E-commerce product photography: 10 foolproof tips for creating a great-selling product photo!

Looking to boost sales on your website? Photos of your e-commerce products can make all the difference! In fact, a well-crafted photo can arouse the interest of your potential customers and encourage them to buy. But how do you create a photo that sells? In this article, we present our 10 foolproof tips for the best e-commerce product photography that will hit the mark every time. Whether you’re a photography novice or an expert, these tips will be of great use to you, so follow the guide!

1. Respect these main principles for your e-commerce product photography

 

 

For all e-commerce product photography, it’s essential to follow the best practices of packshot photography, some of which are listed below:

• Represent the product faithfully, without artifice, so that the customer knows exactly what he’s buying.
• Avoid retouching and gimmicks that could mislead the customer and lead to returns.
• Use a neutral white background to attract and keep attention on the product.
• Control the lighting to highlight the product, and use a neutral color temperature to avoid distorting the perception of the product.

If you’d like to find out more, we invite you to read our complete guide to packshot photography, a series of articles we’ve written for beginners and less experienced photographers alike. These articles cover all the technical aspects involved in creating quality product photos. You’ll also find practical tips on how to improve your shots and boost your sales.

2. Minimum 2 or 3 images per product

Online shoppers need clear, precise information about the products they want to buy. To achieve this, we recommend a minimum of two or three images per product.

By providing several photos, you also show that you have complete confidence in your product. You’re proving to your customers that you’re transparent and have nothing to hide. This transparency reassures buyers, who feel more confident when they have access to more information.

In short: the more product photos you have, the more likely you are to win your customers’ trust!

3. Don’t forget to show your product from several angles

 

 

As your customers can’t touch or test products online, it’s essential to show your product from different angles, so that the customer can get a clear idea. This includes the technical aspects of the product, but also the design, finishes and specific details.

A 360-degree animation can also add real value to your product sheet!

4. Zoom in on details in your e-commerce product photos

 

 

Some products, especially those with intricate details, require more work to offer consumers a complete view. So don’t hesitate to take close-up views of certain details, like showing the fabric of a garment or the delicate engravings on a pendant up close. The more details you can show, the better.

Zooming in on these details also gives customers a better idea of the quality of your product. For example, by showing the seams of a garment, customers can see that the product is well constructed and durable. This can justify a higher price and convince customers that it’s worth their while.

5. Add one or more lifestyle photos

 

 

Customers often need to see the product in action and understand how it can improve their lives before making a purchase.

This is where lifestyle photography comes in. This type of photo highlights the product in a very specific environment, bringing it to life and showing it in a situation that could be real. Imagine, for example, a photo of a backpack carried by a hiker in the mountains. This photo highlights the usefulness and benefits of the backpack in a real-life situation, while making it more attractive and desirable to the consumer.

With lifestyle photography, your customers can visualize what their lives will be like once they’ve bought the product. This helps them to see themselves and the product as already part of their daily lives.

Showing your product in a real-life context also enables you to highlight its features and benefits. It’s an opportunity to highlight the problems solved by the product, and to convince customers to buy it.

6. Show how the product works or sets up

Following on from lifestyle photography, another idea to incorporate into your e-commerce product photos is to show how the product installs if it’s not intuitive, or how it works afterwards. In fact, it’s entirely possible to create a tutorial in the form of a diagram or a montage of images to be integrated directly into your product sheet.

By showing how your product works or installs, you’ll offer your customers an optimal buying experience, reassure them and increase your chances of selling.

7. Inform us of your product’s dimensions

On the Internet, our perception can quickly become misleading: we can imagine a product to be larger or smaller than it really is, for example, without the seller’s intentions being misleading in the first place. It’s simply difficult to imagine the real dimensions of a product that you can only see in images.

That’s why it’s so important to give clear indications of a product’s size. You can do this in several ways:

• in a lifestyle photograph, by placing it next to a model or an everyday object,
• with a diagram showing its exact dimensions,
• using a size chart if you’re offering several options.

Giving your customers this kind of clear indication will also save you a lot of returns and complaints.

8. Optimize your e-commerce product photos for the web

 

 

Have you ever visited an e-commerce site and waited forever for the product images to load? Not only is this annoying for potential customers, it can also be detrimental to your business.

But it’s a problem that can easily be solved, often by optimizing and compressing your e-commerce product photos. By reducing the size of these files, you not only improve the loading speed of your site, but you can also save storage space for your web host. This image optimization is not to be taken lightly: it can considerably improve the user experience and thus increase your conversion rate.

The jpeg format is the most commonly used image format on the web, as it offers good image quality and is easy to compress. You can also optimize your product photos for your e-commerce directly in retouching software such as Photoshop, or you can use free online tools such as TinyPNG.

Having the right-sized images is also important for optimizing your website. An image that’s too large will take longer to load than one that’s the right size. Check the dimensions of your images before uploading them to make sure they’re suitable for your website.

9. Use them to boost your search engine optimization (SEO)

Having product photos that sell is one thing, but having an e-commerce site that attracts large numbers of visitors from search engines is even better!

But the e-commerce product photo you’re trying to optimize can also help you bring more customers to your site, thanks to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Indeed, your images can also have a significant impact on your site’s SEO.

Here’s how to make the most of your product photos to boost your SEO:

• Fill in the image’s alt tag with a description of what it represents and relevant keywords. Google uses these descriptions to understand the content and context of the image.
• Renaming your images descriptively will also make them easier for search engines to index.
• Upload a sitemap of your images to enable search engines to find them easily and thus increase your chances of ranking (many SEO plugins on WordPress, such as YoastSEO or Rank Math SEO, allow you to do this easily).
• Optimize the size of your images, as we said in our previous point (the loading speed of your pages is a crucial factor for Google!).

10. Choose quality equipment

 

 

Last but not least: the quality of your product photos is absolutely essential. Indeed, the first thing online buyers notice is the quality of your visuals. If your photos aren’t of professional quality, you risk losing sales.

So it’s imperative that you use quality equipment to take your photos. At the very least, you’ll need a good camera and quality lighting with a neutral white background.

However, if you’re looking for the very best in packshot photography, we recommend investing in an automated photo studio. This type of studio guarantees an extremely high standard of quality, all with disconcerting ease.

With an automated photo studio, you can produce professional-quality e-commerce product photos in just a few minutes. This equipment is designed to make taking photos easy, fast and accessible to everyone. Even if you have no particular knowledge of photography, you can create impeccable product photos.

With an automated photo studio, you can adjust lighting, focus and colorimetry with ease. What’s more, the integrated software lets you correct any small imperfections that may remain, while providing you with optimized images ready for publication on your e-commerce site.

All that’s left is to put these 10 tips into practice to boost your online sales. Don’t forget that the quality of your photos is essential to make Internet users want to buy your products, so don’t hesitate to consult our more in-depth guide to packshot photography or ask us about our automated photo studios if you’d like to go further!