A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in ecommerce, it's worth even more.
Nearly 80% of shoppers say product images and videos influence their decision to complete a purchase, and 42% will abandon their cart if a product detail page (PDP) has no or low-quality images or videos, according to Salsify’s “2025 Consumer Research” report.
Ecommerce experts from Neem, Bimbo, and Proximo Spirits share why visuals matter more than ever in ecommerce and how to use them in your brand storytelling effectively.
Why High-Quality Images Are a Digital Shelf Must-Have
Oliver Bradley, digital commerce strategy and operations director at Neem, an agile tech company that focuses on visual accessibility testing, has spent years studying what makes images compelling. He shared his experience on the Digital Shelf Institute’s “Unpacking the Digital Shelf” podcast.
Before Neem, Bradley worked for more than 25 years at Unilever, which was the first company to create a mobile-ready hero image, setting the standard in consumer packaged goods for visual content.
“Unseen is unsold. The quality of your digital content visuals — both static and video — has become even more critical and competitive,” Bradley says. “Because of the way our brains are wired, we are able to absorb information from images really quickly. Our brains instantly recognize brands by color and shape. We love shortcuts. We avoid the cognitive load of reading text when shopping. We prefer to scan visuals.”
Bradley’s perspective isn’t just based on decades of experience; it’s informed by rigorous research. At Unilever, he collaborated with a design agency and the University of Cambridge to create a mobile-ready hero image that would visually communicate the four most important attributes of a product: brand, format, variant, and size.
After extensive A/B testing with major retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Sainsbury's, the team discovered that new mobile-optimized images boosted sales. Magnum Ice Cream, a Unilever brand, even experienced a 24% sales lift with mobile-ready hero images.
Unilever subsequently made the intellectual property and guidelines for these images open to the industry through global product classification, a nonprofit that helps companies use the same product standards for things like barcodes.
What Actually Makes a Good Product Visual?
When it comes to product imagery, Bradley says clarity, consistency, and context determine quality.
- Clarity: Images need to be both easily readable and accessible. Handwritten fonts and all caps undermine clarity.
- Consistency: Every company needs distinctive brand assets, such as recognizable logos, colors, and shapes, for consumers to immediately identify the brand in images.
- Context: Your brand has to consider what information your customers need to see on the PDP, depending on the channel. The hero image design should differ based on desktop or mobile content, for example. It’s also important to show your product in use, so consumers can imagine how they’ll benefit from it.
In Visuals, Authenticity Still Matters
While clarity, context, and consistency matter, so does authenticity. A big part of that is making customers feel seen with realistic, inclusive imagery — a top consideration at Bimbo.
“Our customer base is diverse, so choosing the right product imagery is a huge part of making them feel represented by and connected to our products. That means picking lifestyle images that resonate with them, not just the typical stock photo.” — Beto Martinez, PIM & Digital Shelf Management, CPG Digital Transformation, Bimbo
Inclusivity is also important to alcoholic beverage company Proximo Spirits: “By curating digital-shelf imagery that reflects the full spectrum of online shopping occasions — from moments of luxury or gifting to everyday, responsible enjoyment — we ensure our portfolio is showcased with intention, inclusivity, and excellence," says David Lewis, senior digital shopper and ecommerce marketing lead, Proximo Spirits. "This creates a digital presence that invites every shopper to see themselves in our brands."
Gen Z and millennial shoppers, in particular, value authenticity. Many of them are flocking to micro-influencers, or creators with less than 100,000 followers who are considered experts in their niche, because they trust their product recommendations and opinions.
In Salsify’s “2025 Consumer Research” report, many Gen Zers and millennials say uncertainty is a key obstacle; the inability to feel, see, and smell an online product is preventing them from making a purchasing decision.
However, your brand can help shoppers overcome this hesitancy and give them the confidence to buy with compelling, authentic product visuals that mirror their needs, wants, and unique identity.
Bridging the Gap Between Artificial and Human Intelligence in Visual Content
Generative AI is helping design and ecommerce teams create product visuals faster, accelerating everything from resizing images and creating different variations to scaling accessibility testing for contrast, text size, and other characteristics.
“We're in this crazy time in the industry where we both have to get AI-ready and mobile-ready,” Bradley says, adding that while AI is nearly bulletproof for image testing, it still has a long way to go when it comes to image creation.
“AI is amazing for creating backgrounds and textures — very simple stuff,” he says. “In terms of being able to do proper hero images, it can't do that yet. In terms of testing hero images, it's brilliant.”
Optimize Product Images With Salsify’s Intelligence Suite
Salsify’s Intelligence Suite, a set of AI tools built into the Salsify Product Experience Management platform, can help you optimize your product images to make them more accessible and easily discoverable.
The Intelligence Suite can:
- Generate alt text for images, offering textual descriptions for those with sight disabilities.
- Suggest metadata tags that provide descriptive info about the images, making it easier for both search engines and users to find them online.
AI is helping teams work smarter, but to Bradley’s point, brands will always need humans in the loop to ensure they create compelling product content — visual or otherwise.
Best Practices for Better Product Images
If your brand wants to up-level its product images, consider implementing these best practices.
Keep It Simple
Less is more when it comes to product visuals.
“Everybody's trying to shout louder and louder. Sometimes, actually standing out is about doing less." — Oliver Bradley, Digital Commerce Strategy and Operations Director at Neem
“Steve Jobs was so amazing at that, in terms of designing for simplicity and being so single-minded. That's why many Apple products are so amazing to use. They really thought and have been very careful about not adding too much stuff and too much clutter,” Bradley says.
Clarify Your Message
Bradley also advises brands not to stuff too many messages into a single image. When he was still at Unilever, he read through nearly 50 different academic studies about cognitive load, which indicated that four things are the maximum someone’s working memory can hold at one time.
“If people can only hold four things in their heads, then don't give them more than four things per image,” he says.
Make Your Product or Brand the Hero
This may seem like obvious advice, but too many brands ignore it.
“A naked product attracts positive attention. If you think about chocolate, the reason Magnum got crazy good uplift —24% uplift — was because we took the Magnum bar out of the pack,” Bradley says. “We did the same with Ben and Jerry's before anyone else had said, ‘You can take the lids off Ben and Jerry's packs and show what's inside.’”
The Importance of High-Quality Product Visuals
Your product must always be the star. Engaging, conversion-driving images make this possible.
“Since Alexa launched, we've seen TikTok take over the world as probably the most addictive algorithm, and we've seen video take over the internet,” Bradley says. “So if anything, the importance of visuals has only got stronger.”
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