I M AG E Q U A L I T Y AND ECOMMERCE. Why optimising images improves conversion rate

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Lee Boyd
6 years ago
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1 I M AG E Q U A L I T Y AND ECOMMERCE Why optimising images improves conversion rate Bright North 2014

2 Executive Summary 002 Contents How does image quality affect business? 003 How do we define Image Quality? 004 Simple ways to improve your conversion rate 013 How we can help 014 Clients 015 Contact 016 Bright North 2014 PAGE: 001

3 First impressions count in the increasingly competitive ecommerce industry. Product images are one of the key factors in reinforcing your brand s quality and creating a superior shopping experience that drives confidence and engagement with your products. Executive Summary Research shows that missing, offset or slow loading images significantly affect conversions, particularly on mobiles and tablets; however, many brands still fail to prioritise image quality. Leading retailers who thoroughly optimise their images for the web see an immediate uplift in product sales, customer engagement and brand perception. There are a range of ecommerce platforms that claim they offer a solution, but in reality most fall short of the mark and are unable to deliver higher quality images that meet today s high standards. It s no longer enough to rely solely on the default featuresets of the widely used ecommerce platforms; retailers must seek out new resources, tools and technologies to serve their customers with larger, clearer, mobile-device friendly product images and reap the benefits of an improved shopping experience. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 002

4 How Does Image Quality Affect Business? Bright North 2014 PAGE: 003

users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that s relevant to the task at hand Poor image quality directly affects your business by harming your conversion rate and

5 users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that s relevant to the task at hand Poor image quality directly affects your business by harming your conversion rate and encouraging consumers to click through to your competitors websites instead of yours. In contrast, customers presented with higher-quality product images are three times more likely to convert. 1 Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen recently stated, users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that s relevant to the task at hand 2, ignoring images that don t carry information about the products they re interested in. In short, if the image is not relevant to your customers expectations, they will purchase the product elsewhere Bright North 2014 PAGE: 004

6 few serious attempts have been made to quantify image quality in the ecommerce space, or to analyse its effect on conversion rates and sales How Is Image Quality Defined? Quality is often considered a subjective metric but sales, conversions and click-through are objective and, more importantly, measurable. Until recently, few serious attempts have been made to quantify image quality in the ecommerce space, or to analyse its effect on conversion rates and sales. This lack of industry standard has made it difficult for retailers to benchmark themselves against their competitors, and to capitalise on the resulting effect on the customer experience. Bright North s work in this arena has identified five factors that have a substantial impact on the online customers browsing experience, which retailers can use to optimise their own images and start to see the results for themselves. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 005

7 Companies have now identified the need to define what quality actually means, and devising solutions to ensure that product images are meeting these standards. Intrinsic Quality Retailers now need to be able to determine whether a given image is objectively a good picture. This involves analysis of the composition, shooting and focus of the image, and since everyone is different, it can be hard to reach consensus on the quality of any given image. This problem is multiplied for retailers with an extensive catalogue of images. However, companies are now starting to identify the need to define what quality actually means, and are looking for solutions to ensure that their product images are meeting these standards. Amazon no longer accept merchant images that fill less than 85% of the space available, are less than 500 pixels in height or don t have a completely white background. 3 Bright North 2014 PAGE: 006

EXAMPLE PROFESSIONAL IMAGE Research performed at ebay 5 used a combination of smart data algorithms and manual analysis to develop a system that was able to judge the quality of several million

8 EXAMPLE POORLY SHOT IMAGE Google Shopping also now reject any images that don t take up at least 80% of the space. 4, and now recommend that images are at least 800 pixels so they are optimal on high resolution displays that are quickly becoming the norm. EXAMPLE PROFESSIONAL IMAGE Research performed at ebay 5 used a combination of smart data algorithms and manual analysis to develop a system that was able to judge the quality of several million images. They defined intrinsic image quality as a combination of foreground object clarity, brightness, strong contrast between foreground and background as well as a clean and uniform background Bright North 2014 PAGE: 007

9 One well-known merchant had more than 5% missing or broken images in their product catalogue. Errors The proportion of broken image links on their product catalogues is often a surprise to many ecommerce merchants that we speak to. A recent site survey we conducted revealed that one well-known merchant had more than 5% missing or broken images in their product catalogue. Even a small number of broken image links can be off-putting to consumers, gives the impression of a careless brand and ultimately leads to users abandoning the site. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 008

The fact that there is an easy solution only indicates a systemic absence of effective monitoring.

10 EXAMPLE OF MERCHANT SITE WITH MISSING IMAGE These errors are often due to files being moved, technical errors or expired products and are more commonly found on the sites of merchants with large inventories. The fact that there is an easy solution only indicates a systemic absence of effective monitoring. Errors can only be discovered and eliminated by running regular audits; examining product catalogues for missing or incorrect images. This is a small step retailers can take to ensure a consistently positive brand experience across all of their marketing channels. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 009

11 The effect of a badly offset image on a consumer can be startling and contribute to a poor impression of your products and ultimately your brand Product Positioning No matter how clean, crisp and bright an image is, if it doesn t focus on the product and exclude extra material, it s not making good use of screen real estate and it won t maximise the level of engagement with potential customers. Every pixel of an image should be dedicated to showing as much product as possible, centred and in high definition, avoiding excessive whitespace and off centring. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 010

12 This is an example of a product image and product page from one audited site. Product detail lost by off-centre image on actual product page. Corrected image position ensures detail appears correctly on page. Whilst it might seem like an adequate image at first glance, the effect of a badly offset image on a consumer when displayed on the retailer s site or as part of an advert can be startling and contribute to a poor impression of your products and ultimately your brand. Retailers can prevent this by taking consideration of the channels in which product images will be displayed, or through the use of automated tools that can dynamically resize, rescale and reformat images for different contexts and devices. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 011

13 Thumbnailing deserves a little extra consideration; a simple rescaling or resizing of an image with too much whitespace can result in a thumbnail with a miniscule product, which is much more difficult for a potential customer to see. Thumbnails Instead, thumbnails should be created through a combination of cropping around the focal point of the image, and resizing the cropped image, making the best use of the product size within the thumbnail. BAD (PRODUCT TOO SMALL) GOOD (PRODUCT MORE VISIBLE) Good thumbnails can be produced manually with tools like Photoshop or more advanced automated tools that can identify the product within the image, zoom and crop automatically to produce optimised thumbnails. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 012

Unfortunately, naive processing algorithms abound and we frequently see good quality images ruined after upload due to overstretching

14 Quality of processing Many ecommerce platforms and providers will automatically reprocess your product images to resize or create thumbnails. Unfortunately, naive processing algorithms abound and we frequently see good quality images ruined after upload due to overstretching or skewing. Smart platforms reprocess and serve images with the optimal balance between download speed and image quality, optimised in the best format for the device it s being viewed on. EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT OPTIMISATION LEVELS Bright North 2014 PAGE: 013

15 3 Tips To Use Optimised Images To Improve Your Conversion Rate

16 Here are 3 ways you can improve conversions and increase sales through better use of your product images. Simple Ways To Improve Your Conversion Rate 1) Hire professional photographers Research illustrates that the business benefits of spending time and effort shooting photos professionally far outweigh the cost. AirBnB for example have documented 6 a 250% increase in bookings for properties with professionally shot images. 2) Compose your images more carefully Shoot against a clean, uniform, single-colour background. Ensure that the contrast is clear, the brightness is high, and you shoot in a well-lit location. Centre and crop all images to display the most product and minimise whitespace. 3) Use intelligent ecommerce products Don t rely on carelessly resized product images or thumbnails; use software that can produce resized main images and thumbnails that do your products justice. If you re choosing a vendor, ask to see examples of product images in different states, so that you can evaluate the quality of their solution. 6 Bright North 2014 PAGE: 014

17 Bright North empowers multi-channel ecommerce. Our products and services help some of the biggest brands in the world acquire more customers and sell more products. How We Can Help Hawk is just one part of our conversion optimisation solution; an image quality enhancement platform that integrates seamlessly with your existing solutions. Hawk consumes, analyses and processes your product images, before serving highly optimised versions to your customers, increasing engagement and improving conversion rates. Hawk delivers smart resizing and centring technology, automatically detecting the products in your images before dynamically cropping, resizing and rescaling those images to display your products, and your brand in the best possible light. Not only does Hawk take away the burden of implementing your own image processing technology, but also acts as a Content Delivery Network for images - reducing your bandwidth costs and maximising the availability of your content to your customers. Bright North 2014 PAGE: 015

18 Clients Bright North 2014 PAGE: 016

19 Get In Touch PHONE +44(0) WEBSITE Bright North 2014 PAGE: 017

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