You can spend countless hours and capital to to create your on-line eCommerce store front, you can hire the top designers and architecture specialists to make your users experience perfect, but if you miss one crucial element it won't perform. The single element is possibly the most important and overlooked piece of the eCommerce puzzle: product photography.

I am sure most of you are reading this post because of the image, and its the same reason that you need to show not only your product, but I highly recommended that you show your product in use. Now this can differ greatly from site to site and product to product, but there are some basic fundamentals that I can share with you based on our clients and my experience. Taking 5 sites from my past that I and my team have worked on, I analyzed their content and product photography and came to some startling results. Each one of these companies had pretty similar product bases, similar market size and budgets and shared common design and navigational elements.

Now there is no magic combination, but any data cruncher can see there is something to be said about larger photos, photo options and specialty photos and their use within specific product views. There is also always a balance between page load times, graphic sizes and ease of use - but with some great tools like Zoom and Thickbox you can engage your customers with smaller versions of images and then leave it up to them to discover the details. The closer you can get your customer to experiencing the product in a real bricks and mortar store, or even in their own home half your work is done (the remaining half needs to go to your eCommerce software and its ease of use).

When I put the stats together for this post, I wanted to get 5 sites that are as close as possible (all sites above actually sell some of the same products and brands). I even started to look at how other eCommerce software handled photo sizes on-line and I came up with some interesting results. Some software actually downsizes your images without giving you a choice in the matter, namely to make serving the images faster. I have seen this now on several software packages in the open source and commercial markets and although a good idea to save on bandwidth costs; a bad idea according to the table above.

In Closing...

Pay close attention to your product photos, and how they convey not only the product but its use and position in your customers lives. Make sure your eCommerce software can handle larger images and have specialized tools and features to allow your visitors to explore individual photos with ease.