Commentary
Picturing a more dynamic approach to digital back-to-school sales
Imgix CEO Chris Zacharias explains why retailers need to carefully consider the use and editing of images to improve the user experience and why beleaguered back-to-school shoppers will be thankful.
August 17, 2017
By Chris Zacharias, CEO, Imgix
Summer marks a busy time in the retail calendar, as frantic parents equip their children for the school year ahead. It can be a stressful time, with anguished parents dragging their unhappy offspring from shop to shop.
With that as the norm, is it any wonder that parents are looking for a better way? The industry saw a big shift last year with parents reporting mobile as their preferred method for back-to-school shopping. Mobile is fast and easy for parents on tight deadlines and budgets. Browsing online extends the shopper journey and front-loads comparison shopping, taking the pressure off when it comes time to visit the store.
While ecommerce back-to-school revenues have traditionally represented a fraction of total sales, eMarketer is estimating digital sales in core categories will increase by 16 percent in 2017. The overall season is predicted to grow 4 percent, to $857.18 billion, making the back-to-school season second only to the holiday season for sales revenues. There is a huge opportunity for ecommerce providers to step up their game and make parents' lives easier at this pivotal time of year.
The key to all effective ecommerce is creating the right experience for shoppers — one that is just as effective in-store in giving a clear sense of how products look and feel.
All of this points to the growing importance of strong imagery within ecommerce. The Internet at large has become extremely visual. Without compelling, dynamic imagery, ecommerce firms often find their products overlooked in favor of rival platforms, even if they're winning on other metrics such as price or delivery times.
It is not just a web issue either; in UPS' 2017 UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper study, 50 percent of respondents said high-quality product images are now an important feature for retailer apps as well.
It is great to bring customers to your website, but keeping them engaged is priority. Images register to the human mind faster than text, and are often the first line in this struggle. Images must be engaging and fast-loading, or bounce rate spikes. This is especially hard for omnichannel firms, which have to deliver images to a glut of channels and devices, each with its own peculiar requirements.
To excel, it's not enough to think about the content of images. Retailers must also get smarter about how images are hosted and served. Here are three tips that will benefit ecommerce firms as they adapt their visuals to meet the digital back-to-school opportunity.
Make sure images fit the use-case you are trying to target
Ecommerce firms need to ensure they're sending the best possible image to each shopper, without wasting data. Get it wrong and your platform risks becoming an unloadable nightmare for your customers. For example, there is no reason a firm should be serving a photo file large enough to print on a billboard to a mobile device, where it will be displayed at the size of a postage stamp. Smart resizing and cropping are essential for the mobile web. It's essential to have several versions of images ready to serve to different devices.
Ensure the right format for your image needs
"What kind of image file should I use?" has become a harder question to answer recently, because different formats are best on different devices. Jpeg is the standard and usually a good choice. Yet on Android devices and in the Chrome browser, the newer WebP format delivers significant size savings with no loss of quality. Illustrations and logos often look and perform best as SVG files. The best approach is to detect a customer's device type and then serve each image in the appropriate format. Most visitors won't notice the subtle differences between file types, but their connection certainly will. It can even save you money. By choosing the right format for your site across devices it can cut bandwidth by 30 to 40 percent.
Think about how images will look down the line
Simply resizing an image so that it can work on a particular device can be detrimental to the look and feel of your site, however. Resizing images down actually tends to make the visuals greyer because the computer is making compromises and blending colors together. This is a problem for brands selling highly visual products like clothes or accessories — they need colors to pop. For this reason, it makes sense to revisit images once they're resized to tweak color and contrast so it matches the originals.
Images are really the first interaction you have with your customer. Ultimately, firms need to optimize images so they are ecommerce compatible and eye-catching to consumers. Fortunately, it's not necessary for this to be manual work.
Technology exists that can automate much of the drudge work of image optimization, or even perform the necessary edits on the fly as images load. By carefully considering how you use and edit your images, you can help to improve the user experience when navigating your site. Beleaguered back-to-school shoppers will thank you. They'll probably open their wallets, too.
