Tuesday, 30 October 2012

Top tips to improving your store's text and images

When selling online, it's not only what you're selling that's important, but also how you show those products in your store. In recent weeks we at eSellution have produced articles for you on how to improve your products by including images and detailed descriptions. However, it isn't just about adding them to your products, how you display the images and the description text also plays a major role in determining how successful your store will be in achieving sales.

Product Images

Whenever you take a product picture from your ecommerce store, there are a number of different things you should do:

  • Make sure the image isn't blurry - A clear image allows the customer to see the product in greater detail. If the image is blurry they aren't really going to be able to see it properly. Not only that, having a blurry image for your product makes your business look unprofessional.
  • Photograph the products against a white background - When you photograph your products, you need to make sure that the product is against a white background. Having all of your images appear on a white background improves the look of your website, as all the images are the same colour. Not only that, having a white background makes it much easier to edit the image as you don't have to worry about having to take a coloured background into account when cropping or cutting the image. Creating a white background for your images is simple enough to do. If your products are small, it could simply mean placing them on top of a white sheet of paper when you take the picture. 
  • Try to avoid using watermarks - Especially on sites like eBay, people want to protect their product images from other people using them so they put big bold images on top of them or have thick borders around the image. While this stops other sellers from using your product images, it makes the product images look less tasteful. If you can help it, you should look to avoid using borders or images over your product photograph. If you do decide to use an image to protect your photo, just use a subtle watermark across the image. That way it doesn't damage the overall look of your image and people still know that the image belongs to your store. 
Product Description

Now that you've taken care of your product images, the next thing to focus on is your product description. Having followed our previous article: Ecommerce success starts with the basics and written a product description that provides all the information your customers need, the next step is presenting that information in the correct way. 

  • Use the right font - With so many different fonts to choose from, it's often tempting to have the wildest font you can find to help your product descriptions start out. However, you need to remember that the wilder it is, the more difficult it is going to be for your customers to read. When selecting a font, you should select one that is professional in appearance and easy to read. Once you have selected a font, you should use that font on every single one of the products you have in your store.
  • Keep the text the same size - Now that you've selected your font, you need to choose a size to display the text at. You don't want the text to be that small that the customer can't read it, but you also don't want it to be too big that it takes up majority of the page. Usually the standard font size of around 12 will be big enough to make it easily readable and not too big on the page. Just like the type of font you use, you want to keep the font size the same across all of your products. A mistake a lot of online sellers make is that they have different products which have descriptions containing different fonts at different sizes. All this does is damage the look of your online store. The cleaner your website is, the more professional your public image will be. 
  • Highlight important information - While all of the information in your product description is important, some bits of it are more important than others. For example if a product is only available in a particular size at the moment or you don't offer refunds on it, you might want to make sure the customer doesn't skim over and miss this information by making it appear bold so that it stands out from the rest. 
  • Check the HTML - If you have both an eBay store and an ecommerce store, you may look to save yourself some time by copying over the product description from eBay and placing it into your ecommerce store. However, when you do this you need to make sure that it is only the text you are copying over. If you copy over text that has HTML in it, it will alter the way your description looks, making it appear unprofessional and harming the look of your store. 

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