According to Chas Edwards’s “In Age of Pinterest, Instagram, Marketers Need An Image Strategy,” published yesterday on Adage.com, the internet as we know it is hurtling through a metamorphosis that will leave the average user processing concepts not by what they read, but through the images by which they interact.
Case in point:
Facebook will tell you the same. When you talk to its executives or founders about the company’s inflection point, they’ll all tell you some variation of “It’s the pictures, stupid.” The Facebook community uploads 250 million photos a day, and one Harvard Business School study estimates that 70% of all activities inside the social network — from “liking” and commenting to looking at friends’ content or uploading your own — revolves around photos.
What does this mean for Yahoo! Store merchants? Because of the innovations in digital image application on the internet, consumer expectations as to how product photos should work have increased at light speed. Product imaging standards aren’t just based on professional photography display methods anymore. It used to be that Yahoo! Store merchants who simply used nice backdrops in their product photo shoots, and uploaded the files in high definition put themselves way ahead of the competition. Now, customers don’t just want images to look nice, they want to see products from every angle and contortion imaginable; close up and far away. Customers want product images to appear so seamlessly “real” that the shopping experience is as close as it can be to trying on or hand-weighing the product in the store.
While browsers aren’t anywhere close to brushing their callous-free finger tips over heavily textured products (no level of futuristic lcd monitor is generating a tactile product interactive experience like this), or getting a whiff of new paint smell when they click to zoom in on the goods, web image technology is getting eerily close to imitating the frictions and free-verse of old fashion fruit shelf shopping–squeeze, sniff, put it in the basket. Product images need to be fluid, responsive, and extremely high quality to convey trust and appeal to the typical shopper these days. Here are two articles we recommend reading to learn more about the power of using quality image engagement for Yahoo! Stores:
1) Yahoo! Stores Are Naked Sans Custom Product Images
2) Three Different, But Equally Useful, Custom Image Maps for Yahoo! Stores
