Image Guidelines
High quality, optimized product images will improve your store, and overall, site performance, and help you to effectivelly sellyour products. It’s a fact.
It does take some time to produce good e-commerce product images. Due to the nature of our site, many listings will use whatever the independent Seller, Manufacturer or Distributor will have online, or provide.
For file types, our site can accommodate most image types, but most images provided are .png or .jpeg.
When creating images for the web, size is one of the most important characteristics of good product images. When we reference size, we mean physical dimensions, and not resolution. All numbers in this guide will refer to pixels:.
Below are some guidelines for selecting the best sizes for marketplace product images:
Small: Thumbnails
These are small images that appear in product category or site search results listings which are just large enough to convey shape, design and color. These are typically used for Options and recommended sizes are (100 x 100 or 200 x 200. Clicking on a thumbnail may simply launch the image as is, or re-direct to a dedicated page, or a larger, full-sized image.
Medium: Store Profile or Other Images
Every content area will need good page-quality images. These images are usually in the range of 250 x 250 or even up to 640 x 640 or 800 x 800.
Main Product Image Views / Zoom on Hover
Detailed close-ups are super important and our site offers a zoom on hover feature on the product page. Products with important design details require zoom functionality for customer evaluation. You can do this in a couple of ways; take separate close-up shots, or just use the hover functionality. 800 x 800 or 1000 x 1000 are usually perfect for zoom on hover viewing.
Platform Restrictions
Below are the current default values of the containers that hold all of the images in our marketplace. We use these fields to adjust the sizes of the containers. The containers do have their limitations so we cannot go over certain limits. However, our site uses a fluid grid system where elements use percentages instead of fixed pixel dimensions which allows us to scale the overall site, or indicate how many products to display per row for each resolution.
What are the best sizes for your e-commerce images?
The short answer is ; the types that work for your Store. Whatever you choose, however, standardize and be consistent. If you’re going to use thumbnail, product and zoom categories, pick three sizes (one for each category) and stick with them.Unless your images are meant to be printed, and are required at a certain size, you can safely ignore the dpi setting, as that’s a printer setting only. Web browsers don’t use it. They always render images at a 1:1 pixel ratio. An image with a 72 dpi setting will look the same on the web as one with a 600 dpi setting, and it has no effect on the file size for our purposes.
Images don’t have to be square, you can use different width and height dimensions, for example 250×350 or whatever your image proportions are. For most web purposes image sizes on the order of a few hundred kb with resolutions set to 96 dpi work best. They’re legible, and they’re quick to load.