extra to show the face of the model in the image. This is an economical way for getting product images, though you might find the same images being used by other websites selling the products from the same supplier. So, you might not have an uniqueness or personal touch in the images.
Taking photos by yourself- There are various cases when you might not find the images from your product supplier. For example, your website might send unique products or local handicrafts. The suppliers might not be able to provide the product images depending on their scale of business. So, you need to take photos by yourself.
This is a tough task when you have to consider the efficacy of your product images and take care of the every aspect. Otherwise, you might end up with low quality images that would be good for nothing. In addition it might just counter the conversions. So, with a proper skills and little investment in decent photography equipments, you might establish a good photography unit for yourself. It;s not a butter, but you can manage it with proper skills. That brings me to the next option to get the product images for your eCommerce site- hiring a photographer.
Hiring a Freelance Photographer- Product photography require skills and equipments. If you think you cannot take the good quality product photos and it’s not wise to invest in the equipment, you might consider hiring a professional photographer.
Hiring a freelance photographer is the best option for medium sized eCommerce businesses where they cannot afford an investment in professional agencies. The professional photographer can use his skills to take some good product images improvising the location, lighting and studio space conditions.
Hiring a professional agency- This is the ultimate way that assures the best quality product images taken in quality space and lighting situations. There are many agencies that provide product photography and take care of all the requirements by themselves. From hiring models to studiospace and equipments everything they need.
Hiring a professional agency is a bit costly approach. Often these services charge on per SKU basis. Depending on the volume of images required it might cost you around $25 per shot. There are some overhead cost involved too that includes, transportation of products to and from the studio. However, a professional agency can assure the best quality product images for sure if you can afford the cost. Getting other images for the storeThe 4 places explained above fort product images can also effectively provide the other images for your store too. Other images that you would require for your eCommerce site can include: -Images for blogs and content marketing -Images for online advertisement -Images of social media post -Images for site-banners -Images for landing pages etc. Now, there are various places and ways to get the images that you can use for different purposes on your website. Not just the images that are directly used on your website are important but images used for your website on other platforms such as blogs, and social media are also important. So, you can try the following ways to get the miscellaneous images. 1. Stock photos: There are various websites and repositories where you can get the stock images for free or paid. Stock images are the royalty-free images where you do not need a license or copyright to use them. You can
use any of the available repositories to get the stock photos and use them for various purposes on your website. These images can be used in blog posts, Product categories, banner images, Ads and so on.
2. Images from social media- People on social media really like to show what they have purchased lately. They upload good quality ‘Selfies’ and Photos of them showing the product to everyone in their social circle. You can contact such users from the social media and ask them if you can use these photos on your website. This would have two benefits. -You get a royalty-free imaFinal thoughts, ge -You will get photos of actual people using the product 3. Google is a great optionGoogle’s image search can return millions of images for your query in micro-seconds. Now, the concern with Google’s image search is it returns a lot of images, and not all of them are royalty-free or non-copyrighted. To get royalty free images on Google you need to perform some tweak in your search process: -Enter your search query in the Google’s image search box. It will return a lot of images. -Now, below the search box, you will see the ‘Tools’ option. Click on that.
-Next you will see several menu options coming below the search category menu. You have to click on the ‘Usage Right’ option to open filters based on Usage rights. Select the filters as per your requirement.
Final thoughts, Images are required at every step in an eCommerce business. You cannot ignore their importance in conversion optimization strategies. For a better eCommerce conversion optimization getting the best quality images on your website should be your utmost priority. Hopefully, the ways explained in this article would come handy in this regard.