Hi,
I’m one of those vendors that has only 1 picture for every product in my store. Fortunately I’m not in a niche that is extremely image focused (jewelry, clothing etc). But this no doubt is less than ideal and something I am trying to fix.
For the others who have improved the quantity and/or quality of their product pictures, how much of a boost have you seen to your sales?
If you search around you’ll find a number of case studies on this topic as it’s a very common question (hint: try looking at Adobe’s Scene7, it’s an image serving solution and likely a good place for data).
The basic answer is that, especially when dealing with personal and household goods (things people wear / show and thus need to be sure look good) photos are beyond important. This isn’t just a question of numbers and angles; having quality shots both to layout the product (flat background) and ideally in context (on a person/ wrist / etc) will raise conversions sharply.
The web is impersonal. Getting past that as much as you can is nothing but upside.
Quality photography can be a turning point for a business in ecommerce . Not talking about the number of images, or interactive images - often just a single high quality product image is enough. There’re many ways to show the same product in a completely different light (e.g plasticity cheap vs shiny metallic rich) and that’s what some businesses pay big $$ for or keep a full time photographer on-site or even a full-blown photo studio.
There’s so few ways to differentiate yourself on the internet, especially if you’re not selling a totally unique product, but photos are one of the main ways to do it. My experience has been that sales for a particular product increase anywhere from 5-10% for each additional quality image.
I know there’s a few cases for us where we sell identical products as our competitors. However, our photos are far higher quality and the customer perceives that they are getting a higher quality product from us based on these photos.
Some picture can say more than the words and effect more in person mind who see the picture. Now a days worlds 70$ sales are coming from presentation style of products and it’s marketing with the help of TC Ads, posters, online banners, etc this all are ultimately promoted product with static OR moving pictures. So, pictures and sales are directly proportional to sales of any product. Just keep in mind that how you can attract people and your promotion style matter.
Good point, [B][COLOR=#0071D8]dhavalpandya[/COLOR][/B]
People are in time-deficit, so for them much easier to look at images than read texts.
If images are OK, maybe they will read the text later
Naturally images that will get our attention more than what the text does; so the quality images always force the users to stay on the information provided. Providing information along with the text content is always the great idea to grab the attention of the users.
Photos are as important as the layout of the page, home page etc. Should be clear, colorful and precise.
Some of this is captured in a couple of the other posts, but as a merchant its your job to create an experience for the customer so its like they are physically in reach of what you are selling. Compare an online store to that of brick and mortar. Your customers cannot walk into your store and touch the products, so instead, give them imagery of of what it would be like if they could. Different angles, high res, zoom in and out, etc. This is somehting Zappos bases their strategy on.
If have a two website , and one is only picture with cloth, and one with a sexy girl wearing a cloth . Which one would you buy ? Ofcourse is the cloth with the pretty girl wearing.
A site with totally white and plain , and with a site come with flash , attractive color banner . Which one would you trust ? a simple white website or a professional look website?
That why picture in the content play an important role of increasing conversion rate.
The most common images I can think of that you can use for an SEO company would be pictures of the stats and some stock images that can pertain to SEO. I think it’s pretty hard to look for a good and unique one that would really attract a lot of traffic. But I do think that the relationship between the pictures and the sales can be viewed like this: If you have good images showing what your product is and what it can do, then it would have a lot more sales than just describing your product in text form.
[FONT=Verdana]Delta223 asked a simple and straightforward question:
With the exception of TedS in post #2, nobody has actually addressed this question. There have been plenty of general posts about the value of images in a site, but nothing that actually answers the question.
If anybody has anything helpful to add for Delta223, please share it, but we don’t need any more general opinions about images. 
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I created a lottery syndicate site in November and got a free image…got only 2 new member for the next 2 months. After buying templates and new pictures, got 8-12 members each month.
Another way I looked at it was…bad pictures will not sell anything even if your offer is the best around