Photography tips from a non-professional: Making your product photos stand out

This blog post on photography was so popular, I thought I'd dare to venture down that road again and show you my tips for post production, or making your product photos really pop after you've taken them.

I use Gimp but I'm sure the instructions are pretty much the same for other photo manipulation software.  Gimp is my choice because it's free and there are bits of it I can understand.  If only I had more time to work with it, I'm sure I could do some pretty cool things.  But I'm a confirmed amateur, and I'm deliberately avoiding any technical language here because I just don't understand it. 

Anyway, here goes!  Hope it's helpful.

Open your photo in Gimp - you perhaps want to make a copy to work on.  Here's some tigers eye and carnelian earrrings looking a little grey and flat.  What I'm showing you here is how to get a white background and make the image stand out but without distorting the colours or contrast of the product.

 Choose the 'colours' menu, and from that 'levels'

You get a graph - don't panic!  You are going to manipulate the graph, but it won't be like maths in school, honestly :-)

 Locate the little triangles underneath the graph at either end...

 ... and simply grab them and drag them to where the black shape on your graph starts.  I've started with the right hand one and pulled it over to meet the end of the black blob graph shape.  Note how this has already lighted the background from grey to off white. ('grab' and 'blob' are technical terms, honest!)

You can experiment with moving the triangles further, but you'll see once you are in the zone of the black shape of the graph, you'll start to distort the colour and contrast.  Keep the triangles right at the start of where the graphs start at either side, and you'll generally get the clearest image.

 You can save now, or alternatively, you can pick up the 'dropper' icon on the right....

 ...and pop it anywhere on your background.  With a bit of luck, it will give you a snow white background too!  Combine the two approaches and your product should really start to stand out.

 You've done it!  Any problems, you can always use 'reset'.  Don't forget to save before you quit. 

Phew!  My first tutorial with screen shots.  Let me know if it's useful, and if I've made any mistakes. 

Alison

Good and bad for online sales

As my regular blog followers know, I think there's a lot of luck involved in successful online selling (see this blog post on luck if you missed it). However, looking at my stats now another financial year has ended, there seem to be some patterns in my sales and some things that I can't back up with hard evidence, but are serious 'hunches' and I wondered how many of you agree that these are good or bad for sales and views? Here goes, and remember each one is just my opinion or gut feeling.

A great eternal truth of shopping:owls a

re really popular

The recent sunny weather prompted these thoughts and my first proposition:

Sunny weather is bad for online selling. People are outside instead of in browsing the Internet. So bad weather is much better for views and sales.

Winter, autumn and spring are better than summer for sales and views. Even if it's a bad summer in the UK, there's still less Internet activity. This applies to Etsy too, even though it's a global marketplace.

August is the worst month, October is the best. It's either very organised Christmas shoppers who are attracted to my shops, or the change to autumn sends more people to online buying.

Weekdays are better than weekends for both views and sales. The exception is late Saturday night when some folks clearly go back to things they spotted online earlier, and being at the most relaxed and happy point of the week, decide they will, after all, treat themselves.

Evenings are better than daytimes - certainly for views.  But sales can happen at any time of the day or night.

Sales (as in discounts) and promotions are counter productive for smaller sellers without high numbers of returning/repeat customers. If your customers mostly find you online through searches (rather than being sellers on Folksy or Etsy themselves), then they are probably browsing your shop for the first time. That means they never knew what your non-sale prices were, and they probably don't care much if you've got 20% off today. In fact, if they like your product and it fits their needs, they may well have been prepared to pay the original price for it. 

Returning customers are different but if they think you might be having a sale, they may decide to wait for it, and in the meantime get distracted and buy elsewhere.  Better to offer your returning customers a discount for future purchases, then they may be attracted to buy whenever they see something they like, knowing they are making a saving.

And lastly, and most controversially...

Like marmite - love it or not, instant reaction

Hard selling and persuasion don't work.  At least, not for me with jewellery. Jewellery's not like double glazing - you don't need to be talked into the merits of getting it, you either like it enough to buy it, or you don't. 

Good pictures and descriptions help to reinforce that gut reaction you get when you see something you really like.  But they don't actually sell items. 'Wanting' and 'needing' feelings control whether people buy things, even so-called impulse buys, and you as a seller can't really influence much whether your potential buyer has those feelings.  Sure, you can tempt them.  So the main thing is to make sure those potential buyers can see your products... and that means focusing on listing and SEO. 

What do you think - agree or disagree?

What makes a successful shop?

This post originally appeared as a guest blog on Iyobo Design's blog.  Thanks to Beata for featuring it :-)

OK, I’m going to make a bold statement now. I think I have a successful shop! Actually, I have four online shops on Folksy, Etsy, Dreamaid and Zibbet. I’ve been selling for 11 months online and across the Folksy and Etsy shops I have 54 sales.

Were you expecting the number to be closer to 5,000? Or 500? What do you think it means to have a successful shop? Is it loads of sales, loads of stock, repeat customers, wholesale orders, being a household name?

I guess like most sellers when I started I was a bit naive and imagined that customers would be queueing up to buy my jewellery on a daily basis – maybe I wouldn’t be able to make things fast enough! I soon learned that making the jewellery and listing it was the relatively easy part. There were all sorts of things about promoting online that I didn’t even realise that I’d need to do – blogging, tweeting, chatting in forums, all that was new to me. Now I spend a lot of time promoting, but I’ve learned to focus on the things I enjoy. And customers still don’t come in droves. So why do I think I’m successful? Maybe I’m just mad LOL

It’s because of the best thing about online selling, something I’d never even thought of when I started my shops. It’s about the customer experience. A lot of people I’ve sold to have emailed me about the jewellery, have left me feedback in the shops, have blogged or mentioned my shop in other forums and online venues. I’ve been lucky all my feedback so far is really positive. And that’s the real joy of it for me.

Everytime I sell an item and put it in the post, there’s a bit of anxiety about whether the recipient will really like it. After all, they’ve only seen a few pictures and read my description of it, and I’m no David Bailey in the photo department! And all my designs are from my imagination and are things I’d like to wear, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world shares my taste, does it? So the relief and pleasure when you get feedback that it’s beautiful, that my mum will really love it, that it’s well made, that it’s better than the picture etc etc, is really sometimes better than the sale. I don’t think people working in a bricks and mortar shop get that experience very often. So I’m happy to trade loads of customers for a few, really happy online buyers any day!

It’s lucky that making jewellery is my hobby and I do feel for people trying to make a living from their crafting in such tough economic times. And if a hundred people suddenly found my shop and each bought an item, I’d be overjoyed. But just at the moment, on an average of a just over one sale a week, I’m quite a happy bunny. So my advice to new shops would be, don’t be impatient, work hard and the customers will gradually come and then, well, it’ll be lovely!