Image Quality and eCommerce: Why optimising images improves conversion rate

I M AG E Q U A L I T Y A N D E C O M M E R C EWhy optimising images improves conversion rate

© Bright North 2014

© Bright North 2014 PAGE: 001

Executive Summary 002

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

Contents


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.

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 feature-

sets 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.

Executive Summary


How Does Image Quality Affect Business?


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.

1 http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/436-Quality-Images-Boost-Sales 2 http://www.nngroup.com/articles/photos-as-web-content/

“ users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand”


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.

How Is Image Quality Defined?

“ few serious attempts have been made to quantify image quality in the ecommerce space, or to analyse its effect on conversion rates and sales”


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

Intrinsic Quality

“ Companies have now identified the need to define what quality actually means, and devising solutions to ensure that product images are meeting these standards.”


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.

Research performed at eBay5 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.

3 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200202110&tag=viglink21108-204 https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en-GB5 https://labs.ebay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/14ImageInCommerce_WSDM_eBayResearchLabs.pdf

EXAMPLE POORLY SHOT IMAGE

EXAMPLE PROFESSIONAL IMAGE


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.

Errors

“ One well-known merchant had more than 5% missing or broken images in their product catalogue.”


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.

EXAMPLE OF MERCHANT SITE WITH MISSING IMAGE


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.

Product Positioning

“ 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”


This is an example of a product image and product page from

one audited site.

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.

Product detail lost by off-centre image on actual product page.

Corrected image position ensures detail appears correctly on page.


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.

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.

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.

Thumbnails

BAD (PRODUCT TOO SMALL) GOOD (PRODUCT MORE VISIBLE)


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.

Quality of processing

EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT OPTIMISATION LEVELS

3 Tips To Use Optimised Images To Improve

Your Conversion Rate


Here are 3 ways you can improve conversions and increase

sales through better use of your product images.

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 documented6 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.

Simple Ways To Improve Your Conversion Rate

6http://blog.airbnb.com/airbnb-photography-celebrating-13000-verified/


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.

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.

How We Can Help

http://www.brightnorth.co.uk/solutions/image-optimisation.html





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