eCommerce is growing at rapid speeds, and online stores are looking more and more professional. Yet, one area that still seems to be a pain in the a** to many brands and retailers is optimizing product image quality.
The Importance of Great Images
Displaying great product images is one of the most important keys to eCommerce success. The way your product images look across retailers and in your direct-to-consumer (DTC) store depends on the photos you upload, the resolution, aspect ratio and more. Think of yourself landing on a marketplace. The store has a product that you really want to buy, but you just can’t see the product properly. The images are small, a bit blurry, and there’s just one image of each product. This provides zero inspiration to buy the product. There are two reasons for this: (1) you can’t be sure how the product actually looks, and (2) you also think that a retailer with amateur pictures cannot be trusted.
This is exactly why retailers have become increasingly strict for brands to abide by their regulations. Each retailer has its own image specifications, and managing product images cross-retailers can be a massive overhead for your operations team. Imagine updating your product images across 40+ platforms every time you add multiple products. And some retailers also require swatches (variants of available colors for each product) in addition to a unique naming convention for each product.
Marketplaces and retailers will require you to adjust image size, ratio, type, background color(s), margin (ratio of product and image) or the layout/angle of the product.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these aspects:
Size
Small pictures are simply not effective as sales tools. Therefore it’s essential to ensure your photos are properly sized to achieve great quality, high-resolution images.
Background
A transparent background is an important factor to consider when creating your own product images. A transparent background will also allow you to use the same product images on many online marketplaces and retailers. Depending on the retailer, they will require a specific color background prior to integration.
Alignment and margins
Having the exact alignment and white margin on product images creates visually consistent product category pages and results in a better shopping experience.
Angles
Showing multiple angles of your product is critical. It is a known fact that offering various views of your product will significantly improve your conversion rates. Doing so can also help your customer understand the item’s size and allow them to better visualize product details such as extra pockets, interior lining, special thread, etc.
Ratio
Image ratio, also known as aspect ratio, is how wide an image is in relation to its height.
Product Color Variants
Color is another important feature during the online shopping experience. Your images should display the correct color in order to show your customer exactly what they will be getting and reduce returns.
Some retailers also require you to send swatches – which are variants of the available color offering for each product. And when the color of the products changes automatically, this is often something the brand must provide.
Naming Conventions
Add additional manual difficulties on top of it all, retailers often also require each file to have specific naming conventions.
Macy’s, for example, requires a universal product catalog (UPC) number for each product image name.
To complicate things a bit more, each color and size has a different UPC that you need to send the name of images in a specific format, including UPC of one and not all of the variants.
You’ll have to manually build excel files to change the names of the files and send images in a specific way with a particular prefix or suffix.
Retailers such as Nordstrom allow brands to send them samples, and they will take the product images for the brand, although this is an extremely lengthy process and not fit for scale, especially across multiple channels. When processes are lengthy you are losing valuable time which is potentially cutting sales.
Cymbio’s Media Server
Imagine having all images across all retail partners automatically fit and optimized. This includes image size, background color, margins, angles, and image type such as JPEG, PNG, TIF-format.
Wrapping Up
Stop wasting valuable time manually adjusting photos per each marketplace and retailer. Images are just one link in the chain to your multi-channel retailing success, yet very time-consuming. Our team handles the full optimization of your image workflow and will save you and your team significant amounts of time and money in the process. Our pre-built specifications and configurations will get your brand up and live quickly, so that you can grow digital sales fast.