A Quick Guide to Generative Imagery for Ecommerce

An online merchant doing product and photography research for her brand.
Sam Wookey
October 25, 2023

Learn how AI-driven visuals are revolutionizing product photography, personalization, and user engagement.

The ecommerce world is always changing. How can you stay ahead and provide even more captivating experiences for your customers? Enter the world of Generative Imagery, a transformative technology that is reshaping the way customers will experience products and shop online. In this post, we'll make it easy to understand how Generative Imagery is revolutionizing product presentation, personalization, and user engagement. Whether you're a seasoned ecommerce marketer or just starting your own store, understanding the power of generative imagery is essential to harnessing its potential and delivering a shopping experience that dazzles and converts.

What is Generative Imagery?

Generated images based on a text prompt

Generative imagery is a term that refers to using AI (artificial intelligence) to create new images entirely on the computer. The images can resemble real-world objects, scenes, or abstract art. 

There are some huge benefits to generative imagery for marketing your products. You can make beautiful pictures and designs on your own without paying and waiting for photography shoots. You can also get wildly creative! Generative AI doesn't just copy existing art or pictures; instead, it creates new and unique images based on what it has learned from lots of other pictures - you just provide a little guidance to inspire it. This "virtual artist" can create stunning and unique pictures of your products, making your online store more appealing to customers.

Imagine you sell clothing, and instead of taking photos of every item single item in every possible color and style, this virtual artist can show customers exactly how each variation will look, even before you've made the physical item. This same virtual artist can also create eye-catching visuals for your website and social media, showing your products in settings that might be far away (like a beach!), or very customized (like the kitchen of a rustic farmhouse).

Why is Generative Imagery important for ecommerce?

Generative imagery gives you boundless opportunities to showcase your product

Generative imagery is quickly revolutionizing the way products are presented online. By harnessing AI, ecommerce platforms can instantly create cost-effective visuals that cater to individual customer preferences, resulting in higher conversion rates. This technology empowers businesses to stay competitive, reduce operational costs, and provide customers with a more immersive and satisfying shopping journey, thus shaping the future of online retail.

The stats on how better visuals lift engagement and sales

Visuals play a critical role in online shopping, and numerous studies and statistics highlight their impact on consumer behavior and ecommerce success. Here are some key statistics on the influence of visuals in online shopping:

High-quality product images improve conversion rates

  • Products with high-quality images can experience a conversion rate increase of up to 63%. (Source: Jeremy Smith)
  • 67% of consumers consider high-quality images more important than product descriptions and customer reviews. (Source: MDG Advertising)
  • Conversion rates rise with the number of product images (Source: EBay)

Video content improves engagement

  • Product videos can increase the likelihood of a purchase by 144%. (Source: Stacks and Stacks)
  • 91% of consumers want more video content from brands and businesses they support. (Source: WyzOwl)

Brand consistency increases revenue

  • Consistent branding and visual content across all channels can increase revenue by up to 23%. (Source: Lucidpress)

It's clear that stores who invest in high-quality images and videos can create more compelling and effective online shopping experiences for their customers.

How exactly can Generative Imagery help me?

Ok, you're intrigued! Here are some of the specific ways generative imagery can help your ecommerce business today:

Save Time and Money

Generative imagery can automatically generate high-quality product images and visualizations, reducing the need for expensive photoshoots. This is especially useful for businesses with large inventories or frequent product updates. By automating various visual tasks, generative imagery can reduce the time and costs associated with manual content creation, image editing, and product photography.

Drive Sales

Good visuals can improve ecommerce sales, in particular by showing products in lifestyle shots that help shoppers visualize the product in their lives.

Enhanced User Engagement

Engaging visuals, such as diverse and realistic product scenes and settings, capture users' attention and encourage them to explore products more thoroughly. This increased engagement can lead to longer browsing sessions and a higher likelihood of conversion.

Increased Trust

Well-presented visuals instill trust in potential customers. Professional-looking product images convey a sense of credibility and reliability, making customers more comfortable with the idea of making a purchase.

Emotional Connection

Visuals can evoke emotions and create a connection between customers and products. Lifestyle images that feature real people using or benefiting from the products can tap into consumers' emotions, making them more likely to buy.

Reduced Return Rates

Accurate and detailed visuals reduce the chances of customers receiving products that don't meet their expectations. When customers can see products from multiple angles and in different contexts before they buy, they are less likely to return items.

Personalization

Visuals can be tailored to individual customer preferences. Using data-driven insights, ecommerce platforms can show customers visually similar products or generate visually similar scenes, increasing the chances of upselling and cross-selling.

Storytelling

Visuals can convey a brand's story and values effectively. Compelling visuals can help customers connect with the brand's narrative, mission, and identity, fostering loyalty and repeat business.

A/B Testing and Optimization

Ecommerce businesses can use generative imagery to quickly perform A/B testing to experiment with different visuals, such as product images, banners, and videos, to determine which ones drive higher conversion rates and revenue. Continuous optimization based on data insights can further improve visual strategies.

Brand Consistency

Generative imagery ensures brand consistency by automatically applying branding elements and styles to all visuals, maintaining a cohesive look and feel across your ecommerce platform. Companies can generate a consistent visual identity that aligns with their brand guidelines. Generative imagery ensures that logos, product images, and marketing materials adhere to the same color schemes, fonts, and design elements, promoting a unified and recognizable brand image. This technology streamlines the content creation process, minimizing the risk of human error and deviations from established brand standards.

Scaling Your Business

As your ecommerce business grows, generative imagery can scale with you, generating visuals for an expanding product catalog and user base. First and foremost, it offers cost-effective content creation at scale. By automating the generation of images and visuals, businesses can reduce the time and resources required for traditional photography or graphic design, enabling them to rapidly expand their product catalog and marketing materials. Additionally, generative imagery facilitates personalized and targeted marketing efforts, allowing businesses to reach a broader audience while tailoring content to individual customer preferences.

Seasonality and Cultural Zeitgeist

By eliminating time consuming photoshoots, generative imagery allows you to respond quickly to cultural moments and seasonal variations.  It expedites the creation of seasonal campaigns, ensuring that products are presented with fresh and timely visuals as seasons change and cultural moments evolve. This not only maximizes the impact of seasonal marketing efforts but also helps ecommerce businesses stay agile and responsive to the ever-changing market demands.

Easy Product Variations

Generative imagery can quickly generate variations of product images, such as different angles, lighting conditions, or backgrounds. This diversifies your visual content and can improve user engagement without costly and time-consuming photoshoots or graphic design work for each product variant.

Cohesive Content Generation Across Channels

Beyond product visuals, generative models can create visual elements for branding and advertising campaigns including ads, blog posts, and social media. Besides saving time and resources on content creation, this empowers businesses to streamline content creation across various marketing channels while retaining a cohesive brand style and tone. Generative models are rapidly advancing to produce multimedia content like video animations or interactive experiences, enabling businesses to engage their audience even more dynamically.

Conclusion

Generative Imagery has emerged as a powerful tool in the world of ecommerce, offering to redefine how businesses connect with their customers. It's clear that generative imagery has the potential to elevate the online shopping experience to new heights. From stunning lifestyle shots to personalized product images, generative models are reshaping the digital storefront, allowing businesses to craft captivating narratives and provide shoppers with tailored experiences. The journey is just beginning, and for ecommerce companies, embracing generative imagery is not just an option - it's crucial to staying competitive and thriving in the dynamic world of online retail.