Visuals in E-commerce: How Background Removal Affects Your Sales
BY: DDS EDITORIAL TEAM | JUNE 14, 2023
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Starting a business could be fun, it feels like you’ve unveiled a new chapter and entered a whole new world. When suddenly, there were customers, social media accounts you have to manage, website traffic, and branding you have to keep in check. We are so used to thinking more is good, but in digital marketing, there are so many variables that there are some wherein more could mean bad. Conventional marketing is a no-go in today’s market, and for small and new businesses like ours, having high volume feels like standing in the middle of a jam packed bus, no one either looks, nor even hears us.
But then, let’s go back to our brand, and the protagonist of our brand, our product, and its value. What does it do for the customer? Why do they want it? What value does it bring to them? How do they see it from their perspective? These set of questions should be what we have in mind when it comes to marketing our products online. Customers want the shopping experience where they can feel their senses interact with the products. Following the point made from Salsify, it’s true that customer experience brings crucial value in order to make a sale happen. From there is where content imagery takes part, to enable the experience online.
Report from Field Agent in 2018 stated that;
83% of respondents make decisions to purchase by influence coming from images, while texts come in close on second place with 82%.
To re-imagine such experience online, we’ll have to maximize what comes in second than our sense, that is to see. A study by digital marketing magazine comes with similar findings, that around 61% of British consumers expect marketing messages to include photos or images. Although it seems convincing enough, the truth is, it’s not enough just to include pictures of the product alone, it has to be in the highest possible quality, has different angles, and is focused on the product only.
According to Nielsen Norman group research,
“buyers are more intrigued by images with higher quality that can provide them more information about the product they are interested in.”
Cited by Ehousestudio, one of the buyers even said “The biggest problem with any kind of shopping I’ve done online is that it’s not a big enough picture for me to assess whether or not I like it.”. From here we can safely say that an image in high quality carries its value for bringing details to the product that buyers lack in feeling when shopping online. But in order to do so, let’s probe deeper into how an image should be presented to buyers.
To aid us in getting there, Pressloft wrote that cutout images (product images with its background removed) are important in getting your customers convinced since that way, they can put their focus more into the products. Take a look at the example of a product view from the site of asics.com
Credit: https://www.asics.com/id/en-id
As you hover through the image, you can practically see the very detail of the product to the point that you can almost feel the material the product was made of from. But in order to achieve that, as Pressloft has written, buyers will have to free their attention from other distractions in the background, just like the example of product view from asics.com, you have no choice but to focus on the product only.
Back to the article from Salsify,
Their research says that around 38% of shoppers are most likely to buy a product if the images only include the item against a plain background.
With that in note, it’s plausible that to present the product of its own value itself is for it to present its own value. Therefore, we’ll have to understand the methods we’ll have to apply in showcasing them, one of them being, practicing background removal.
Darshana Design Studio (in collaboration with SelfMade) provides service to create branded visual contents needed by e-commerce in achieving such purpose. One of the services we give being: professional photo retouching, background removal, background replacement service, and many more. With quick turn-around time, meticulous quality checking, and mass production service, we are ready to provide you the content you need to grow your business.
About DDS Editorial Team
FATHIYA HAMDAN
Image Specialist
at Darshana Design Studio
Contact and get to know more about us on: studiodarshana.id
References:
Walfish, E. (n.d.). What types of product imagery earn ecommerce sales? Retrieved from
https://www.salsify.com/blog/what-types-of-product-imagery-earn-ecommerce-sales
Agent, F. (Ed.). (n.d.). Special Report: The Digital Shopper. Retrieved from
https://info.fieldagent.net/the-digital-shopper
Helyer, K. (2018, January 17). The Power of a Picture. Retrieved from
https://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-content/the-power-of-a-picture/4779
Nielsen Norman Group (Ed.). (n.d.). Ecommerce UX Product Pages: Nielsen Norman Group Report Retrieved from
https://www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce-ux-product-pages-including-reviews/
Bode, R. (2020, March 1). Product imagery - Convince E-commerce Customers to Buy. Retrieved from
https://www.ehousestudio.com/blog/how-to-convince-customers-to-buy-with-product-imagery
Press Loft (Ed.). (2014, August 22). What are Cut Out images and Why are they important? Retrieved from
from https://blog.pressloft.com/2014/08/what-are-cut-out-images-and-why-are-they-important/