Imagine how annoying and expensive it is for the supplier you bought from, when your dissatisfaction is about to start costing him time and money, on the returns process, and in some instances, his reputation.
Owning an ecommerce business is an exciting and low overhead way to trade as a retailer and it works beautifully as long as what you’re selling is exactly what the consumer wants, but if the product comes in different sizes, shapes or types, and add in the “fussy nature” of some customers, that brilliant business, can become a nightmare.
The often quoted cliché of “making it easy for the customer to buy”, should always be paramount in the seller’s mind and can be solved quickly and easily by making sure the customer has as much information about the product, including high quality photography, showing detailed images from various angles, especially size and shape.
Ordering online from some ecommerce websites can be extremely hit and miss, in fact what you see is very often not what you get, because of the poor quality photos and inadequate description, especially when the pictures on the site are not always of the branded product you’re expecting or looking for.
Sometimes the packaging may be different, but the contents aren’t, or in the case of counterfeit goods, vice versa.
This also increases that niggling doubt, which invariably occurs just after the pay button has been clicked, that it may not be the exact item needed or that possibly the description itself doesn’t match, even though the illustration looks correct.
For the vendor it’s essential that website photos of their merchandise are, “as described”, otherwise this will lead to an increase in returns for the company, frustration and irritation for customers.
In a shop the customer can usually pick the product up and prod it, poke it, squeeze or stroke it, examine it closely and even open the box to check the contents match the picture on the outside. They can compare items on the shelf and scrutinise similar models or types of product, but online it could be just a picture of the outside of the box or a very poor, low resolution image, which becomes a mass of pixelated mush without any visual information, when they click to enlarge.
Many companies now routinely take their own pictures for the web, using anything from a mobile phone to a point and click camera and for much of the time this will be fine, but the quality of the photos reflects not only on the product, but how the customer views the seller’s reputation.
As a specialist product photographer my clients rely on my expertise to make their products look great and provide all the information a customer requires to make a buying decision.
One of my clients produced replacement parts for a domestic appliance but there were various sizes produced which led to lots of returns. My solution was to produce a scaled, grid overlay of squares so the end user just counted the squares and knew they were getting exactly what they wanted.
If you need to reduce the number of returns from your ecommerce site or want your customer to be in no doubt about what they’re buying, talk to a professional product photographer now.
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