Tips for better product photos for your online shopping cart

Working with online hosted shopping carts like Storenvy and Big Cartel makes running your retail shop online easy. The sites come with default templates and settings that make your store work almost without any effort on your part. While setting up the store and adding a new product are simple using these hosted shopping carts there is one thing you have control over that can make a big difference, your product photos.

Take better product photos

First things first take amazing photos of your products with good lighting and a consistent background. Use a digital SLR for the best results in good natural light or in a well lit room. Take more than one photo and pick the best. Also make sure to take close-ups of details, get front and back photos, product in use, etc… Shoppers like to see as much of the product as possible and stores like Etsy, Big Cartel and Storenvy allow for multiple photos to be uploaded.

Consistency in your photos

What works for many carts is to have your product photos with similar backgrounds or in a similar style. That way when browsing a category or collection of products the gallery view looks consistent and visually appealing. So if you are selling t-shirts consider your primary photo just being a close-up of the t-shirt or perhaps a always having a person wearing the shirt. Mixing and matching how you primarily display the product will be distracting. Consistency will help here. So decide up front how you want to show off your products.

Additionally make sure the subject of your photos is sized consistently. For instance don’t use a close-up of one product and then a wide angle shot of the next product, especially if they are the same type of product.

Finally regarding consistency I find it best to choose a vertical or horizontally formatted product photo from the start. Usually the template you choose will help influence this decision but it won’t stop you from using a vertical photo for one then a horizontal image for the next product. Basically, frame and crop your photos to the same layout to ensure consistent visual layout when displaying your products online.

Sizing your photos

All shopping carts have a default template. If you are using the default template find out the dimensions of the photo on the all product listing pages and then the individual product page. Take those dimensions and find the size ratio you are looking for.

Now to quickly resize your photos use a tool like IfranView, which is free. You can either open a file and resize it manually or bulk edit an entire folder of photos.

The goal of resizing your photos on your desktop is not to resize them to the size that will be displayed on the website but to get to the proper ratio that the shopping cart will automatically resize your photos to. Most carts will generate 2 or 3 copies of your product photos. A thumbnail, a preview and the product display photo in addition to the original file uploaded. This allows different pages on the site to show the image in an appropriate size without having to resize each time a page loads.

What you are looking for here is that all of your photos end up sized exactly the same in your cart. This way the template you choose looks better. It is always a visual turn off when you visit a shop where the product photos are a different size.

Share your tips

What tips do you have for others when taking product photos? Share them in the comments.