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What is are Stock Photos? Stock photography is the supply of photographs which are often licensed for specific uses.
Have you ever heard the old adage that a picture is worth 1000 words? It is even truer for e-commerce websites.
Many e-commerce entrepreneurs spend weeks creating beautiful sales copy for their landing pages. However, they neglect their images entirely. In fact, I have seen plenty of landing pages that don’t have images at all. Other e-commerce often have landing pages that contain very shoddy pictures that don’t reflect to support their brand.
The good news is that there are a lot of places to find free images, such as Shopify Burst, UnSplash, Pixabay, Pexels, Freepik, etc. You are better off using these sources instead of a Creative Commons source that requires you to provide an attribution link to the photographer.
Images can have a significant impact on your conversions. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Why it is Important to Choose the Right Stock Images
You need to spend as much time looking for images as you spend writing copy for your site. Here are some reasons that it is important to choose the right images for your site:
- Images can have a significant effect on conversion rates. A case study from Visual Website Optimizer found that using a picture of the company’s founder increased conversion rates by 35%.
- If you choose the right images, people are more likely to share your content on social media. While most e-commerce sales aren’t driven by organic social media traffic, it can still help bolster brand recognition.
- Images are part of your brand. If they aren’t consistent with your brand image, it can create a lot of confusion among your followers.
Fortunately, there are a lot of great places to find high quality stock images.
Choose images that blend in with your landing page
Many people try to get very fancy with their landing page images. The problem with using flashy images is that they tend to distract users from your call to action.
It’s best to use images that have similar colors and brightness levels to your website theme. Your call to action should have more contrast with the rest of the page so that it grabs your visitor’s attention.
Look for images that are relevant to your brand
You don’t want to choose images that are irrelevant to your e-commerce site. This should sound obvious, but it is important to repeat because it is a common mistake many e-commerce websites make. Website Magazine pointed out that one leather furniture company used images of couches that were not made of leather. The company has since replaced them with more relevant images because they probably had difficulty converting their visitors.
Find stock photos that sell commercial images
A lot of website managers use Flickr to obtain a creative Commons images. Those images may work for blog posts and SlideShare documents, but they aren’t ideal for e-commerce and landing pages. You need to provide links to the source of the image, which can distract your visitors and hurt your conversion rates.
It is better to use stock photo websites because they don’t have to be attributed to the source if a license is purchased. Make sure you choose stock photo sites that allow you to use images for commercial purposes. I found that some sites only allow images to be used for educational and nonprofit projects.
Choose the Right Images for Your E-commerce Landing Pages
There are a lot of stock photo websites out there. You can find tens of thousands of images for your website. However, you need to choose quality images that support your brand. Make sure you browse stock photos with a critical eye to find ones that work well.
These are just some tips you can use to find the right stock photos for your ecommerce site. Make sure to do your own research when looking into the best places to find relevant stock photos.
