Ecommerce image optimization benefits to influence customer’s buying decision?

Ecommerce images are the key factors to attract and influence its customer’s buying decisions. As being human it is almost natural to have fascination and charm for visual elements.” Your product images are the medium between the authenticity you want to create in customer’s imagination about your online shop and products”. Hence, eCommerce image optimization is an essential aspect of website design and SEO to make your online business a success.

Product touch, look, feel and trial are the four major factors influencing a buyer’s final purchase decision. And as far as online shopping is considered, customer’s inability to touch, feel and try the product is its biggest disadvantage. Your ecommerce product images, videos, descriptions, and reviews take over the charge of all the physical senses. Its rather more essential to have high quality, and optimized product images to enable your customer have an ideal imagery of it.

Let’s discuss ecommerce image optimization and its importance.

I would like you to assume yourself shopping in the best market of your area. You would generally either enter the most popular shop or would be attracted by the mannequin display of some random shop. Entering the shop either you would browse the products yourself or ask the shop staff to show you the products. While browsing the products you certainly get an overall feel how the product is going to be.

Similarly, in an eCommerce website the product images are the influential factors for visitors. Your online product images help your customers to better know, understand, and relate to your products.

High quality product photos captured from multiple angles, engage your customers attention. They help your customers to access the product information they need. Which otherwise can only be collected by visiting a physical store. And it is the ease of access to information that influence a customer to purchase online.

What is image optimization?

Image Optimization is the process or techniques to adjust the image size, dimensions, formats and resolution to adapt to its user device type. In technical terms, it is compressing and reducing the image size, while maintaining image quality standards.

What are the benefits of product image optimization?

Optimizing images while maintaining their quality brings in three types of benefits.

• Technical
• Marketing
• Customer Experience

Technical benefits

Saves server space and bandwidth

Did you know images add up to 53.25% of web page resources?

Take a note of the byte consumption graph of popular web page resources below.

*Note: This graph is created using page weight reports from HTTP archive . Lens WordPress and date range Jan 1, 2020 – Aug 1, 2020

Images are the highest byte consuming elements of a website. And for eCommerce websites, more than 50% of their content is displayed via images. Image optimization becomes even more important for ecommerce website.

One of the technical benefits of optimizing images is saves server space.

Uploading pictures without editing, generally results in heavier image size. Heavier an image, greater is its bytes consumption. And every website hosting plan comes with server space allocation. Optimizing your images can help you save server space and bandwidth.

Improves Web Page Loading Time

Loading a website, becomes faster phenomenon for browsers if attached images are lighter in weight.

Importance of web page speed to attract and retain website visitors is discussed throughout the internet. And yes, speed does matters.

You and I would definitely leave a website if it takes too much long time. Won’t we?

Boosts SEO results

Google considers Page Speed as a factor to rank websites in its search results.  And as page loading time depends on various elements including images. Optimizing them would not only improve your website speed but also ensures higher rankings.

As per Moz, 27% of search happens via Google Image Search

A technically improved high quality image boost your chances to get a prominent space in the featured snippets image carousels and image search results.

The various technical components like alt text, title text, image caption, and format etc. not only define the purpose of the image but also outline its usability and comprehension for the end-user and search engines as well. The purpose of your web page is made more clearer, which leaves an authoritative impact on users and search engines.

Marketing benefits

Boosts brand image

Your product photos are your online business representatives. They certainly are your visual brand ambassadors to attract and influence customers buying decision.

Your brand ethics, culture and style can be effectively and efficiently conveyed via photographs you use on your website.

Ecommerce platforms play a major role in influencing the purchase decision of online consumers. 26% of individual retail websites inspire their online consumers to buy a product from them. Source: BrizFeel

High quality ecommerce images build healthy brand recognition. Images are the medium to develop online customer’s trust to your business and products.

Demonstrate authority and competitiveness

This is digital era and eCommerce industry is growing very fast. From grocery to heavy electronics, everything can be purchased online. With millions of shopping options available online, it is certainly important for online shop owners to stand out with their services and products.

Since your product images are the visual business online representative, utilize them to their best to influence your visitors to revisit your online shop and convert into your loyal customer.

Using high quality images and surrounding them with relevant and informative text influences the customer’s interest in your products. Your website content and images speak your business criteria and quality standards. This finally boost your sales and ultimately your business ROI.

Social media sharing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest have modernized the online consumer behavior. Almost one third of global population use social media platforms. These platforms allow you to share photographs, videos and views globally.

Inclusion of social media while creating business marketing strategy has become mandatory these days. As it provides you different approaches to promote your brand while being economic.

Be it influencer marketing or video marketing or story boards, social media offers cost-effective tools and techniques. These platforms offer you the ability to directly interact and engage your audience.

With the wide reach of social media platforms, they help you promote your business globally. 54% of social browsers use social media to research products (GlobalWebIndex, 2018). Your product images can play a significant role to influence social media users.

Customer Experience

Content plays a major role in the success of any website. For ecommerce websites, where a large portion of the content is displayed via images. It becomes rather more important to focus on image quality and optimization.

Adding captions and alternative texts increases the accessibility of the website to its visitors. When an image is accompanied with relevant informative text it increases the resourcefulness of the product page. And customers are happier to find more information available to them.

Also, an optimized image discards the probability of slowing down your website. A slow website is disliked by more than 50% of website visitors. Faster a website loads, happier are its customers.

The above stats clearly depict the importance of speed to boost customer’s experience of your website user. Image optimization results in reducing the size of image file size. This directly influences the page load time and makes a website loading time fast.

Image optimization enhances your user experience not only in terms of page load time but also with the relevancy and meeting their requirements.