How to Improve Product Photography for Your Online Store

There are a few determining factors that trigger a customer’s impulse to make a purchase, and product photos play an important role here. They are the visual representation of the product that the customer will buy; in other words, quality product images are key to building engagement, conversion, retention, and customer lifetime value. The quality of the images will determine the result of the first interaction and the perceived value of the products that you are selling, as well as your brand image.

In the light of the above, it’s important to understand just how necessary it is to have awesome product images. At this point, however, another question arises: should you do it yourself or outsource it to a professional? The short answer is that you should focus on your core strengths, spending time on what you can solve yourself and not on the things you can’t, or at least not on those you can’t solve efficiently.

In order to scale every operation, product photography included, a good decision is needed. If you’re looking into DIY photography, then you should consider the fact that good product imagery requires professional work fostered in an environment that allows this. This essentially means that store owners need to outfit their own photo studio, build a production team, and go through every step of the photo shooting and post-production process.

The problem with this setup is that it costs both time and money. For high-quality results you need to follow each step one by one, so this kind of limits your output. What you need is a way of scaling up that is both time and cost effective, and that’s where a supply chain comes into the picture.

As such, having a professional photographer in-house is a win because they will help you to build the studio needed for shooting professional product images. If this is the case, then you are already one step ahead because the photoshoot can already be performed and you have full control of the results. Having access to your own studio and professional photographer is obviously more effective, but the cost of such assets will likely be unfeasible for smaller businesses only just stepping into online shopping.

The best option to save both time and money while still scaling up at the same time is to outsource this process. This can be done in different ways, such as hiring a studio from the neighborhood or using freelance sites for access to professional photographers. By doing so, it is possible to reduce production costs – freelance sites will give the option to select the cheapest bidder – and scale the professionals you have access to at the same time because more projects can be run at the same time.

However, while running the project, outsourcing the photoshoot process will also create headaches that will need answers. First, you need to find a reliable photographer or team, and secondly you will need to ship the products to them. Those products also need to be returned after the session, all of which you’ll need to factor in when making the decision.

Gaining the much needed ease in production flow is best achieved by outsourcing the image editing process. As with every product image, the raw materials need post processing to meet the technical requirements of yourself and other marketplaces. If you have the human power and skills to keep this part of the process in-house, then do it. But if you really want to save yourself the time (and with it your nerves), then outsource it using freelance sites. You’ll be amazed by the results.

For example, let’s say you have one thousand images of your products that have been taken and need to be sorted and whittled down before they are published on your online store. Each image requires time to edit and if one image takes about 10 minutes to edit, then you can only finish six per hour. Now, depending on the hourly wage you’re paying, that could range from $3,000 to $4,500 for the 1,000 images. That’s a whole month’s work.

If this work is outsourced globally, then the editing process can be done in a fraction of the time and for much less money. The best-case scenario is a couple days at a cost of $1,500. That’s really attractive for any business owner because it gives them the opportunity to scale their business up while focusing on what really matters.