With any business, you’ll want to make sure that your products are advertised at their best. This means writing a detailed description that can highlight your products’ best qualities with high-quality photographs that can give the potential customer a good look at what you’re trying to sell them.
And this is where a lot of businesses get things wrong. With eCommerce, odds are your target audience has never seen your product up-close. Because of that, product photography has become one of the most important components of a business’ marketing plan.
The Basics of Product Photography
What is product photography? In simple terms, it’s photography focused on products. This might confuse some—after all, isn’t photography consistent throughout the discipline?
That may be true with the basics, but product photography will need photographers to keep an eye on a few things, most often how the light source affects the product’s color and dimensions. This is why you might find behind-the-scenes videos of product shoots where the photographer has a collection of equipment, even if the product was just a simple hamburger.
Product Photography for eCommerce
As more and more businesses adapted eCommerce practices, a sub-culture of product photography began to emerge. eCommerce photography is still product photography, only this time the idea is to cater to eCommerce platforms.
How is this different? Imagine all the product photographs you can find on an eCommerce platform. Instead of merely advertising the product, eCommerce photographs will cover the product from all angles, making sure that the buyer can see as much of the product without actually seeing it in real life.
This is also why it’s so easy to spot sellers sourcing products from the same manufacturer. These are the eCommerce sellers who all use the same photographs for their products, some even going so far as to use generic stock photography.
Why This Is Important
The goal of any business is to make sales—it’s the whole point of doing all this work, right? To achieve this goal, you’ll want to be sure that you’ve done your homework, giving your potential customers all they need to decide on whether they want to buy your product or not.
And this is where a good business will differ from a bad one. Instead of merely filling out the requirements by publishing a generic photograph along with a bland copy describing the item, a good business will have high-quality photos of the specific product paired with a highly-descriptive and exciting description.
All this is supported by some statistics that marketers have learned over the years. Take, for example, the average person. 65% of people are seen to be visual learners, meaning that providing quality photographs with your products is more effective than simply talking about them. This is further pushed by the fact that 90% of online buyers use the quality of the photo as a predictor of the quality of the product. The reasoning here is that if the business was willing to spend on a good photograph, they probably have enough confidence to show their product in all its glory.
Conclusion
As with any business, what you get out of it will depend on how much you’re willing to put in. It might cost you a little extra to get a professional to photograph your products, but the end result will show itself to be worth it. The bottom line here is simple—a good photograph is one of the most effective ways to market your product.
Kiin is a full-service digital agency in Chippendale created to assist brands and businesses in thriving in an increasingly complex environment. We integrate strategy, creative thinking, design, technology, and media to make your items stand out.