Your content eCommerce photo plays an extremely important role in increasing the conversation rate of your eCommerce store as it affects how people perceive your brand. In this article, we’ll provide you with ten beginner-friendly photography tips that can serve as an eCommerce success guide if you are looking to take quality high conversion pictures of the products sold in your eCommerce store.
Take Shots From Different Angles
Shooting pictures or even videos from multiple angles greatly diversifies the subject matter. For people in the fashion eCommerce industry, it adds an extra flair to your product image. Depending on the angle you decide to use, you can exaggerate the overall appearance of your product image or highlight a specific detail about it. Both of these will help customers get a feel of the general integrity of your product.
So next time you find yourself taking pictures of your product you can try a different approach rather than just taking a picture by facing an item directly. You can try crunching on the floor, taking a picture above the item, or even taking shoots at various some might say awkward angles to get a more natural effect.
Use a Suitable Lighting Setup
The lighting setup used in taking a photograph not only determines the brightness or darkness of the said image but also sets a mood and atmosphere for the picture. This will affect how the image is received by whoever is viewing it.
Depending on the effect or the story you’re trying to get with a particular product image, it is advisable to set up lighting that will help enhance or portray that effect. Naturally, there are two main types of lighting, natural and artificial light. So irrespective of the effect you are in search of the lighting that will help improve your image character, texture, vibrancy, and so on will fall under either one of these categories.
Don’t Forget the Rule of Thirds
In photography, the rule of thirds is simply a guideline that helps you create better composed and compelling shoots by breaking down your image into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. This will sequentially provide you with about four or nine gridlines, depending on the size of the image you are taking.
If you’re hearing about this for the first time, it might sound a bit complex to you and that’s understandable. You can learn more about the rule of thirds by visiting Digital Photography School.
Keep It Simple
One distinct mistake a good number of fashion eCommerce marketers make is trying to overcomplicate their eCommerce photos to grab customers’ attention. However, grabbing the attention of a customer does not guarantee sales.
You can grab the attention of your customers with an overly bright and unnecessarily large product image, but they may not end up purchasing anything from you either because your image has lost its visual appeal or it’s just hard to understand, and people are not patient enough to wait around to decipher the meaning of a picture.
This is why you should try your best to keep everything to a minimum and only go overboard if it will help with telling the story of a particular product.
Buy a Tripod
A tripod benefits you from longer exposure with a faster shutter speed within seconds. This translates to a tripod helping you reduce the risk of blurs or any other mistake caused by the instability or shaking of your hands while taking your eCommerce photo. In addition, a tripod makes your image sharper, which as the case may be, will help improve the visual appeal of your product image.
Contextualize Your Sample
You should always aim to contextualize every single one of your eCommerce photos. What this means is that every product image that goes up on your website, or you intend to upload on your website should be taken concerning what the product will be used for, to better help customers understand the need and importance of that particular item.
For example, if your eCommerce store specializes in selling winter jackets, you should try showcasing your product in a cold setting or during the Winter. A picture like this will help your customers to better understand that they would need a winter jacket before Winter approaches rather than you displaying your jacket on a table or a mannequin.
Focus On The Details
When you focus on details in fashion photography, you draw attention to certain aspects of your products that would have otherwise completely gone unnoticed. This detail might be as little as the stitches used in a particular dress, or how soft the material feels which is somewhat difficult to capture from an image.
Focusing on details will also help you show your customers different sides of your product and build their trust in your brand since they can see that you are confident enough to give them a close-up of what you are selling.
Prepare Ahead of Time
In every eCommerce success guide, you are more than likely to come across a section or two that speaks about the importance of planning your fashion eCommerce photo shoot ahead of time. Planning ahead of time leads to proper organization, and also improves the final outcome of your shoot leaving you time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Before you begin any photo shoot, should already have a location where you want the shoot to take place, and have your props and pieces of equipment ready. This will assist in eliminating any room for errors or mistakes caused by improper planning.
Create an Inspiration Portfolio
Another thing to add to your eCommerce success guide is an inspiration portfolio. Depending on what works for you, this can either be an online or offline portfolio. Your inspiration portfolio should consist of product photography samples from other businesses or brands, not just those in the fashion eCommerce industry.
This portfolio will serve as a source where you can get creative inspiration to keep your product images unique and different because people will notice and get tired if you keep using the same style or staging in all your pictures. You can also use this portfolio as a point of reference when you have a particular vision you are trying to achieve or recreate.
Use Multiple Sets
To liven things up, you can try using more than one set for some clothing items. What we mean by this is you can incorporate things like staging and props in some pictures, and in other pictures containing that same item, you might want to keep it simple by just showcasing just the clothes. Taking multiple sets will allow your customers to visualize themselves in the same outfit but with a different style or accessories.
Conclusion
Clothing photography is an integral aspect of every eCommerce business and cannot be ignored. Your eCommerce pictures play a large role in affecting the purchasing decision of customers, and as such, they should be taken very seriously. The tips that you can take away from this article to improve your fashion eCommerce photography include:
- Take pictures from different angles for extra flair.
- Choose your lighting correctly
- Use the rule of thirds
- Make everything simple to understand
- Invest in a tripod
- Take your pictures in a context
- Pay attention to details
- Plan before any shoot
- Make an inspiration portfolio
- Use more than one set
