The Product Imagery Challenge
Product data is hard to normalize across ecommerce suppliers on your marketplace program? What's worse though?
Image data.
Here are the things that might go wrong for you, particularly in fashion/luxury:
Images shot in different aspect ratios.
Images submitted in different file formats.
There might be different resolutions for different images.
Some products appear zoomed-in, whereas others might appear tiny relative to the size of the image.
Some products shot on-model, and some off-model. All with different creative direction.
Some shots might have a horizon, where some may not.
Drop shadows appear in some but not in others.
Your suppliers may not be able to afford a studio, so some may just use a lay-down.
How do you manage, process, and deal with these sorts of issues?
First, it starts with having your own standards that you can use to coach people. Work with your merchandising team to develop a "second" standard on your site that third-parties can use which may not be exactly the same.
Another solution is to do what category normalizers do - pick a pre-existing standard. In other words, give me the images you use for another retailer. The problem is that standard will surely not match your own creative direction.
One thing that makes it particularly difficult is that the number of people who can fix images is significantly smaller than people who can fix product data. Most people can use Excel. Not the same for image processing programs.
Some insights from the comments section:
Suresh Chaganti points out that there could be (should be?) standards for this, saying “Product Data Management and Syndication is the umbrella technology to address this. It is a pain and resource-intensive for retailers with large SKU count to maintain product descriptions, imagery and video consistent with each of the marketplaces. Standards need to evolve, something similar like EDI.” There is not an industry standard like EDI for this. It's all vendor/retailer/brand specific, but wouldn’t a standard be nice?
Elliot Moskow throws another wrench in, for companies with a high volume of SKUs. “Image guidelines and strict enforcement go a long way - but, at scale that doesn’t cut it. What’s needed for consistency on a marketplace with a large seller network and assortment is a significant understanding or investment in systematic image scrubbing, enhancement, normalization and augmentation. Without it, the search experience becomes mostly awful, and participation on the major CSEs to drive marketplace traffic becomes problematic due to lacking conformity to the channel’s requirements.”
Sara Logan adds some thoughts on the complicated layer of customer-generated images, like in reviews and on social: “Another thing of note is the battle between brand assets & CGC (consumer generated content). Retailers issue image standards for expensive professional assets, particularly lifestyle & in use, while at the same time the consumer is gravitating towards wanting to see “low quality” assets from real people…either with product reviews or sometimes in the primary image carousel (& definitely on social media). What’s a brand to do?”
Images really are key, especially for certain types of products. As Steve Engelbrecht says, “in categories like apparel, the image is basically all that matters. You don't have a chance of converting without it…having a good image is critical because it's evidence you actually have the item and you're selling me the right thing.”
What other pain points stick out to you when it comes to product imagery?
