Visualization gains more and more importance. A large number of Germans today own a smartphone, which means they can see a picture of anything at any time. A lot of all Google searches are specifically targeted at images.

eCommerce product visualizations

In electronic Business, the importance of images cannot be overemphasized: Many customers regard images as the most important factor in their decision to buy online – more important than product descriptions, reviews or even prices.

But the customer journey of eCommerce customers does not end with the purchase: Only when a customer actually receives a physical product does it strengthen their buying decision. Nevertheless, the response rate of 20% in eCommerce is more than twice as high as in bricks-and-mortar retail.

The good news is that the right product visualizations can increase sales and reduce returns. In the following article you will get an overview of what kind of visual content works in different situations and how eCommerce brands can use excellent visual content in their web content without a team of full-time photographers.

The right visualization for your visualization options.

In the days of paper catalogs, retailers had the simple task of taking high-quality images of their goods and distributing them to buyers. Today, eCommerce brands have a dizzying array of options for visual content such as VR, AR, interactive 3D or classic 2D.

Before investing in any of these options, it helps to know where each one works best when it comes to eCommerce visualizations:

VR.

While VR is popular in some gaming applications, VR has not yet gained a foothold in most eCommerce applications, mainly because of its difficult format: most people simply do not have the necessary equipment (e.g. a headset) to enable a VR experience.

However, it is possible that the tide is turning. The Oculus Quest, launched in May this year, is affordable enough to stimulate mass acceptance. In this case, eCommerce brands should rely on VR to build trust and community through content.

VR content should be designed so that customers can enjoy it at home. The experience of disappearing into a virtual world is too disorienting for most people to be willing to try it in public.

AR.

AR has achieved great success in the furniture sector and should provide similar added value to all brands selling large, expensive or hard-to-deliver items. With AR applications, shoppers can place virtual products in real environments to see if they fit.

Customers can see if a new sofa will fit on the wall or a carpet with curtains will work. One reason AR is booming is because of its form factor: shoppers only need a smartphone to see an expanded version of their world.

Interactive 3D offers many compelling use cases:

Full product rotation: Allows customers to manipulate the 3D renderings of products to see all sides and angles. Full rotations are usually useful for uncomplicated products with many details, highly technical products and customized products.

Product Explosions products with important inner layers are perfect candidates for Product Explosions, which allow the buyer to view the components of a product. An explosion can help illustrate why your item’s price tag might be higher than that of your competitors.

Click and drag product markups: Consider them as interactive user guides. By offering clickable 3D, you can illustrate how to use complex and mechanical products such as printer scanners and provide helpful troubleshooting options for common problems.

Photorealistic 2D technology still has its place in eCommerce. If you opt for computer-generated 2D images, you can achieve higher quality and much lower costs than by employing photographers – and you can save everyone a lot of trouble.

Because these images are computer-generated, all the photographers you work with are freed from taking thousands of boring and repetitive images so they can focus on shots that require human creativity.

Benefits of product visualization.

The right product visualization can increase sales and decrease ROI. In general, eCommerce brands find that 22 percent of returns are generated because a product looks different from the images on the website.

Interactive 3D and photorealistic 2D images and AR applications can solve this problem. Better images can also increase the number of buyers: A brand increased sales by almost 10 percent simply by increasing the size of the photos on its website.

These figures are particularly compelling because digital product visualization costs only about 1/1000th of what similar systems would cost if produced manually. In other words, computer-generated product visualizations have an extremely favorable ROI.

More importantly, however, they are becoming tabletop solutions for eCommerce. Today, it is disruptors and pioneering brands that have class leading visualizations (including interactive 3D, photorealistic and configurable 2D and AR visualizations). Soon this will be standard.

eCommerce companies that want to remain competitive must improve their product visualization strategies or accept that they will lose sales to better equipped competitors. The time for action is now.

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