When you go shopping for furniture at your local retailer, you don’t find the sofas just stacked on top of each other. The store will organize them in a living room-like setting. Clothing retailers do this as well, putting their clothes on display hangers for more visibility instead of folding and stacking them on the shelves. The more outstanding clothing items are put on mannequins and placed around the entrance or by the windows.

Online stores have their own version of this: inspirational images. They’re usually featured on the homepage or on intermediate category pages. IKEA will show a living room or bedroom setting, LL Bean might feature a mountaineer in full gear, a restaurant may show diners enjoying numerous items from their menu, and so on.

The entire point of having a featured look is to inspire buyers to buy the products featured there. If you walk into a clothing store and see a mannequin in oxfords, chinos, a sweater, scarf, and top hat, you might want to replicate the look. All you have to do is ask a salesperson and you’ll get everything the mannequin is wearing. If you only want the top hat it’s still the same process.

Problem is, some online stores don’t make this as easy as it is in physical stores. Let’s say Jonah sees a living room set and it just speaks to him. He decides he’s going to have a living room exactly like the one in the picture but your store doesn’t offer an easy way for him to buy the featured items. Or maybe he just likes the throw pillows on the couch and wants to get those but he encounters the same problem. He might search around manually but if he doesn’t get what he wants quickly he’ll just give up and you end up missing out on a fair bit of business.

How do you make products featured on inspirational images easy to buy?

Here are a few options:

Add tags on individual items that shoppers can click on to buy a specific product.
Provide a link below the image that takes shoppers to a page listing all the items individually.
List items featured in an inspirational image individually directly below the inspirational image.
Have a “Buy featured set” button that allows customers to buy every product featured on an inspirational image. You can also add an option selector so shoppers can get rid of what they don’t want. For example, Jonah may want the couch, armchairs, and coffee table featured on a living room set but he may not want to include the flower vase because his hyperactive pre-teen children would break it within hours.