We want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.
- Sam Waller
The concept, known as ‘mobile ready hero images’, was designed to make shopping for grocery products faster, by making it easier to quickly spot key information about a product, such as size, type or flavour.
For example, searching for ‘soap’ on Amazon or other retail websites will bring up hundreds of images, and most customers will scroll quickly through the list on their phone in order to find the particular item they want. However, based on product images alone, it can be difficult to quickly spot the differences between items: whether an item contains one, three or ten individual bars of soap, for instance.
“While traditional pack photographs can be effective on desktop screens, different flavours and sizes of products can look identical when these photographs are displayed on mobiles, reduced to the size of a postage stamp,” said Dr Sam Waller from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, who led the project. “This is especially problematic for older consumers with age-related long-sightedness.”
To date, mobile ready hero images have been adopted by over 80 retailers in more than 40 countries. India – where 65% of all online shopping transactions take place on mobiles – has been one of the fastest countries to adopt these images.
In addition to making the mobile shopping experience easier for customers, mobile ready hero images have also been shown to have a positive impact on sales. “Magnum ice cream is one of our billion dollar global brands that has adopted hero images,” said Oliver Bradley, e-commerce director at Unilever. “During an eight-week A/B split test with a retailer, Magnum’s hero images led to a sales increase of 24%.”
In order to meet retailers’ demands for consistent product images across all brands, Unilever commissioned Cambridge to develop a website for hero image guidelines, with freely available templates to help brands create improved product images.
Image: Man on a smartphone
Credit: Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge