Numerous companies have been using 3D configurators for several years now, as the product lists of Bosh and Ashley Furniture, for example, have shown for a long time. Shopify has also recently announced its intention to use 360-degree product photos in its future advertising campaigns.
Bildquelle: Wikipedia
If you’re not sure whether to implement 360-degree product views into your eCommerce strategy, you should take a closer look at the study by Tibert Verhagen, Charlotte Vonkeman and Willemijin van Dolen published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.
The study examines the following three product presentation categories to analyze how they influence the buyer’s ability to evaluate products online, i.e. how these processes influence the customer’s purchasing decision:
- Still images.
- 360 product images.
- Virtual mirror.
Nearly 400 students took part in this 2016 study in the Netherlands, where they evaluated different forms of perceived product longevity and their purchasing intentions using product pages on Ray-Ban.com.
Ray-Ban offers all three presentation options for some of their glasses, which is rare. This is mainly due to the fact that the “virtual mirror” is fashion specific and the technology is still complex and tricky.
We recommend that you take a close look at this study: the virtual mirror achieved the best results, followed by 360-degree images. Interestingly, the difference between the virtual mirror and 360-degree product images seems to be very close to the gap between 360-degree product images and still images.
An example from this study: Buyers who interact with 360-degree product images buy a product 14% more often than when only photos are used for product presentation.
The “virtual mirror” indicates an additional improvement of 15%. And that’s not all, because we also have to consider that the improved user experience can reduce product returns and improve overall purchasing satisfaction.
Other interesting research findings come from scientists at the University of Hong Kong and Stanford. The researchers investigated the impact of multiple additional images of the same product on the buyer’s ability to compare and decide while shopping online. Surprisingly, the participants who saw additional photos were “less convinced of their decision and appreciated the product less than those who saw only one photo for each product”.
In view of the results of the first study, we believe that some products, such as shoes used in the last study, can benefit from a single 360-degree product view, completely eliminating the need for still images.
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