Selling Online #33 : Every Picture Tells A Story Don’t It?

February 1st, 2009 | Business, DealerNews, E-Commerce

Last month I wrote about the importance of investing the time and energy to write your own product descriptions. Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so this month’s column is going to focus on visual merchandising or product photography.

One of the first things that I want to get out of the way is that I am in no way suggesting professional, high-quality product photography is easy or that anyone can do it. Some of the highest paid, working professional photographers are in fact product photographers. They don’t get that way because taking product pictures is easy. It’s a unique discipline with its own dedicated career path.

However, I’m not writing about taking pictures for advertising or high-quality, glossy brochures. I’m going to be describing taking pictures mostly for their pragmatic, informational value. The ability of a picture to display or describe a product in ways that would be impossible or too difficult and time consuming to do with words alone.

Why is it important that you invest in the tools, processes, and expertise necessary to take your own images, especially if you are selling products that have good imagery from the OEM or supplier (which unfortunately is an amazingly rare occurrence)?

Because your website is trying to actually sell the product. You are (hopefully) the last hurdle between your site visitor’s desire to own the product he’s looking at and actually spending the money to buy it.

If the visitor is really close to buying from you, but really needs to see how the bottom, or back of that widget looks, there’s a very high risk that they are going to go to another site or to a brick and mortar store to find out. If you have the photography or other visual merchandising (video, 360 spin views, etc.) to meet their informational need, you’ve just made the sale.

While the informational aspect of the visual merchandising is a primary concern, it should not be your only concern. You should also want your photography to positively reflect a strong brand image for your dealership and the product that your selling. Try to make the images look as good as you possibly can. Blurry, over-exposed pictures taken on a beat-up, oil-spotted plywood table may not be what your customers are looking to see (however, sharp, well-lit pictures of cool products taken on a beat-up, oil-stained plywood table might be kind of cool!).

Driven by the requirements of huge numbers of eBay-type business the necessary equipment to take semi-professional product photography has gotten very affordable. There are literally thousands of sites out there (just Google “product photography”) that will teach you everything you need to know to get started. And if you don’t want to do it yourself, and don’t currently have someone on staff that can tackle it, craigslist or your local college is a great place to find people with the basic skills that are looking to build portfolios and have a vested interest in making your pictures looks good.

With all of those elements in place, there’s very little in the way of a rational excuse to not take this on if you are serious about setting yourself apart in the e-commerce market place. If you are not the place to go, that means someone else is.

Now to do the job right you’re going to need some basic lighting equipment, a good digital camera, an environment for your products, and the software necessary to make the images look good or to reformat them for your website.

You can get some really decent lighting systems (either constant light or strobe based) on eBay for very little money. Or you can go upscale and shop at places like B&H (http://www.bhphotovideo.com). Or you can even build your own. I know that professional photographers out there are going to want to burn me at the stake for saying this, but there’s really no reason to spend the big bucks for professional lighting gear for our purposes. You don’t need the fancy $40 bulbs and the $300 tripod and fixture. A $3.00 full spectrum compact fluorescent bulb in a $6.00 clip on fixture attached to a 2×4 wood stand works just fine.

However, there are some rules of thumb you need to follow. You want to make sure that ALL of your light bulbs are the same brand and the same type. you can vary the wattage/output, but you get into real problems with color issues if you use different types of bulbs. As long as all the bulbs are the same you can set a custom white-balance point in your camera or do color corrections in your photo software.

Next, you’re going to want to invest in a GOOD digital camera. That’s not really a problem anymore as you can get amazing digital SLR’s with great lenses in a kit for around $500 and non-SLR’s that have astounding built in lenses for around $350. I suggest www.dpreview.com to learn more about what camera to buy. I recommend getting a camera/lens that is as “fast” as you can get (i.e. an f value as close to 2.0 as you can get and when looking at a zoom lens that stays near 2 across the entire zoom range). This will allow you to shoot with faster shutter speeds without needing super bright lights and gives you the ability to use depth of field (DOF) to your advantage.

You’re also going to need an environment to place your products in. This could be a large light-box or light-tent you get off eBay or build yourself or something more creative like a table-top display. You may want to even consider something like a small studio where a beautiful model can display that carbon fiber fender a la QVC. Be creative!

Finally you’re going to need software to edit the images. This can be as simple as cropping and resizing to doing color correction or adding text. The big dog here is Photoshop. There’s nothing you can possibly ever need to do that Photoshop can’t handle either by itself of extended via plug-ins.

However Photoshop has an almost vertical learning curve and if the folks doing the work are not already well versed you may want to look at some software that is more purpose-based for product photography.

A package that is getting some attention is a program called “Bling It” (http://www.blingit.us/) that has some really simple abilities to spruce up the product shots. They have a free download so you should at least try it out. It allows you to place the product on different backgrounds and even do basic retouching of the product to remove scratches, fingerprints, etc.

Finally, if you are really going to take this on, you’re going to want to look at something that automates the workflow and produces consistent results. You might want to look at some of the products offered by Ortery (http://ortery.com). They are a little pricey, but if you have several thousand products to take pictures of, and want to do things like 360 spins and multi angles, these setups will let you do it all and save a lot of time.

Ultimately all of the investment you are going to make in visual merchandising is going to be paid back by higher conversion rates and therefore more revenue. Think about it… Would you settle for dust and cobweb-covered products displayed behind dirty and smudged glass in your showroom? Then why are settling for over-compressed, grainy, small, and generally poor looking product photography on your website?

If you are on one of the turn-key systems, you are currently stuck as none of them allow you to change or add to the product images that come out of the box. If you find yourself in that situation, pick up the phone and call them to request that they change their software to allow you, the merchant, to take more control over how products are displayed on your site. That includes being able to change or add to the descriptions and the product photography. Maybe if they hear from more of you they will make these capabilities more of a priority.

That concludes this two-part series on merchandising. Hopefully by following my advise last month on the words, and this month on the pictures you’ll start raking in even more money. Of course if you don’t do it, I’m sure someone else will.