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How Great Product Photography can Boost your Amazon Sales

Everyone knows the dread of shopping online for hours, looking for the perfect purchase, only to end up having to base your buying decision off of a few, low-quality Amazon images. Product photography matters more now than ever before. The rise of online shopping and Amazon-exclusive companies has increased the impact that photography and marketing have on a brand and its lifetime. The sales and profits made by e-commerce and Amazon brands are greatly impacted by their photography. After covering how Amazon brand survival is linked to quality photography, we decided to break down the connection between Amazon brand’s photography and their sales.

Attracting Attention

The easy way out may be to DIY the images, go the photoshop route, or use the cheapest photographer in the area. However, if you’re looking to boost your sales, these are not the best ways to attract customers. Using personal experience, we can often relate to skipping over the low-quality product photos and clicking on the clean and crisp-looking images instead. Using a photography studio can boost any brand’s engagement, just by providing visuals that look professional and trustworthy.

Brand Recognition

One of the main reasons that quality commercial photography can increase sales is by automatically crafting a cohesive and consistent Amazon page. Brand recognition on this platform can be more difficult than it would be for a retail or e-comm brand, as you end up having to compete with the surrounding Amazon website design. Therefore, taking the steps to follow all branding guidelines, while ensuring that the photography realistically represents your products, can be a hefty project to take on or to trust an unspecialized photographer to pull off. However, handing off the work to an experienced product photography studio can be a game-changer.

A studio will be able to ensure that the images look professional, with the correct lighting, angles, and editing. However, they can also be a great help when needing to figure out a brand’s overall goals for gaining interest from their target audience, where to focus their photography efforts, and to figure out what visuals are missing from a product page. (If in need of any shot list inspiration, we made sure to break down on-white photography and you must have images, here.) When it comes to brand recognition, other options of photography will rarely get the job done. Handing off the project to a product photography studio will ensure that both the technical and creative aspects of your brand and products are highlighted and recognizable to any new or returning customers.

Buying Decisions

The world of media has only increased the need for increased stimulation and visualization when purchasing online. Only a few years ago, the average consumer need half of the images they currently expect from a product page, and this number continues to rise for all age groups.

We have previously discussed how product photography can close the gap between subconscious in-person buying decisions and the lack of senses used for online shopping. Quality photography will allow a customer to get a much better grasp on how large the product actually is, how it could smell, or what the color will look like in person. When shopping, customers want to uncover as much as they can about a product before they make that final decision to click “check out now.” Using a product photography studio can take the mystery out of potential customers’ shopping experience, inevitably leading to more frequent sales.

Answering Questions

As mentioned above, minimizing the mystery of a product is crucial to consumer buying decisions. Much of the confusion that an audience has about a product is often reflected in the most frequently asked questions. A clever tactic used by many e-comm brands is to provide answers to these questions by including more visuals on the Amazon product pages.

Quality product photography is the first step in minimizing customer concussion. However, adding in-image text, detailed imagery to a shot list, or photos of individual product parts can preemptively answer some of the more common consumer questions. Working with a product photography studio can allow for collaboration on what needs to be covered on a shot list and what elements of a product should be highlighted within the images.

Customer Satisfaction

Unlike in-person retail, it is much more difficult for online shoppers to grasp all elements of a product. As previously mentioned, most senses are removed from any online shopping experience. Therefore, by removing any confusion, misinformation, or hidden elements of a product through well-shot, professional photography, customer satisfaction is set to improve.

Similar to how answering FAQs can decrease the numbers of returns and exchanges, accurate images on PDPs and websites can help save companies’ resources across the board. On eCommerce sites, such as Amazon, comment sections are often filled with angry customers expressing that parts of a product were “in the photo but aren’t actually included” or that “the color is completely different than the picture.” These common complaints agave a large impact on seller ratings and brand trust, but can be avoided with photography that is accurate.

Customer Satisfaction

Now that it is clear why authentic images are so important for Amazon sellers, it brings up the question of “why do I need to invest in professional photography just to get successful photos?”

Without knowing the industry or having photography experience, it can be difficult to understand what goes into creating a single shot. To shoot a product in its most realistic form, multiple shots usually have to be taken to capture every highlight, bubble, or shadow needed to create a successful photograph. After the entire photography experience, retouching often includes piecing together these images, while also color-correcting the product to depict SKUs correctly and fixing any inaccuracies that may still be seen.

While that is an extremely watered-down version of the entire approach, it gives insight into the complicated process behind successful photos. Technology is more complicated every day and customers are more aware of their buying decisions. iPhone photos and outdated DSLRs don’t cut it anymore. Consumers will see right through any detours taken when it comes to digital media and online resources. Investing in quality retail photography is the right investment for any eCommerce brand- trust us, the numbers will prove it.