Today I welcome my amazing business partner Rob Sleath of MightyServices to talk about ecommerce photography. You could say Rob has never really had a job. He did three months as a temp during Christmas. Beyond that everything else he's done has been digital, online, and ecommerce related. His formal education is in nuclear physics. In a nutshell, he likes numbers.

 

His start in online sales came well before his start as an Amazon entrepreneur. Rob had been building ecommerce websites and offering photography and graphic design services in the online sector for years. He made the decision to get involved in the Amazon ecosystem in 2014 and has been knee deep in it ever since. On today's installment, we're specifically going to be focusing on Rob's background in ecommerce photography.

Why Quality Photography is Crucial to Selling on Amazon

People place a lot more stock in photography than they realize. When you're buying a product online, you can't touch it; you can't feel it. You read some reviews, read the seller's opinion in the bullet points, but the photograph is the most real and tangible thing on the listing. A good set of photos helps with click-through from the search results page. It enables you to describe your product better than any perfectly written description or bullet point ever could.

There are entire industries that sell products through photographs with little or no descriptions. We're not in the business of selling products. We may be in the business of delivering them, but at the very core, we're selling images. People buy cars and even houses sight unseen based on pictures on a screen. The photograph is the best interaction they have with the products they buy online.

Taking Photos as an Entry Level Seller on Amazon

So many of my clients come to me and ask, "Can't I just take the photos for my listings on my iPhone?" It's true, the resolution on the newest iPhone and Android smartphones is incredible. If your goal is to test a market, and you've only got five of a product, sure, buy a lightbox photography kit and take your product photos with an iPhone. If you can sell those five items based on some dirty, horrible pictures taken with an iPhone, you can certainly sell that product with beautiful, sharp, professionally taken photographs.

On the other hand, if you've already invested in hundreds or thousands of units for a listing, get professional photos. The last thing you want to do is have a failed listing based on bad pictures.

If you want to have an accurate understanding of how many units of a product you're going to sell, then the listing you're creating needs to be as similar to the ultimate listing you're going to be using on Amazon as possible.

It needs to be similar in terms of pricing, in terms of the quality of the description, in terms of the photos, and in terms of the amount you're spending on pay-per-click advertising.  There's no point in investing any real time or capital into a market test if you're going to change all the variables when you finally bring the product to market. The key is understanding what you're testing.

A Good Photograph Must Accurately Represent the Product

A photograph that overrepresents or underrepresents a product is not a well-taken photograph. Not only do you as an Amazon Seller need to match your product with the right customer, but you also need to match your product with the right photograph to get customers in the marketplace to click through, buy an item, and leave a good review (or at least not a bad one). A photograph that looks amazing but doesn't accurately represent the product a c...