Product Photography Tips and Techniques for eCommerce Businesses
For micro, small, and medium-sized e-commerce stores, the professional product photography is a key to sales. 93% of consumers consider visuals to be the key factor in purchasing decisions. You should keep in mind that online consumers can’t touch, try or feel the products you sell so great E-commerce product photography should not only show how the product looks but also shows its texture and appearance from multiple angles and settings.
Whether you are selling home baked products, flowers, apparel, jewelry, or makeup products, or furniture, great product photography doesn’t only help you in improving the conversion rate on the website but also building a superior brand.
Let’s dive into some simple yet essential product photography tips and techniques for small-scale eCommerce businesses to replace uninspiring visuals with tempting visuals and increase sales.
1- Take Care of the Light as a Top Priority
For professional eCommerce product photography, you need to keep the light quantity and distribution right to avoid shadows on your product. It is recommended to use natural light (outdoors or near big windows) as much as possible, and the best time to do this is morning and mid afternoon.
Tony Northrup in an article for Digital Photography School said “A white background without proper light appears grey in the picture instead of white”.
Soft shadow or hard shadow: When the size of the product is much bigger as compared to the size of the light, it creates hard shadow while a bigger light source as compared to the product’s size creates soft shadows. For eCommerce, you should use soft shadows and avoid hard shadows by using a white plastic bag or white tape to the camera’s flash.
2- Try All Possible Angles
Another useful tip for great product photography is that you can take several shots from multiple angles and then strategically choose the best one. For E-commerce stores, it is recommended to photograph all the sides and angles of your product (e.g. quality, shape, and size, etc.).
You should test multiple angles in your product photography to find an angle that tells the whole story of your product in order to ensure customer satisfaction and sales also.
3- Use a Tripod to Avoid Botion Blur
Tripods are stands that stabilize your camera to avoid motion blur. It makes a huge difference in the clarity and quality of your product photographs.
Whether you are using a DSLR or your smartphone camera to capture pictures, there is a range of tripods in the market for every type of camera, or if you can’t purchase a tripod in your budget. You can also use a pile of books or a stool to keep your camera fixed, or use built-in timers in cameras to reduce motion blur and increase accuracy.
4- Scale the Product
Scaling the product in product photography for eCommerce stores is crucial. People need to know the size and dimensions of the product, etc. before buying it.
You can do it by placing another item (people are familiar with) along with your product in the image to help them visualize the exact product’s size. For example, you can place a standard size pencil next to the glass to help people visualize the size of the glass.
5- Macro Setting
The cameras these days have a lot of separate features for catching even the minor of product’s details. On most cameras, a tulip-like icon is professionally known as a “macro setting”. You should use this setting while taking pictures of especially small objects for in-depth and high-quality pictures. In case your camera doesn’t show a macro setting then go with the extension tube option for capturing tiny objects.
6- Remove Background
While doing product photography for eCommerce stores, a key tip for you is choosing a plain white background e.g. your delicious plate of pasta can get lost in distracting background so keeping your background plain and simple will ensure the product you are trying to sell doesn’t get lost in the shot.
Infinity curve: Pastel colors like pale blue, pink, or yellow can often work well but a clean white background to keep the focus of consumers only on the product (infinity curve) is essential to present a clean and pleasant view of the product. You can do this by taking a piece of white fabric or paper and bending it to create a curve.
7- Consider Natural Placement of the Product
For eCommerce product photography, an image is like a thousand words. It gives your valuable customers an idea about how the actual product will look like in a real-life setting, and also they are able to relate to it.
For example, if you are selling watches, the best approach is to picture them on someone’s wrist. Similarly, if you are offering clothes or jewelry on eCommerce store, visualize your products on models wearing them.
8- Showcase Each Product Color
If you offer one product in different colors, make sure you have photos of each color on your site as it makes your product more attractive and has much better chances of increasing sales with different colors.
If you know how to use photo editing software, you can change the color with software by taking just one picture of your product, however, photographing each color individually is always better.
9- Keep it Simple
Keep the pictures of your products simple and clean because online buyers want to see real products and if you put filters and over-edit your product’s photos, it might create suspicions in minds of your potential consumers related to product quality.
If you run an Instagram or other Social Media based eCommerce business, it is highly recommended to use professional photo editing tools instead of filters.
10- Must Use Computer for Enhancing Your Product Photography
When it comes to displaying product photos on a website, webmasters evaluate pictures on a computer screen and not on a camera screen. The camera screen never portrays blurry, pixelated, and poor-quality images while a big computer screen makes a huge difference in image quality.
Ideally, all your product photography should be transferred to a computer for quality evaluation and conducting a comprehensive check before that picture hits the online store.
Bottom line:
Whether you are into the photography business offering your services to eCommerce stores or a marketing manager of an eCommerce store looking to enhance product display, you must know that the product photographs on an online store are one of the greatest assets of the business. However, improving the performance of your eCommerce store requires a lot more than just great product photography. If you are looking to learn the deep insights of making huge profits from your eCommerce business, do consider professional advice from coaches like ecomwarrioracademy.com.
I am sure you’d have found the above product photography tips and techniques useful enough to develop engaging product photographs for your online store.
