Today, there are a lot of online stores which offer customers a wide range of products and services. But in this cut-throat competitive world, being a website owner is not an easy job. One needs to keep changing his policies to retain the existing customers and attract the new ones.

To know about attracting the new ones we need to where do customers generally prefer to shop. This article is about making your own online store stand out. The most important thing in online world is to figure out how to differentiate yourself from the rest.

A successful ecommerce business owner knows that to stand out in the crowd one needs to create a visual impression with his shops. This is not possible without well prepared product images which will portray an attractive appearance of the business. There are various photo editing tools available in the market but the traditional ones remain unchanged namely Adobe Photoshop. However, it is a paid solution but we have other programs available such as GIMP or Paint.NET which will allow you to make satisfactory changes while editing your product images. To know more about how to do it and to keep a check on essential key points read the following steps:

Basic Concepts of Photo Editing/ Photo Selection

Resolution and image dimensions
In a digital image, the smallest measurable unit in an all point addressable display device is called pixel. The more pixels are used to represent an image, the closer the result can resemble the original. The number of pixels in an image is called the resolution. You can see below the difference in the quality of two images one with 72ppi and the other with 300ppi.

File Size and Format
Taking in forward with the above point we need to know that the higher resolution and format we choose will affect the file size of the image. Depending on the size of file it may increase or decrease the time taken to load an image. This lets you balance the art of compromise between the good image quality and optimum size. JPEG is the most common format, ideal for images that contain smooth tonal transitions and where there are no sharp edges. When writing to this format, the image is compressed judicially and the end-product looks exactly like the original.

– format allows you to create animation and save it with transparency. However, in the case of transcription, the gaps become jagged edges of the image.

PNG- format is the most commonly used format for lossless image compression on the Internet, but it becomes difficult for jagged edges in this format.

Photograph processing techniques:
All photo processing techniques need to have an original copy in hand before you start the process. This will help in case of any failure. Also, one needs to keep in mind that different customers will have different settings in their monitors, so the products may look different in the images on their devices. To make sure we should check the images on several monitors once the editing is done. The most commonly faced issues in image processing are :

Adjusting Contrast and Brightness:
Setting the correct contrast and brightness is necessary because too dark or too light may not reflect the actual appearance of the product. So, if the customers purchase the items without knowing its original color they may return it justifying that the color was different than shown in the picture.

Retouch and Improving the Look of the Product:
There are softwares that include many useful tools such as cloning, magic wand and eraser to erase the imperfections very easily. This helps to improve the look of the product.

Product Background:
It is very important for the products to be presented either in the same way as they are used in the daily life or picturized in the studio without anything in the background. Background images and shadows can distract the customers. For example, in Premium cart you can see the images they have used are single products without any background objects this helps customers to focus.

Changing Attributes to multiple images:

As e commerce business entrepreneurs have a lot of pictures of products on their websites, it becomes difficult to change image proportions and size one by one in the gallery. For this purpose there are free softwares available in the market which may help to change size of images together. And also, there are other tools namely,

Fotosizer
Batch Converter
Light Image Resizer

Basically, to stand out from the others in the same online market one needs to take care about the pictures, the images and even the graphics, for example Gift Flora. This has proven better results as attractive appearance produces great customers. Keep watching this space for more updates on what to do different to stand out in ecommerce business.

For our clients that run on WooCommerce, we advice this engagement course.