Image Quality and eCommerce: Why optimising images improves conversion rate

IMAGE QUAL I T Y
AND ECOMMERCE
Why optimising images improves
conversion rate
© Bright North 2014

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
© Bright North 2014 PAGE: 001

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?

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

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

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

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=viglink21108-20
4 https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en-GB
5 https://labs.ebay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/14ImageInCommerce_WSDM_eBayResearchLabs.pdf
EXAMPLE POORLY SHOT IMAGE
EXAMPLE PROFESSIONAL IMAGE

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

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

“ 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”
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

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

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

Clients

Get In Touch
PHONE
+44(0) 20 3598 2217
EMAIL
hawk@brightnorth.co.uk
WEBSITE
www.brightnorth.co.uk

Image Quality and eCommerce: Why optimising images improves conversion rate

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