360° Product Photos: Enriching the Sales Experience

Why you should take advantage of 360° product photos

If you really want to show a product from all its sides, there are few better ways to do it than with 360° product photos. 360 product photography (also known as “spin photography”) allows you to create an interactive animation of an object that revolves around itself, or that consumers can spin manually on web pages and apps. 

Creating 360° product photos requires high-resolution static images from different product positions. This series of images (known as a “spinset”) is then stitched together by special software to make the object appear to rotate on either a vertical or horizontal axis.

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Product experiences like these are a great way to grab attention, whether for fashion photography, sunglasses, automobiles or any lifestyle items really. They also serve to provide consumers with information that can help them make important decisions. This is extremely crucial in eCommerce photography, and perhaps more so now that shopping trends are shifting away from brick-and-mortar stores to webshops and online marketplaces.

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Images are your most valuable asset in e-commerce

When you only have 8 seconds (if that) to keep the average online shopper’s attention, your product photography will make or break your bottom line. You need to grab attention, make an impression, and give shoppers a reason to buy products.

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A well-placed spinning GIF or a 360-degree product viewer is a great way to do this. It’s even better if the consumer has complete control over the spin experience, from the rotation to the zoom. On-page controls for color and design customization, product configuration, or exploding views and animations can make the product experience even more immersive.

In all of these ways, 360° product images help consumers get a better “feel” for products online. Consumers can inspect the product almost as if it were in their own hands. The higher the quality and richer the detail, the closer you get to replicating the in-store shopping experience, which, after all, should be the main goal of your product photos. 

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Improve the customer experience

The most important use case of spin photography is improving the customer experience. 360° product photos answer questions by conveying helpful information about products. Moreover, they give consumers a feeling of complete control over the decision making process, without any pressure like you might experience in store.

This means, ultimately, your 360° product photos have to do the selling for you. There’s no sales team on-hand to assist or answer questions. It’s really just the consumer and your product photography, maybe a brief product description, and the website where it appears. 

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To really improve the customer experience, you thus have to ensure that all of your product images are high-resolution, rich in detail, and capable of truly helping the consumer. After all, the more information you provide, the more comfortable they will be shopping at your online store.

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Leverage 360° product images online, in videos, and in print

Beyond improving the customer experience, 360° product photos are highly scalable. The images you capture in spin photography provide a repository of visual assets you can recycle, reuse, and repurpose for marketing your product in a multitude of ways.

Use them nearly anywhere.

• Webshops: Give shoppers a 360-degree view of each product, either on the web or in the mobile app.
• Product videos: Transform your spinsets into quick product videos, saving you time and costs in recording.
• In-store displays: Place 360° product photos and product spins on screens in physical locations, such as in your stores or shopping malls.
• Advertising campaigns: Create GIFs for social media and online marketplaces, use short and long videos, snippets, banner advertisements, and more.
• B2C and B2B sales presentations: 360° product images are also a valuable asset when prototyping products or showing off final designs for partners or end customers.
• Catalogues and in print: The high-quality images that go into creating product spins are also useful in enriching print product advertisements, such as catalogues and brochures.

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Why 360° product photos are more effective

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• Product spins replicate the in-store shopping experience.
• 360° photos allow shoppers to inspect products almost as if they are physically in-hand.
• They provide valuable and more information to consumers.
• Spin photography boosts purchasing confidence and leads to less returns overall.
• Interactive elements increase on-page time and boost SEO.
• 360° photos support the buying experience while likewise reinforcing your brand image.

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How to shoot 360° product photos

To capture the perfect 360-degree product images, you use all of the tools you would expect with traditional product photography.

• Utilize the right camera for the job.
• Invest in professional product photography equipment.
• Find the right lighting setup for 360° photography.
• Prepare the available space to set up your workstation.

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When shooting, you then need to take at least 24 images (sometimes 36 or more) around the product to snap enough photos to create a spinset. The more photos, the higher the quality. 

After the photos are stitched together, they then need to be post-processed and approved before publishing to the web or for use in other formats. Obviously, you can hire professionals to manage this entire process for you, but there are also solutions like PhotoRobot that make all of this quick and easy even for amateur photographers to accomplish. 

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PhotoRobot: Equipment and Software for Professional 360 Product Photography

At PhotoRobot, our mission is to aid clients in streamlining product photography workflows, enriching product imagery, and reducing time-to-web for product content and media. Our line of robots and software support full automation and control for product photography from multi-angle still images to 360° photos, and scanning products to build 3D models.

If you like to discover more leveraging PhotoRobot to improve your 360° photos and enhance your sales experience, contact us today and schedule a free 1:1 consultation.

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