One single thing that can make your online store dominate the industry

It is hard to imagine a web store without images, right? Let’s chat about online store image performance.
An image is the single most important thing for the online store that makes buyers buy.
Better your image performance more leads you generate and more revenue you get at the end of the day.
Why is it important?
Let’s take a look at the simple online customer journey map. After customer has landed on the main page or on the product page they get into the sales funnel straight away.
Marketers or UX-designers build a customer journey that leads buyers to a successful purchase.

As an example, I will use a very sophisticated well-crafted store which I personally admire — bonds.com.au.
Engage. A customer enters a website directly or from one of the marketing channels that online store uses to attract customers. Therefore, first that a customer sees are a bright huge image which goal is to attract the attention.

Research. Next, what happens, is the customer starts the research either through the search/filter functionality provided by a website or study the provided selection.

Review. Customer jumps into one of the products they are interested in and reviews the product details.

Compare. Moreover, it is a common thing now to show customer other products they might like. So, the customer has an option to compare and select the best option.

Checkout. In the end, they decide to buy and website takes them to a checkout page where they complete the journey with a successful purchase.

What I would like to draw your attention to is that on each step of the journey user sees the vast amount of images. And what is, more important, these images can lead him to a purchase. So, a robust, fast, well-performed images are the key to successfull customer journey for the online store.
What can you achieve improving performance?
- Capture attention. On the one hand, you have to prove dozens of excellent high-quality images to get attention to your website first and then to the product. Because you are simply selling through images.
- Win a customer. On the other hand, your images have to be optimized, light and small to perform well enough to convince a buyer to buy from you.
- Beat the competition. It’s all about comparison. Let’s be honest you are not the only one who sell shoes, pens, toys. And the amount of competition only increases with the progress of technology.
Consequently, working on your online store image performance can get you the much-sought customer interest and the revenue increase.
How to test?
There is an amazing tool called the Lighthouse. It is already integrated in Chrome browser. So you just open your website and look for a report that Lighthouse generates for you. You can work from there on improvements that you could do to make your store perform better.
- Open your website in the Chrome browser
- Press F12
- Then select Audits tab
- Press “Run Audits” button
- Review the report

Read about the in-depth strategy in our post about proper setup and testing of Image Performance.
How to improve?
To improve you have two options. Optimise manually or automate your solution. Each image has to have proper dimensions and the proper weight. So, you either do it by hand or you apply bulk image optimisation services like Pixboost.

Recently we more than doubled the performance of the leading Australian online store. To read more on this please check out our Case Study.

What it does is automatically resizes your images, optimises them and delivering it through CDN in the next gen formats.
Conclusion
Ii is very important to work on your online store image performance because to compete with other stores you have to have a really fast and up-to-date solution. You are welcome to check our Real-time Image Processing Platform or ask any questions you have concerning image performance or integration of automated image transformation services.

