Do 360 Degree Photos Help Increase Sales?

In the fast moving, competitive world of e-commerce, finding an edge over your competition is crucial.

To stand out from the crowd, high-quality images are not enough. Customers expect to be able to interact with your products, to turn them around and zoom into details like stitching or finishes. Just like they would in a real store.

If you are an e-commerce seller, adding 360 degree photos of your products can not only significantly increase your conversion rate but they will also reduce return rates. This article will explain how.

Do High Quality Images Boost Conversion Rate?

It should go without saying that high quality images result in more sales than low quality images. However, even high quality images lack the interactivity that many customers seek.

Take this Maxwell Leather Sofa from Restoration Hardware, for example. The images are beautiful.

However, there are only 7 photos of this sofa for customers to look at. For a $4,595 sofa, is that enough to get someone to purchase the item online? 

Can visitors of RH.com see the stitching and every angle of the sofa from the front to the back to confirm the quality of the sofa? Will they return the sofa after receiving it because it is not exactly what they expected?

Even for a high end furniture retailer like RH, known for its quality products, returns are a big deal. They incurred $162 Million in product returns in the year ending January 2022 - that equates to almost 5% of every sale resulting in a return. 

Why You Should Add 360 Degree Images of Your Products

Adding 360 degree images to your website enables customers to interact with your products virtually just like they can in a store. Adding 360 degree photos results in far lower returns and far higher conversions rates.

DeskRiser.com, an online retailer of ergonomic office furniture like standing desks and ergonomic chairs, started implementing 360 degree photos into their website in late 2021 and found that returns of the products with 360 degree spin images dropped by almost 50%.

Similarly, the Home Depot saw a 35-percent reduction in product returns during an A/B test of 360-degree product photos.

 

Do 360 Degree Spin Images Increase Conversion Rates?

According to CXL, DueMaternity.com, an online retailer of items for pregnant women and new mothers, boosted their conversion rate by 27% thanks to 360° rotating images. In the past, they used conventional two-dimensional images on their website, such as the front and back of a model wearing a maternity dress.

After adding a 360 degree spin to the images, the conversion rate on products sold was about 27% higher than for standard two-dimensional images.

Golfsmith.com claimed that products with the special spin feature increased conversion rates at least 10% and sometimes as much as 30–40% higher than products without it.

How Do You Take 360 Degree Photos of Large Objects?

If you sell larger items, doing 360 product photoshoots are very expensive and time consuming. 

You need the following to photograph large objects:

Hire a photographer

Hire a crew of people to set up your objects

Pay the crew to be on set all day so that they can move your objects around to take pictures from every angle

Lastly, you need to have your photographs edited. 

 

All told, this can add up to $10,000 to photograph just 5 large products.

Here is a great video that explains the complexities of doing large product photography. Not included in this video is how much work is involved with moving products around to produce 360 degree images. You have to pick up your products and rotate them manually.

Imagine doing this for large objects like sofas, refrigerators, or motorcycles for a photoshoot and making sure that the center point of your object stays in the same spot as you rotate it around.

Are there Turntables for Large Products?

The largest product turntables are generally for products up to 30 inches wide. Up until now, there has been no solution for photographing large objects over 30 inches wide or over 100 LBs. 

The only solutions out there are jerry-rigging rotating platforms that require a huge investment (over $10,000) and knowledge on how to set up a platform. You can also try doing it yourself, but you will need to make a large rotating platform that is on a level plane so that your objects don't bounce or shift as they rotate.

360 degree photos of large objects has historically been out of reach for anyone with a smaller budget. Just rotating your objects so that they can be photographed at different angles on a flat plane often requires a team of people and takes a full day.

There hasn't really been an easy of cost-effective solution for this, which is why we patented and launched our own Big Turn, a photography turntable for large products that can support up to 1,100 LBs (500 kg).

The best parts about our photography turntables are:

They require no tools for assembly

They can be set up and broken down in 2 minutes

They rotate around in a 360 degree circle with stops at every 5 degrees for you to take a series of 72 photos of any object.

Big turntables consists of a center hub and 8 wings that simply snap onto the hub to form a giant rotating platform, ranging from 8 feet in diameter to 10 feet. We also offer a smaller version in a 3 foot diameter.

All you have to do is place an object or objects on the platform and rotate the platform around with your hands or a foot and take pictures at every 5 degree turn.

Here is a recent product from DeskRiser.com that was photographed with the Turn 94 turntable:

After taking the photographs, DeskRiser used Big Turntables' professional photo editing to create a 360 degree spinning image for their website. The finished product looked like this:

CONCLUSION

360-degree product photography is making inroads into major online retail marketplaces as well as online furniture, automobile and home goods websites.

For smaller retailers without the budget of large photo studios or multi billion dollar retailers, creating 360 degree images of products has historically been out of reach. 

Large product turntables from Big Turntables offer a cost effective solution that is easy to set up and break down, and allows for solo entrepreneurs to do 360 degree photo shoots in under 10 minutes. The result is 360 degree photos that can dramatically increase sales and reduce product returns.

 

REFERENCE LIST

Here's a list of references included in the article above:

1. PracticalCommerce - Even in 2020, 360 Degree Product Photos Boost Conversions
2. CXL - How Images Can Boost Your Conversion Rate
3. Sean Tucker Photography - How to Photograph Big Products

About the Author

Mike Lipka is a co-founder of Big Turntables, a manufacturer of patented large product photography turntables. Big Turntables are for sale or rent at BigTurntables.com. Additionally, Big Turntables has a 360° photography studio in Boulder, Colorado (USA) that allows you to do 360 photoshoots of any object up to 10 feet wide and 1,200 lbs. You can bring your products to the studio or ship them in. Contact Big Turntables for more information.