Using Good Photography On Your Website
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Day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 29. This episode is gonna be about photos. What types of photos to use on your website and why it's important. It's, let's jump right in. As you probably learned by now, your website is really an extension of your physical store and it's an amazing representation of your business and what you're all about. You probably get some orders from your website, but chances are you do most of your business in store. That being said, it's extremely important for your website to look good and be inviting for customers. So let's jump into why you need good photos. Well, that's exactly why you need good photos. Your website needs to look good, your photos need to look good. So if a customer goes on your website and they see blurry photos on mannequins that just really look ugly, you know they're gonna be turned off by your physical store and they're not gonna want to shop in your store.
Not only that, but there's like very little chance that the customer is gonna buy something from your website if it's an ugly photo, if the photo is stretched, if all the photos are different sizes, if the coloring is off, if it's just not a good photo. I think like everybody knows kind of what a good photo looks like and what a bad photo looks like. And like the way I like to say it is like if you were to go on Revolve or Amazon or you know, one of these huge websites, would you see that photo on those websites or no way? And I think like if you just use that kind of frame of thinking is, you know, that's usually good enough to know what's a good photo or a bad photo. Um, another super important thing is like the worse your photo is, the more likely they are to return the item if they buy the item from you.
Um, because they don't really know what they're buying. And at the end of the day when a customer shops online, they are buying your photo, they're not buying the product, they're buying a photo of the product, they don't get to touch it, they don't get to feel it, but they get the photo. A couple things that I want to mention that you should definitely not do, number one is try not to use mannequin photos. Try not to use photos of just, you know, someone wearing the item in the store. Uh, don't use blurry photos, don't use photos with weird backgrounds. Just keep it clean now. So what are your options now at that point? So we know, we, we know we're not gonna use bad photos. What are our options for good photos? Number one, you can do your own photo shoots professionally. You can hire a photographer, get a photo studio.
And um, you know, to be honest, I never recommend this. It tends to be just way too expensive. I think if you are, you know, going for the big time online and your produce your own merchandise and you have a lot of, you know, stock of a style, it's worth it. But if you're buying six to 12 pieces of a style and the products are not extremely expensive in the hundreds and hundreds of dollars per item, it's not gonna be worth paying for a photo shoot. The second option, and it's really the best option, it's the option we always recommend is use vendor images. Your vendors that you buy products from are probably spending a ton of money taking pretty photos, professional photos of the items that you're buying. Chances are those photos are available to you on their website that you can just grab off their website and put online.
If the photos are not on the website, you could probably email the vendor and say, Hey, can we use your photos? Now people, you know, some business owners always get, you know, some business owners ask the question like, am I allowed to use the photos? Well, you know, you should ask the vendor if you, if you don't feel comfortable. But chances are the vendor wants you to use the photos because they want you to sell more products. And if you have good photos and you're putting that vendor's products on your website or on marketplaces, you're gonna sell more of those products. And if you sell more of their products, you're gonna buy more from them. Think of it that you're doing them a favor by using their good photos because you're gonna sell more of their merchandise, thus you're gonna buy more of their merchandise.
Now the third option, and it's kind of in between the first two options is you can do your own photo shoots by yourself. Um, your own employees may, maybe you find an employee who's really, really good at social media and loves editing photos and things like that. And you do a photo shoots, you know, outside by a bridge with a pretty background or in a store you have a special wall that you like to do things, uh, that you like to do things next to. Um, but you gotta be really careful cuz there is a fond line between like cute and personal and then on the other side, like just plain ugly and not tasteful. So if you can't do it right, don't do it at all to be honest. Um, just use those vendor images. The third thing you could do when I think it works the best to be honest, but it, I think it works the best, but it is really hard to get these images is, you know, find images of influencers or people who, or customers or employees who put the products on social media.
Chances are those photos are gonna look really, really good and be really unique and really personal because it's very rare that you find someone who's into social media who put an ugly photo on social media. They usually take a lot of time and effort and put a really, really pretty and tasteful photo. Um, so just to summarize, we want to just, you just wanna really make sure you're putting pretty photos on your website anywhere around your business. Just make sure the photos are nice, clean, professional, and it'll help, it'll help cu get customers in store and buy more online. So that's it. Looking forward to next episode, which is episode 30. We're gonna make sure to make it a special one. Thanks so much.
