Pictures the key in online shopping: study
What if the things that get online shoppers to buy a product are also what makes them dissatisfied with the product when it eventually arrives?
That’s the question Jacqueline Conard, a professor at Nashville-based Belmont University, posed recently in the Harvard Business Review.
Images are the crux of online shopping, Conard says, they’re what get us to buy. But, after the purchase comes the long wait, the period during which many purchases go sour.
When consumers purchase items online, often they'll print a receipt and pin the picture on their bulletin board. It turns out that these types of pictures actually set the bar long before the Fed-Ex truck rolls up: The better the image on your wall, the more likely you are to be pleased with your purchase.
Despite sites’ glossy efforts, the low-quality versions we reproduce alter the memory of what we’ve bought, boosting our expectations at the same time. When the product arrives, the result is frequently a big disconnect between what we've been imagining and what we're actually looking at.
The trick, she suggests, might be for online retailers to provide just enough visual information to allow us to feel good about the money spent but not enough detail to allow our memory of the purchase to be altered. In other words, to represent the purchase in a more abstract way – like a line drawing, rather than a photo.
What do you think? Have you experienced that let down when the promised product actually arrives?
By Gordon Powers, MSN Money
Posted by: zipizap | Sep 14, 2021 12:36:40 PM
Well, an online shop will eventually have to face that ilusioning customers with wonder-pictures will slashback to them when the buyer actually receives the product and feels unhappy with the transaction - the buyer will certainly confirm the description of the product with the received product, and will notice the differences. At this point the disatisfaction of the buyer will fall not in the product but in the seller of the product, which is the online shop.
So in the end, an online shop cannot sustain it's business strategy on cheap-tricks as these... it will not make the shop famous among potential costumers...
In short, doing it is a no-end-path...
Posted by: Mark Demers | Nov 19, 2021 2:45:09 PM
I understand what you`re trying to say - I think a great picture is essential to selling your products .It don`t have to be a HD picture but quality matters.How could they know if they would want to buy your product without a clear picture of what the product actually looks like?
You`re not deceiving anyone if you post an accurate and clearly visible photo of your product.
Clear photos are needed especially when selling digital products over the internet because that`s the only and best selling point to any digital product -of course a great name and description helps very much also.