No doubt over the previous month or so, many of you who are online sellers yourselves will have had to go through the e-commerce experience (or catalogue shopping) from the position of a customer. The first thing you will be hit by is the over saturation of sellers competing for your attention, and the often confusing array of options and products being shown in front of you, as you make spilt second decisions and hasty purchases.

I hope the overriding thing you learned from these Christmas shopping binges, be they online or in a catalogue, is that the way the product looked to you, above all else, would drive you to make a purchase or move on to the next site.

The imagery of your own products, be it pack shot product photography, 360 product photography, fashion and clothing photography or moving image, is the vital and most emotive link between the thing you’re selling, and the person that you hope will buy it. You’ve invested time and money to make your products unique and desirable, too many ecommerce sellers sadly let that go to waste by using unprofessional, unappealing product photography. Try to think back to those frantic Christmas shopping sessions, in truth you probably weren’t spending long periods of time browsing a single site, reading lengthily blurbs and product descriptions, you were more than likely bouncing around numerous, competing ecommerce sites, looking at many different products, rapidly processing visual information  and stopping at products that struck you as appealing, and with a look of quality and professionalism (this is most evident on eBay, where sellers with professional quality images by far out sell sellers with self taken, supplier, or ‘in house’ images of the same products). Creating confidence in the quality of your brand, the quality and design of your product and credibility of you as a seller will translate in to sales.

The trend over 2013 was towards diversifying of product imaging. The most successful sites usually opted for pack shot product photography,  accompanied with 360 product photography and often something creative to accompany that as well. The top fashion sites were increasingly going for clothing photography, supplemented with a few basic model shots and often a short product video.

Taking all that in to account it’s clear that professional product photography should be a vital part of your business plan in 2014. Not an inconvenient part of the process that’s done at the lowest possible cost, and certainly not an optional one, but at the heart of your strategy.  Our clients unanimously report that whatever cost they’ve laid out on product photography with us in the past year (usually relatively minimal) they’ve recouped that cost many times over in extra sales. A wise investment indeed. See it as an initial connection, a digital handshake between you and  a potential buyer. You’ve devoted time and money into attracting someone to your product page, don’t fall at the last hurdle. Give your products the treatment they deserve, it could be the difference between a sale for you and a sale for your competitor.