Ecommerce Photo Zoom Tips

First, some stats about eCommerce photos: 83% of phone users surveyed by Field Agent in March, 2018. This data is a bit old, so it’s actually probably likely quite higher. Found that product images and photos were very and extremely influential in their purchase. 60% of US digital shoppers said they need to see an average of three to four images when shopping online. And lastly, 22% of returns occur because buyers find the products look different in person than they do in the photos.

When you’re thinking of zoom, you really need to think, first of all, do my photos even need zoom? The products that typically benefit a lot from zoom are ones where people are typically used to touching and feeling them in person. That could be clothing, shoes, accessories. This could also be higher end products or very expensive products where visitors feel like they need to see a lot more detail, especially clothing. Zoom can really help people see more detail about the material, which is as close as they’ll get to feeling it. You need to make sure that it’s clear zoom is available, so we’ll show some examples. The zoom should actually zoom. Sometimes you might use a zoom tool and it just makes the image bigger on the screen, but it doesn’t actually zoom in.

Also, consider mobile. How are you going to display zoom on mobile? Consider bugs and technical issues. Make sure you thoroughly QA if you’re implementing a new zoom feature. Because bugs are something you definitely don’t want to have when people are looking at product images. You want to make sure that images are very high quality. If people are going to zoom in, it shouldn’t be blurry or pixelated. Visitors should be able to pinch to zoom on mobile, that’s a very common expectation on product pages. And you need to make sure you explain the zoom features and how it works.

Here for Bonobos, on their product page, they do quite a good job of presenting multiple images, very close up images. They have a standard model image and then they have this very close up detail of the pockets displaying two pockets. And then on desktop they have this little plus icon when you hover over it indicating that you can zoom in further. On mobile they also do a good job here. When you click into one of the images, there’s this magnifying class with a plus. Usually most users are going to understand that that’s a zoom feature. You can click to zoom in and over here on the right you can see just how detailed that image is. That gives you very high quality. You can see the zipper here, you can see the stitching. Definitely very high quality images.

For Tracksmith, their zoom in function, they mention it right below the image, which is really good that they indicate that the feature’s available. And when you click, you get a quite zoomed in image and you have this icon here on desktop that shows that you can click and drag to look at more of the zoomed in image. And they have this little X up here indicating how to exit the zoom feature.

For Parachute Home, here on mobile you can see here in the image gallery and up at the top it displays zoom. They’re actually not using the magnifying glass, they’re using these two arrows, but they’re making it known that this is zoom. Even if you’re not using the magnifying glass, if you’re displaying text here, then that makes it very clear. And they have the zoomed in image here on the right and then the X to get out of it.

For Kendra Scott, we’re in the image gallery and you can see that they clearly display how to utilize their zoom function since it’s a little bit different than typical. You have to double click to zoom. It’s good that they specify that. You have to hold and drag on your mouse to zoom around on desktop. And then there’s a clear way to exit the zoom feature. This is quite interesting. If you set up a zoom tool that has less prototypical ways of using it, it’s good to make that very clear with text.

And lastly, Home Depot. On desktop here, they mention that you can hover the image to zoom. Instead of clicking, instead of showing an icon, they just make it very clear here that when you’re hovering over, that’s how you can zoom in to see more of the detail. And it’s a sort of magnifying glass to look at the detail on the different labels. Which makes a lot of sense for Home Depot because people are most likely looking at the details on the products, not necessarily the actual product, like a pair of pants or jewelry.

All right, that’s it for the video. Quite a few examples of different ways to implement a zoom feature and explain how to utilize it. These are just a few examples, there are tons online and if you’re looking to work on a zoom feature or optimize your zoom, we also have some articles in the blog on more details about ecommerce zoom tools. Be sure to check that out and I’ll see you in the next video, thanks.