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Product listings are a key part of selling products online. Having great quality product images boosts conversions, but creating high-quality product images for every single one of your products is difficult.

In this episode of eCommerceScale.com, Brian Guidry from Pixelz.com explains what impacts a store’s product image quality and how to ensure your store’s image quality is great. Pixelz provides product image editing and retouching services for thousands of customers and allows you to get thousands of images professionally retouched and edited overnight.

If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us.

Key Aspects Of Great Product Images There are a number of factors that impact the quality of product images, but below are a few factors to consider.

Use multiple images to showcase products – Rather than having one main image and one or two alternative images, it’s best to have at least five alternative images to showcase your products. This allows you to show different angles of your products and different aspects that certain customers will care about.
Get specific shots to showcase your products – It’s not enough just to have multiple shots of your products.
- It’s important that you consider which shots you need to showcase different aspects of your products that your customers will care about. For example, zoom in on product details like clothing lining or trim detail.
- Also, consider using 3D mannequins or ghost mannequin formats for clothing shots. These allow people to see your products in the shape they will be on an actual person without getting distracted by the model or by the mannequin.

(image / data source: http://blog.bigcommerce.com/ghost-mannequin-photography-101/)

Consider using a 3D product spin – In addition to ghost mannequin formats, consider using a 3D product spin. A 3D product spin enables you to show all angles of your product to customers.
Keep product photos consistent on your website – Keep in mind that visitors to your website will usually land on category pages and not necessarily the homepage.
- If you make the product image formats consistent within category pages on your site, it makes the page visitors arrive at look more organized and professional.
- This lowers your bounce rate and increases engagement with your products.

How To Create Great Product Images It takes a lot of experience and expertise to master the art of creating great images, but below is a workflow that can help you make sure you have the right steps in place.

Prepare your products for the photo shoot – Before the photo shoot, make sure that your products are well-prepared and look their best. This means making sure the products are clean and ready for high-resolution photos to be taken.
Plan your product shots before the photo shoot – Rather than simply starting the photo shoot and figuring out the shots you want to get along the way,
- Plan the shots you need in advance. For example, if you know you want to include zoomed in product detail shots on specific products, make sure to take note of that.
- Decide on the order of products you’re going to shoot, and label products to make the photo shoot efficient.
- By planning the photo shoot in advance, you can ensure you get all the shots you need and also make the most of your time during the photo shoot.
High-quality photo shoots – If you’re hiring a professional studio, they should make sure that the photo shoot is professional. But if you are managing the photo shoot yourself, consider the below factors that Pixelz shared on their blog post about DIY Studios.
Use a reasonable quality camera – There are a number of cameras on the market to choose from, but Pixelz recommends he Canon PowerShot SX510. This is going to get you high-quality shots without breaking your budget.
Use a tripod – Using a tripod keeps the camera steady during your photo shoot, which allows you to control the shot.
Simple background and professional lighting – To showcase your product on a simple white background, use a roll of white paper that is positioned behind your product.
- You can use a reflector, such as a simple foam core board from any office supply store, to reflect light onto your product and eliminate any shadows.
- For lighting, position the photo shoot area near a window that has plenty of natural light, or adjust lighting, as needed, with photographer lighting.

(image / data source: http://www.pixelz.com/blog/diy-1-build-photo-studio-bootstrapped-budget/)

DIY Product Image Editing and Retouching

The image editing and retouching process can be complicated, depending on your needs.If you’re going to be doing image editing and retouching yourself for product images, consider the below workflow from Pixelz blog post.

Editing software – There are a range of image editing software options to choose from, but Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop are industry standard.
Raw image corrections – Use raw image corrections to even out the colors and tones in the image. You can also use the Exposure tool to brighten certain parts and the Contrast tools to enhance the texture of the products.
Spot retouching to remove blemishes – You can use spot retouching to remove blemishes, such as dust on a product during the photo shoot. The Patch tool, the Clone Stamp tool, and a Dodge and Burn tool can be helpful for spot retouching.
Color adjustments – Color adjustments take experience to learn how to do, but basically involve creating a Curves layer and then adjusting specific curves, based on what colors you want to adjust.
File and alignment – Finally, you need to make sure your file size dimensions and the alignment of your product within the image is what you want for the final image.

Product Image Editing Services If you are not going to manage the image editing process yourself, below are your main options.

Photographer editing – Editing is often offered by the photographer or studio that you hire to do the photo shoot. Rates vary, but can range from $7 to $10 per shot to hundreds per shot.
Product image editing services, like Pixelz.com – While using a photographer for the photo shoot may make sense, it is usually best to break up the photo shoot and post-production work to gain major cost advantages.
- Pixelz partners with photography studios who manage the photo shoots and have Pixelz do the post-production process. Y
- ou can work with Pixelz to handle the image editing and retouching part of the post-production process with rates starting around $1.45 per image, depending on volume and what you need.
- Rates can be lower if you have a large number of images to process.

By working with an editing service, like Pixelz, you’re quickly able to handle all of the image editing and retouching aspects for your product images within a very reasonable budget.

Uploading The Images To Your Site The last step of the process is to use the product images on your site. In this post, we wanted to focus on how to make your product images high-quality. In future posts, we’ll discuss image placement and other aspects of website design that can increase conversions.

If you need support with image editing and retouching for your store, contact Pixelz today.

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Jon Tucker

CEO, HelpFlow.com

Jon Tucker is CEO of HelpFlow, a provider of 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for 100+ eCommerce stores. Launched in 2015, their team of agents has produced nearly $100M in chat revenue for a wide range of stores using a conversion-focused approach to live chat. * Follow * Follow * Follow

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People won’t buy your product if they don’t understand it. Using only text and images, even if they’re well designed, only communicates a certain amount of information. Using product videos to demonstrate your products enables visitors to learn so much more, faster and leads to great conversion results on your site.

In this episode of eCommerceScale.com, Thierry Denis from h1productvideos.com shares details on how to create product videos including a done-for-you streamlined service he’s built for eCommerce stores.

If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us.

Do Product Videos Improve Conversion? Text and image content is static. Product videos are as close as possible to human explanations of your products. A video can share certain details in 15 seconds that would require a lot of text and many images. For example:

The size of a product – Using an image or explaining dimensions of a product in text is not as effective as showing the product being used by a person. The video helps visitors understand how big the product is in relation to another object, usually a person using the product.
Material and quality – By zooming in on your product, and showing it from different angles, you can quickly demonstrate the quality and material used in your products. While you could explain this in the specifications on your page, video communicates it much faster.
How to use the product – Certain customers may use the product differently. So showing video of how the product is used helps them understand more detail about the product, especially for complicated products.

Using product videos effectively can have a huge impact on your business. Below are just a few of the metrics mentioned in this interview.

People that watch a product video are 85% more likely to buy the product than people that don’t view the video.
Visitors that view a product video are 144% more likely to add the product to their shopping cart.
People that view product videos are 25% less likely to return a product.

If you use product videos on your site strategically, you’ll see strong improvement in how visitors interact with your site and purchase products.

What Should A Product Video Include? There are a number of things to consider when making a product video. But below are the main things to focus on:

Keep the video short and simple – Making the video short and to the point, usually 15 to 30 seconds is recommended. This gives you enough time to share important information with the visitor, but keeps the video short enough where visitors will be likely to watch it.
Don’t use a host – Having somebody introduce themselves on a video, and then talk through the product details might seem logical, but it adds a few seconds to the video, and can sometimes distract the visitor from your product. Rather than using a host, focus on just showcasing your product.
Background and lighting – Make sure that the lighting of your video is good and balanced. Also use a plain background to keep the focus of the viewer on your product.
Share product details – If there are specific things visitors care about in your product, be sure to show those in the video. For example, show the product with different angles, zoom in on certain parts of the product that visitors are interested in. And also, share the most important specifications visitors might care about, such as the size of the product in relation to somebody holding the product.

Below are a few examples of product videos, so you can see these recommendations in action:

Creating Your Own Product Videos With An iPhone You can definitely create your own product videos with a camera such as the iPhone, but there are certain things to consider to make it as high quality as possible.

Shoot the video horizontally – Shooting the video vertically can make it look unnatural when your visitors view it online. Keep the phone horizontal when you are shooting the video to make it look like it was shot with a standard camera.
Stabilize the video – Use a tripod or other stabilization equipment to make sure that the video is stable. Having a video with any movement that is not intended is a give-away that it was created yourself.
Don’t use the phone’s zoom – Zooming in on certain product features is helpful for visitors, but this should be done by moving the camera closer to the product, or by zooming in when you’re editing the video. Zooming in with the phone’s zoom can sometimes cause quality issues that look odd in the final video.
Use great lighting – Lighting is one of the most important parts of shooting a great product video. You can create your own lighting kit using simple products from Home Depot, or you can purchase basic lighting equipment on Amazon. If this is not an option, make sure you have great light in the location that you are shooting in.
Don’t use the camera’s autofocus – The auto focusing function of the iPhone called “exposure” is great for shooting photos but can cause quality issues when shooting a video. Lock the exposure on your iPhone within the iPhone’s camera settings before shooting your video to avoid this.
Edit the video on your computer – Use iMovie or other editing software to make basic edits to the video before publishing it on your website. You can definitely create high quality video using the iPhone, but there are still a few downsides.

You’re going to have to spend some money, and a good amount of your time, and the end result might be obvious that it’s DIY. If you’re just testing out product videos on your site, this might be an option to consider, but should not be a long-term solution.

Hire A Videographer To Create Product Videos Instead of creating videos yourself, you can hire a videographer to create the videos for you. You can ask friends and family for good videographers in your network or use Craigslist to find potential people to work with. Make sure to review samples of their work and discuss your project to gauge their quality in advance. The shooting process will vary depending on the videographer, but will usually include the below steps:

Project details – First you’ll discuss the details of your project usually on the phone, so that the videographer can get an understanding of what you need. For example, you’ll need to share the number of products, the style of product video you want, and any additional parts of the video you want such as, narration or animation.
Shooting the product videos – The videographer will come to your location, or you will go to theirs to conduct the actual video or shoot. They’ll set up your products in good lighting to get the shots they need based on your project needs.
Editing – After the shoot, the videographer will edit your product videos, and share with you along the way. This can sometimes be simple, but is often complicated, especially if you have unique project needs.

At that point you’ll have product videos completed that you can use on your website. They’ll be definitely higher quality than creating videos yourself, but the budget can be gigantic. For example, creating five to ten product videos could cost you anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 or more, depending on who you work with, and the style of video you want.

Product Video Creation Tools and Software One option to consider that is between do-it-yourself, and hiring a videographer is to use video creation tools and software. The process varies depending on what tool you use (Treepodia is popular) but usually includes:

Uploading your product images.
Choosing a template or style for the video.
Adding text, music, voice-over, or other features.
Creating the product videos using the software.

These tools can create reasonable quality videos, especially if you have great product images as a starting point. But remember the final result is still based on the product images you have and is not really a full-scale product video.

Done For You Product Video Creation Service Hiring a professional videographer is going to give you great quality, but has some downsides, such as a large cost. A product video creation service gives you the best of both worlds. You’ll get high-quality videos, rather than slideshows, without the high cost of hiring a videographer. This is possible, because it’s a streamlined service that removes a lot of the custom work that a professional videographer would require for your project. Here’s how the video creation service from H1 Product Videos works:

Discuss project details – You’ll discuss your project details with the H1 Product Video team. So they understand how many product videos you want, and which style of video you want based on the options they provide.
Ship your products to the studio – Rather than having to meet at their studio, or have them come to you, you can simply send your products directly to their studio. This eliminates a lot of the production and travel costs associated with hiring a typical videographer
Creating the videos – H1 Product Videos will then create your videos at their studio according to the project details discussed. Depending upon how many videos you’re creating, they can finish the videos in as little as three business days.
Get your videos – They’ll ship back your products right away, and also give you the product videos. You can use additional services, such as analytics and video hosting they provide, or host the videos yourself.

Below are a few examples created by H1 Product Videos, so you can see the style:

Additional Product Video Considerations There are a number of other things to consider if you’re creating product videos which we can discuss in the comments, or create additional content about:

Make sure your videos are optimized for mobile devices.
Configure the videos on your site to fit the current purchase process of your visitors.
Measure the results of videos, such as views and conversions within your analytics or shopping cart system. Tools like Wistia can help with this.

Additional Product Video Resources To learn more about the H1 Product Video Creation Service, visit h1productvideos.com. If you have any questions about creating videos for your products comment here and share examples of your progress along the way.

Want to Download the Action Guide? The Action Guide summarizes key aspects of this post, tools and resources, and can be used to implement this in your business.

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Jon Tucker

CEO, HelpFlow.com

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As an established eCommerce store you already have a customer base, and are getting orders every single day. If you’re not using effective email marketing to leverage those emails and that website activity, you’re missing out on additional sales opportunities.

In this episode of eCommerceScale.com, we’re speaking with John McIntyre from ReEngager.com. John is an expert in the email marketing space, and has a podcast with hundreds of thousands of listeners. He has coached hundreds of copyrighter’s through his educational programs, and also provides a done for you email marketing service for online retailers. In today’s episode, John shares how to use page abandonment to get people back to your store buying more product.

If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us.

What is Page Abandonment If someone starts the checkout process on your website, you can use a cart abandonment email to automatically follow-up with them if they don’t complete the checkout process.

Cart abandonment is a really common email marketing technique for eCommerce stores that you should already be using. Page abandonment is similar, but can be even more powerful for many stores. In short,

If somebody visits a product or category page on your website, but does not actually add that product to their cart or complete a purchase,
You can send an automatic follow-up email to them asking them why they didn’t buy or addressing potential reasons that they didn’t buy.
The end result is similar to a cart abandonment sequence, but this allows you to follow up with prospects even before they’ve started the checkout process.

How to Get Started with Page Abandonment There are a few different steps to get started with page abandonment for your store.

Tracking Website Activity in Your Email Marketing Software In order to send follow-up emails based on website activity, you need to be able to track this activity, and trigger events within your email marketing software. Klaviyo.com is a powerful email marketing software that you can use for this as well as a range of other advanced eCommerce email marketing campaigns. You could also use tools such as Activecampaign.com, or Getdrip.com.

If you’re using an entry level email marketing platform like Mail Chimp or A-Weber, this might be possible to configure, but these tools are not built for advanced email marketing techniques like this. Consider using Klaviyo.com to get this campaign configured if you don’t already have an advanced email marketing system built for eCommerce stores.

Trigger Email Campaigns Based on Page Views Start with the highest trafficked page or category on your website. Eventually you can get to the point where you have automatic campaigns configured for many pages on your site, but at first you should start with the highest trafficked page.

Within Klaviyo.com, configure a rule to add people to the page abandonment campaign if they visit the product page, but do not add the product to their shopping cart or complete the checkout process.
This will work with prospects that you already have in your email marketing system.
There are a few different ways that you can get people’s emails to add into this campaign if you don’t have them yet.
1. You could configure an exit popup just for this product page that gives people an incentive to provide their email address if they visit this page, but click away without adding it to their shopping cart or completing the checkout process.
2. You could also configure advanced custom coding to track user activity on the website before someone gives you their email address, and then to connect this user activity to their email record when that email address is provided at a later time.

For now, focus on creating a simple campaign in Klaviyo.com to add people to the page abandonment campaign if they view a product page on your website, and you already have their email address in their system.

Create the Page Abandonment Emails The actual emails that go out to prospects in the page abandonment campaign need to be carefully crafted. The main thing to address is why someone isn’t buying the product.

Here are a few things to consider when trying to identify why someone isn’t buying.

They might be confused about how the products work. In this case, you could create some emails explaining how to use the products, and how they help them accomplish the goal they’re trying to achieve by purchasing.
They might be concerned about the product quality or how it compares with other products on the market. In this case, you could provide testimonials from customers, detailed information about how the product is constructed using the highest quality materials and manufacturing techniques, and also guarantees that you have about product quality.
Finally, the price might be too high, in which case you could consider offering a discount, or otherwise trying to justify why the price is high.

It’s important to not jump directly to providing a discount. Don’t assume that price is the only reason why people aren’t buying a product.

The first page abandonment sequence you configure should start with one simple email. I
n that email ask people why they didn’t buy. By launching this one email sequence with a high trafficked product page, you’ll start to get replies from people about why they didn’t buy.
Once you get enough replies to identify a few trends of why people don’t buy, you can use that insight to create a full email sequence.

Apart from your understanding of the business, this is the easiest way to identify the real reasons why people aren’t buying.

Measuring and Optimizing a Page Abandonment Campaign Once you have your page abandonment email campaign in place, you should monitor and optimize it over time. The main metric to focus on, is not open rate or click through rates, but instead the dollar value per emails sent for this campaign compared to other emails you sent. Depending on your email marketing strategy, this campaign will usually be significantly higher than other campaigns such as, general promotional campaigns or other campaigns that are not as directly connected to a prospects direct interest in your product.

Test different messaging in your emails to better address why people aren’t buying.
Consider changing the order and timing of the emails, and also the content that you use to address the reasons for not buying. For example, you could create a buyers guide to explain the complexities of different products, or tutorials on how to use certain products if needed.

How to Super-Charge Ecommerce Email Marketing Having a page abandonment campaign is one part of an email marketing strategy for eCommerce stores. There’s a wide range of other techniques you can use, and they all impact each other. Below are a few examples we’ll cover on future episodes.

Weekly or monthly newsletter and promotion emails to bring people back to your website.
The page abandonment campaign we talked about today to follow up with prospects that viewed specific products, but didn’t start the checkout process.
Shopping cart abandonment emails to follow up with prospects that started the checkout process, but didn’t actually complete it.
New customer and repeat customer email sequences for customers that do complete purchases which can help them purchase even more in the future.
Re-engagement campaigns to warm up prospects that have stopped buying, so they come back and purchase more products.

Additional Ecommerce Email Marketing Resources To learn more about how to use email marketing effectively in your business, visit John’s eCommerce email marketing blog post at Shopify.com.

You could also see additional details about the ReEngager.com email marketing service here.

If you want to work directly with John on your email marketing, and are doing a minimum of one to two million dollars a year in revenue, reach out to John at ReEngager.com.

Want to Download the Action Guide? The Action Guide summarizes key aspects of this post, tools and resources, and can be used to implement this in your business.

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Jon Tucker

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The post ESCALE 002 Using Page Abandonment To Get More Sales – John McIntyre Reengager appeared first on HelpFlow.

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How you build and operate your business can determine how valuable that business is when you decide to sell it in the future. Even if you’re not planning to sell your business anytime soon, you should be aware of certain mistakes you might be making that can make it impossible to sell. There are also a number of things you can do now to significantly increase the value of your business which is great for you while operating the business and great if you decide to sell in the future.

In this episode of eCommerceScale.com, Joe Magnotti from Empireflippers.com goes into detail on mistakes to avoid that can hurt the value of your business if you decide to sell in the future. EmpireFlippers.com is an online marketplace for buying and selling high quality websites. Joe and his team at Empire Flippers have helped sell over five million dollars worth of businesses to date, and have experience with all types of businesses. Even if you’re not planning to sell soon, use his perspective to make your business even more valuable. If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us. * Note that this blog post is derived from the transcript of the audio discussion. Please excuse any typos or odd wording.

Are Your Financials Well Organized? The key to being able to understand the value of your business and communicate that to someone else such as a buyer, is to have well organized financials.

You can use systems like QuickBooks or Xero, or any other accounting system that lets you track important metrics about your business.
Make sure you are able to track basic metrics such as revenue, cost of goods, profit margin and other important financial metrics.
Having this data tracked over time gives you important insight you can use to make day-to-day and strategic decisions, but is also absolutely critical if you decide to sell in the future.

Without having well organized financials, your business might be impossible to sell if you decide you want to sell in the future. It’s also important to keep business and personal finances separate. This might seem like common sense for established businesses, but it’s common to have certain personal expenses of business owners run through the business for tax purposes.

If you run certain expenses that are more personal than business related through the business, these expenses can hurt your valuation when you are reviewing financials with a potential buyer.
The buyer may use that expense against you to claim that the business is less valuable because the expense is in the financials.

Keeping your business and personal finances completely separate, at least in the 12 months leading up to a potential sale, will help eliminate this issue.

Document How The Business Operates Your business should be able to run completely independent of you. This is a huge advantage for you even if you keep the business, but is absolutely crucial if you decide to sell the business.

If the success of the business relies on your day-to-day experience and input, then a buyer is going to value your business significantly less since you will no longer be involved after the sale.
While your business should be run mainly by your team, it’s important that the business does not rely solely on the experience and knowledge of your team.
You need to document your processes so that your team can work those processes, and other team members can be added in the future without significant interruption to the business.

Below are a few types of processes to make sure you have documented.

Basic customer service such as how to answer common customer questions, or handle common customer service situations.
How to process orders and returns, as well as how to manage inventory on your website.

You can document these business processes using an online system like Google Docs or SweetProcess.com, or other systems. The main thing to focus on is making sure that processes are available to your team, ideally online, and are in a format where you can collaborate, and constantly update those processes with your team.

Are You Tracking Your Marketing Efforts If you invest $10,000 per month in a marketing channel such as online advertising, and can prove with metrics that this produces $100,000 per month in revenue, then that marketing initiative is a great asset to your business. But if you’re not able to realistically show that a marketing expense produces a strong ROI, then that expense hurts the valuation of your business. Whether you’re looking to sell in the future or not, it’s important to be able to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Be sure that each marketing campaign you have has a clear way to measure success, and that you optimize the campaign over time. In the months leading up to the sale of your business;

Pay close attention to which marketing campaigns are profitable, and
Consider getting rid of campaigns that are not profitable.

This will help buyers see the effectiveness of your marketing, and limit the chance of unprofitable marketing campaigns decreasing the value of the business. Another important marketing asset is your customer email list.

Building and maintaining your email list can make it an extremely valuable part of your business.
By regularly contacting customers and prospects, and being able to show that this email list produces revenue for the business, you are able to show potential buyers the value of the customer list you have built over time.

Be sure to keep this list extremely valuable in the months leading up to a sale. For example, do not do a lot of promotions to unload inventory that you think a buyer would not want to keep or purchase as part of the sale of your business. There may be other ways to unload this inventory, but blasting your email list with promotions can burn the relationships you have with that email list, and make it less valuable in the future.

Use a Hosted Shopping Cart Hosted shopping carts like Shopify or Big Commerce can make it easier to sell your business.

These platforms are very well known, which means buyers will be more confident in stores that are built with these platforms compared to other self-hosted platforms like, Magento or others.
In addition to increased competence in your shopping cart, having a hosted shopping cart also means you have a larger market of potential buyers for your business.
Many more buyers are familiar with these platforms versus other self-hosted or proprietary shopping cart platforms, which means you have more people to market your business to.

Although you should not change your shopping cart right before selling your business, if you are in a position where you are deciding what type of shopping cart to use for your business, heavily consider a hosted shopping cart instead of a self-hosted or proprietary platform. Even if you’re not planning to sell your business anytime soon, having organized financials, clear processes, effective marketing, an industry standard infrastructure can only help your business. This will make your business more profitable now, easier to run, and much more valuable if you decide to sell in the future.

Additional Resources If you want to learn more about how to increase the value of your business, and how selling your business works, visit www.empireflippers.com. They have an active blog, podcast, and social media channels with valuable information you can use in your eCommerce business. You can also reach out to Joe Magnotti at EmpireFlippers.com.

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