Product images are the most important component

Having beautiful relevant quality images is more important than the product information, a long description and ratings & reviews.

According to MDG, here’s the breakdown of what customers said is important to them:

Quality of a product image – 67%
Product-specific information – 63%
Long description – 54%
Ratings and reviews – 53%

Professional, varied, and consistent

Professional high-resolution photos communicate professionalism and allow users to see details of the product. This is especially important if your products have lots of features.

The product page should contain several quality photos, from different angles or featuring various features of the products. For example, if you’re selling shoes, one of the photos should be the sole of the shoe.

Have a consistent style (and background color) for the main image of all of your products, so that the thumbnails in category pages are consistent.

White images

What background color do you think is best for white images? Here’s the take from a photographer in my Ecom Convert group:

Professionally photographed products should not have pure white in the actual photo as pure white is overexposure. In general, I prefer to push clients to use a medium gray background for all photos of all the products. Its easier to crop out the product to change the color of the background thus it will cost less. Otherwise, shoot on white, but realize that you still have to crop out the background in photoshop to pure white.

You might have to gray out your products slightly to contrast with a white background.

Note that if you plan on selling on Amazon, they require pure white backgrounds (RGB 255,255,255), and their robots quickly catch it if your photos do not match their requirements.