E-commerce platforms are increasingly competing for our limited attention. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Instagram, and Facebook Marketplace all want the limited time of consumers and engage them to buy.
For Amazon, it’s not the price, the free shipping or the detail that gets that all-important consumer attention. Pictures are what bring products to life and change ‘I want’ to ‘I need’.
If your business is selling on Amazon and photographs aren’t at the top of your strategic investment list, you need to ask yourself, ‘can we afford not to invest in them?’
In this article, the team of Amazon experts at Sell Beyond reveal how using better images influences what people buy on Amazon, why this critical selling technique is often overlooked on Amazon and how brands can get started with a photography brief for Amazon.
The era of Amazon product photos on a white background is well and truly over.
You can nearly guarantee the strongest companies in an Amazon category will have attention-grabbing pictures. Nowadays, uninspiring product images won’t help your company get the most out of Amazon and could even stop you from growing your sales. All companies selling on Amazon need to tell a story through photos, pictures, videos, and user-generated content.
To be more successful selling on Amazon, you need to consider marketing expert Sarah Carter’s pithy opinion:
“They really don’t give a ****. People’s indifference to brands and advertising should be the starting point” for you to improve their Amazon experience.
It’s time to understand that better images impact your Amazon sales and conversion. Pictures are not just marketing vanity!
Photographs and infographics do not simply highlight product features. Rather, they help your customers:
- Recognise themselves as your target market on Amazon
- Understand your product on Amazon in relation to other competitors in the segment
- Identify themselves as your ideal customer on Amazon through images
- Trust your product will look and function like you say it will
- Choose your product as the answer to their needs and solution to their problem
From this perspective, a complete set of product imagery, including lifestyle images, is no longer “creative”, “marketing” or nice to have. Imagery is a key investment in market positioning on Amazon.
Why do businesses put off investing in better photographs and infographics on Amazon?
Sometimes CEOs or Managing Directors believe that Amazon photographs simply showcase the technical features of products. They may consider taking these photographs to be a simple task that is easily delegated. Three common misconceptions are:
- Any employee can take a few photos for Amazon. This may be technically true, but will they do a complete job that helps people browsing on Amazon convert to happy customers? This takes creativity, time and a consistent “completer-finisher” mentality.
- You can’t measure return on investment from photographs. This is false; we can measure the increase in product page traffic and conversion after optimizing images and text on a product page.
- Photographs only need to highlight unique product features. False. In a supermarket, customers can pick up a product themselves. On Amazon, customers have only the visual and written clues that you give them to understand whether your product suits their needs.
Brands need to identify and target potential Amazon customers with commercial messages that trigger a response. The challenge facing companies in the increasingly competitive Amazon ecosystem is that they are not in control of capturing and holding consumers’ attention.
Unlike websites, Amazon will not automatically show your products to prospective customers. Rather, Amazon uses its ever-improving A9 algorithm as well as a host of AI technology to decide whether to show your products on the first page in a list of search results.
If your listing isn’t chosen by Amazon, it won’t be seen on page one.
If it is not seen by potential customers, it won’t be able to generate sales.
The customer experience is completely different on Amazon mobile vs desktop and images are key to the Amazon mobile experience.
In 2020, more than 63% of traffic to retailers and 53% of sales happened via mobile. If you haven’t got images that work on the Amazon app, or on a mobile browser, you are not serving most of your potential Amazon customers!
When you browse on Amazon with a mobile device, the entire screen is filled with product images. The mobile layout is completely different to browsing Amazon on a desktop device.
On mobile, the main product photo (or “hero image”) is the focal point. The written product summary – typically one of the first things a customer views on a desktop – appears at the very bottom of a mobile listing. In fact, you must click to reach this information on mobile.
Does your listing contain photos that will help potential customers browsing Amazon on their mobile?
Although your product may have wonderful features, if consumers can’t easily see and quickly understand them on Amazon, you could be leaving space for your competitors to win the sale.
On the world’s biggest e-commerce platform, poor imagery that doesn’t target your ideal customer results in two things: low traffic to your product pages and low conversion rates because you are not grabbing your customer’s limited attention span, while your competitor definitely is.
The good news is Amazon offers an increasing number of features to help companies use photos and graphics on mobile and desktop. Both Seller Central and Vendor Central offer companies several ways to engage with their potential customers through images, infographics, and photographs.
To use all of Amazon’s features, you will need to invest in lifestyle photography which educates the consumer.
What is “lifestyle imagery” and what does it do for a company selling on Amazon?
Beyond the main product photographs, Amazon gives brands the opportunity to highlight how their product can benefit the consumer and, crucially, who your consumer is, through the Enhanced Brand Content or A+ feature which offers the option to add lifestyle images.
At Sell Beyond, we find that the expression “lifestyle” may make people switch off. For some businesses, it sounds like marketing jargon. Lifestyle may sound like something additional or unimportant, in comparison with the obviously important product photography.
When lifestyle imagery works, it helps consumers identify their lives with what you sell.
Consumers need to know:
- How they will benefit from a product
- How they should use the product
- What problem the product solves
- How they could enjoy the product
In short, lifestyle imagery is a key sales asset! In seconds, a single image can show potential customers that your product is for them. For instance, look at these product images:
The consumer can see themselves in the model who is demonstrating the product or imagine the product in surroundings like their house or garden.
Lifestyle images also showcase size accurately by using natural staging and real models. This builds trust in the product, which increases the likelihood of someone buying.
See how many customer pain points lifestyle images can help resolve?
Amazon is such a big platform, if consumers don’t have a sense they can rely on the product to do what it claims, they will quickly move on to the next listing – which will probably be your competitor’s!
Get the images right and you’ll have a competitive advantage no amount of Amazon advertising can buy.
How to get started with an Amazon photography brief
If you can get key sales images right, you will quickly show customers you understand what they need or want. Yes, it’s complex, but we’re here to make it easy.
- Your images must fight for attention, not just against the other images on Amazon, but also against everything else that people could look at! Creating simple, visual content that stands out from the screen is key.
- People’s attention is limited, with most images on Amazon generating only a few seconds of attention. Fit your message to suit this limited time budget. Simpler images with one key idea will perform better than complex, busy, visual content.
Effective photography therefore requires careful planning. You must carefully choose all the elements to tell a story of your product that grabs the attention of your target customers. Your images must use all of Amazon’s features which means planning photography sizes and dimensions.
Sell Beyond’s Top 10 list for creating the right images to get attention for your products on Amazon:
- Review your existing Amazon listings imagery to see if any assets are usable. Check all files and folders where images might be stored.
- Review brand and target market on Amazon. You can only create imagery that appeals to the customer if you really understand who you are trying to attract.
- Write a list of the photographs and images that you need.
a. Link up what you want to say to your target market and which spaces you have on Amazon to do this.
b. Decide on a location that would work best for your product, project, and budget. - Research your competitor listings on Amazon to see how they sell their products and how they use images to showcase product features and your target market.
- Create a mood board or image selection. Review with your Managing Director to understand imagery they like and don’t like (the “don’t” likes are just as important as the “do” likes).
- Once approved:
a. Research suitable locations if required and book them for the shoot.
b. Book models and organize model release forms.
c. Research props and purchase them! Getting good quality accessories for the shoot, can make or break a listing. - Photo shoot – photographer edits and presents final draft.
- Additional creative work (e.g. infographics, text added to picture).
- Creative review with MD.
- Technical review – upload to Amazon Seller Central or Vendor Central. Test if the images look right and are formatted correctly once they appear on Amazon.co.uk.
a. Re-edit images as necessary.
b. Raise Case Logs with Amazon if there are any upload errors.
At Sell Beyond, we help businesses transform their Amazon sales every day. How do we do that?
“We signal to buyers with compelling product images, lifestyle images, pictures of models interacting with the product and infographics. We know that photography done well for Amazon is an investment that makes a massive impact on Amazon traffic to your product page, and improves your Amazon conversion rates.”
Heloise Finch – Sell Beyond CEO
Get in touch to see how we can put your products in the Amazon spotlight. Call 01206 899020 or email info@sell-beyond.com to arrange an informal Amazon coffee and chat on Zoom.