The Importance of Photos for an Online Retailer

As a online seller, we are automatically at a disadvantage! Why? Our customers are not able to physically touch and try on our products in person before purchasing them, like they can at a brick and mortar store. That means that they have to have a certain amount of faith when making a purchase from a online retailer. Without that certain level of comfort, they won't buy. It is our job to make the customer comfortable with making a purchase from us, and that starts with product photos!

Like all first time businesses, we started from scratch with what we had available. Even though we had exceptional products to offer our customers, we did NOT have an exceptional photo studio with amazing lighting and great cameras and models to showcase our items. We had a point and shoot camera, some fabric, and the ambient lighting of either the sun outside, or a simple room light. The results are shown at the right.

This photo was one of the very first we took. AND it's since been modified as we learned to adjust photos properly. Now, you can clearly see it's a bracelet and necklace combo... but that's about it. Place this simple photo next to hundreds of others that are professionally shot, and are you likely to click on it to see more about it based on this impression? Probably not. Even though I can tell you this is a well made set, that it is beautiful in person, and that the photo doesn't do it justice, that will mean very little to the potential buyer 500 miles away. They see an amateur picture of a piece of jewelry. If the picture is less than spectacular, what is the workmanship of the piece like?

Now take the photo on the left into account. Exact same piece of jewelry, but the photo is significantly brighter and more professional appearing. Would you click this photo to learn more about the items? Would you potentially buy this jewelry based on the photo?


Would you believe that this photo is taken with nothing more extravagant than a point and shoot camera, a box, some white paper and poster board, some white cloth, and 2 small desk lamps? It's true. The first photo is taken on a cloth in the middle of the floor with an expensive professional camera. This photo was taken in a small D.I.Y. light box I built for about $4.00 with a simple point and shoot camera on a kitchen table. All it took was some research, and time to figure out how to create professional product photos that are eye catching, and sell!

These types of photos will make of break and online business. If your customer isn't WOW'ed by your pictures, they are much less likely to feel comfortable about buying your products. Taking the time (and you will find it may be a lot of time at first) to shoot quality product photos is a simple investment into your business. You don't even need to buy a photo program. The normal 'picture viewer' in windows is sufficient to brighten up slightly dark photos under the 'fix' option at the top. Just remember to BE PICKY. If the photo is slightly out of focus, is dull or dark, or bothers you at all, it will most likely bother your customers. Also, take lots of shots! We make sure to do at least 5 different 'poses' of each piece with several pictures and angles of each pose to give us enough shots to work with.

To learn how to build your own light box go to http://www.digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a-inexpensive-light-tent.

A bit of a make over!

If you've previously visited our Esty Store, or taken a look at our blog before you may notice some things have changed. Namely the looks of our banners and graphics!

Original store banner.

This was our original store banner. Crystal was gracious enough to sit down with me and create it on the fly after I had spent hours reading the Etsy message boards. Everyone seemed to say "No banner, No sales", which of course made me have a slight nervous breakdown and call her in a hissy.

After some very fast talking, some cropping, some cussing, some whining, a bit of squishing, and a lot of tweaking our store banner was born. Considering it was done on the fly, and from scratch we were both exceedingly pleased with it.

We have been open for almost 5 months now as a formal online store, and I've been doing a lot of looking around and asking other successful sellers what they did in their infancy as an online store. The general response was a lot of changing, and tweaking, and perfecting. This got me taking a good long look at our online presence and what we could do to be more appealing to customers that we would, unfortunately, probably never have the pleasure of meeting face to face. After retaking as many product pictures as my poor camera and mind could handle (for the time being), I started noticing that our banner and graphics could use some tweaking. So I kidnapped Crystal and chained her to my dining room table and threatened her until she produced an awesome banner!

Ok! So I didn't kidnap her and chain her down, I told her if she came over and helped me I'd feed her... twice.

Yes, here she is hard at work. It ended up not just being a shop banner that she worked on for Serenity in Chains. I also ended up getting her to create the lovely Blog header that you now see above, as well as tweak our logo, adjust our business card templates, and start on the vending banner (a 6ft by 2ft work in progress).

It only was a total of 5 hours of work. If it wouldn't have been for the fact that I kept her in caffeinated beverage, and played silly YouTube videos to distract her I'm pretty sure I'd be missing an eye right now.

Is that a happy dance, or did I break it?

I am very fortunate that she can do this stuff for me. I'm not computer illiterate, quite the contrary. But if I can bribe someone else to do my digital art with poorly cooked cuisine, I'm all about it.

And for the record it as Blackened Chicken sandwiches and fries for lunch, and Eggs and Chorizo, hash browns and tortillas for dinner.
Yeah, we played it healthy today (that was my heart screaming you heard).


However, even after hours of going back and forth, of picking pictures and cropping, and cropping and cropping and cropping, and shuffling them around we were finally able to come up with a basic store banner design that we both liked, and that I thought would be attractive to customers. If you have a moment, take a look and compare it to the old one. We would love some feedback!