Images speak a thousand words

One often overlooked area of your eCommerce store is the use of images. Shoppers will visit your store expecting to see high quality images of your products supplemented by good quality descriptions in order to make a buying decision. Here’s some top tips for making sure your products have the impact they deserve…

1. Image Quality – Low resolution or fuzzy images do nothing for you so make sure you start off by obtaining high resolution images of your products before optimising and cropping them.
2. Optimisation – Now you have your high quality product shots, use a commercial application such as Photoshop or an open source alternative like GIMP to optimise the images. Slow loading pages caused by un-optimised images are a big turn off for shoppers
3. Galleries – Most eCommerce software solutions offer some kind of gallery option, Open Mind Commerce allows unlimited numbers of images in the gallery system and even allows you to auto-create thumbnail images expanding to a full size picture
4. SEO – An often overlooked area is the search engine optimisation of images.  Make sure your eCommerce software gives you complete control over the alt tag for the images as well as the actual image name.

So there you are, it may only be only be a part of your eCommerce store strategy but shoppers appreciate high quality images just as much as low prices!

What do you use for image optimisation for your eCommerce software? Add your comments and let us know…