Considerations for Ecommerce Product Image Galleries
Video: Considerations for Ecommerce Product Image Galleries
What are the best ways to showcase your products and what should you be thinking about when it comes to image galleries?
In this video, you’re going to learn about:
- The technical aspects of showing images on the product page
- Product considerations
- And you’ll get some gallery inspiration
Technical Considerations
When it comes to the technical side of showcasing images, you need to consider a couple of things. The impact on the page load time. If you are going to be displaying a lot of very high quality images, different tools like a 360 viewer, you need to consider how this is going to impact how fast or slow the page is going to load. You don’t want to introduce a technical element that ends up slowing the page down so much that visitors end up getting frustrated, not wanting to wait and end up leaving. You need to balance these two things.
You need to also consider the file size of the images. They need to be high quality, but not at the expense of, again, page load time. Then you need to also consider bugs that can occur with different tools. If you’re using a zoom feature, if you’re using a 360 viewer or a rotation tool, you need to make sure that your team QAs it very well on different browsers, different devices to make sure that there are no bugs that pop up.
Product Considerations
When it comes to product considerations for your photos, you need to consider how many angles you need for each item. Is this something that can just be displayed well from the front or does it need many different images of the top, the side, the bottom? This is different product to product.
Do you also need a video or a 360 view? Not all products are necessarily going to need both of these things. You should also consider adding photos in context, so showing the product being used by people or in different settings, and then also the packaging. Do you need photos of the product in the packaging, out of the packaging? That’s something else to think about.
Product Image Gallery Examples
Some examples of product gallery, product image galleries. Here, for Floyd, something interesting they do is they have these nice large image galleries, and they mention, at the bottom in the caption, what the product is and the coloring as well, because people probably view that and think that would look nice in their home, and now they have information on what colors to choose.
Details. Taking closeup photos of different aspects of the product really helps give customers a better idea of the quality of the product and what they can expect the product is going to look like. The gallery itself, so you need to consider where you want to place the thumbnails. Should they be along the side, along the bottom? How are people going to navigate through all the different images and videos that you’re going to be showing? Do you even need a gallery at all? Something that is popping up on different ecommerce stores is where you scroll down the product page and all of the images are visible at once. There’s no needing to click through a gallery.
Also consider how the gallery should display on desktop versus mobile. Here for Maiden Home, they have very nice, large, high quality images on desktop, and then the thumbnails to navigate through the gallery are in the upper left corner. But then on mobile, this same desktop view would not work well. Instead, on mobile, they have a large image and then they have the thumbnails at the bottom, which is a better mobile experience.
For Any Day, they have really large images for their gallery. They don’t have them feeling like a separate gallery feature. You can see here, they’re even almost part of the entire page, even with the logo and the menu items appearing over top so they can really take advantage of the screen size to show large images.
Then lastly, consider the controls that are going to be used in the image gallery. How are you going to convey that an item can be zoomed in and out of? How are you going to convey that there are more images to go through in the gallery? Then, also showcasing the different tools so that you can rotate or that you can zoom the different images. These are things you need to consider, because not all users are going to necessarily know this intuitively.
Those are some things to think about when it comes to your image gallery. Take a look at your product page, think about how this experience could be improved, test out some different styles and see what does best. I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.