Uploading Images onto Your eCommerce Website and Blog

By Adam  |  27 Jun 2015 19:00:00

When starting up your eCommerce website through Sellr, you will doubtlessly want to include images. It's important to provide your customers with some visual stimuli because otherwise you risk your site looking boring. If it's all text, it's unlikely that newcomers will stay for very long. Images break things up, catch the eye of prospects and generally do well for your business.

But, of course, with images, you enter the complicated world of copyright. If you think that a photo of a person smiling while on the telephone would look great on your contact or support page, maybe you're right, but you can't just go to Google to find an image to suit that need. The image you use will probably be the legal property of somebody else and while they probably won't realise that you've taken the image initially, the longer it’s there, and the more well-known your eCommerce website becomes, the more likely they are to realise that you've taken it from them. The last thing you want is to have somebody taking legal action against you after your website begins to become successful!

However, there are a few safe options available to you. There are several websites which offer public domain images for free and you can use them without concern of copyright; PublicDomainPictures.net is one of these sites. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that sometimes images may be made available for use, but only for non-commercial reasons. If you're using one of those images on the pain part of your site, you are using it for commercial purposes, but if you're using it for a blog on your site, that is not a commercial purpose, so that would be fine. It's small things like this that you have to be careful of. Websites such as Shutterstock provide images as a paid service, which gives you a pretty broad range of things you can use, although it does also cost quite a lot so may not be the best choice for you, depending on your circumstances.

Ideally, all the images on your site would be things that you own, but this may not always be convenient. If you have images on your site, you want them to look professional, but you may not have the resources to make them look professional yourself. If you do have a camera and you think you might be up to it, it's definitely something for you to investigate because if you can produce all the images you need, that's perfect. Another possibility could be to investigate some local photographers; they might prove to be the cheaper alternative and you've also then got some photos that you can use forever.

The final point, in regards to images, is that you must be sure to have good photos of all of your purchasable products. People like to see exactly what they are getting and are very unlikely to buy something if they can't see a picture of it. The best idea is to photograph them against a completely white backdrop (as is the practice of Amazon) as then people have a clear, unobstructed, professional looking image of the product.

Now that you've got an idea of the things that need to be taken into to consideration before uploading images onto your eCommerce website, why not get started? And if you don't have one, but want one, sign up to Sellr now! It's completely free.