Ecommerce Product Images: A Comprehensive Checklist [6 Best Practices]

If you regard your e-store as a physical outlet then your product images are the salespeople and awful images hurt your sales the exact same way as an incompetent salesperson. 

In other words, in the fiercely competitive online selling world, eCommerce product images can make your dreams come true or be a recipe for a disaster.

Thus, in this blog post, Nesso’s professional product photo retouch will give you a full checklist of product photos so you can boost your customer shopping experience and more importantly, your conversions.

1. Meet eCommerce product images’ technical requirements

One of the very first things you definitely should go through on this checklist is to make sure your eCommerce product images hit all the right notes in terms of technical requirements. 

But don’t worry! We won’t use a bunch of jargon but instead, guide you through 3 basic SEO product photo set-ups so your product detail pages could rank higher and convert better.

• Choose the right format

The 3 most popular eCommerce product image formats are JPG, PNG, and WEBP. JPG works perfectly fine if your photos are colorful and detailed while PNG is usually used for pictures with transparent backgrounds.

However, it’s the WEBP format that we highly recommend for your product images. Using this image format can help you reduce your image size by 25-34% compared to its 2 counterparts. 

• Compress your image

Many merchants hold such a fallacy that the heavier their images’ size is, the higher quality the images are, which can help boost the conversion rate. But that’s totally wrong. Before posting product images on your website, make sure you’ve compressed them first!

If you’re concerned that the compression will make the image quality go bad, worry no more. There are now many tools that allow you to compress your product images without negatively affecting your photos.

So you may want to compress your images with one of the 3 tools we recommend below:

1. Tiny PNG 
2. Compressor
3. Compressjpeg

• Pick the right size

Every eCommerce platform has its photo size guidelines you must abide by. So make sure you resize your eCommerce product images to the right size. 

For instance, Shopify recommends using 2048 x 2048 for images on product detail pages while Amazon and Etsy advise their merchants to opt for 1000 x 1000 if they want to enable zooming.

Or the LightSpeed’s Point of Sale application restricts the maximum photo size to 512 x  512. 

So if you choose the right size for your product images, it’d be of great help in enhancing the image’s display. 

2. Stick to one product photography style

After clearly meeting all the eCommerce product technical guidelines, don’t rush into the editing part yet. Let’s decide with your team what kind of concept or product photography style you want to opt for.

Choose one style that best suits your business and whether you edit product images on your own or outsource an agency, draw up an image guideline and stick strictly to every word in that guideline.

If you take stunning product images with any style you feel like, each image can look stunning on its own, but the general look of your storefront will be nothing but a mess.

Not to mention that posting eCommerce product images using the same style, in the long run, will help customers identify you among hundreds of alternatives. 

3. Use a clean background for eCommerce product images

You may think that using a rainbow-colored background will help make your products look better. But in fact, a too-much background can do more harm than good. 

So let potential customers focus on your product by putting the main character on a simplified clean background, and you’re done!

To remove the product image background in Photoshop, navigate to the top panel and click on the Select tab then choose Color Range. Afterward, use the Eyedropper to select the background color range. 

Holding Shift, you can select several parts, and drag the color sliders to modify colors. Hit Delete and the background will be removed from your images. 

4. Minimize the text overlaid on your eCommerce product images

If you’re selling on Amazon or doing some research on product image guidelines on this huge marketplace, you probably know that to list your products on Amazon, your product must fill at least 85% of the image frame.

This holds true on Facebook when it recommends using images with less than 20% text for dynamic ads on the platform to get better results. 

5. Utilize secondary eCommerce product images

Apart from the primary image, it’s necessary that you make the best use of secondary images to help customers have a better view of what they are going to spend their money on.

So to improve your conversions, make sure that you use secondary product images to help shoppers understand more about your merch.

• Provide a 360-degree view of your product

The biggest drawback of online shopping is that customers cannot hold a product with their bare hands and view it from all sizes. So by showing a product from different angles, your customers can better visualize it in their comfort zone.

• For the color swatch on variants with different colors

If your products have variants with different colors, make sure that you display all the color variants and when customers select a specific color, the product image will change to that color correspondingly.

However, you don’t have to take photos of all products to show a variety of colors. You can just take an image of a single variant and then recolor it using Photoshop.

6. Allow customers to zoom in on your eCommerce product images

Again, when browsing your website, your potential customers cannot hold a shirt and move it closer to their eyes to check the details and textures.

So empower your customers to zoom in on your product images without deteriorating the image quality. This can help boost your customer online shopping experience and your chances to convert them as well.

If your products are listed on Amazon, as long as your images are 1000 x 1000 pixels, the zooming effect will be automatically applied when customers hover their mouse over the image as below:

If you build your own e-site with your own domain, then you probably have to tweak the code to enable the automatic zooming-in effect.

Are your product images eCommerce-ready?

That’s it! We hope our eCommerce product images checklist can help you optimize your product photos more properly and grow more sales. 

However, if you have a sophisticated product catalog, going through the checklist above for hundreds of products can be a daunting task. So why not outsource product photo retouching from Nesso’s know-how experts to save time and costs for your core business functions?

Read more at Nesso.vn