Know How to Showcase Your Product Online

Having a web presence is important, but how much product should you share with visitors to your site? Images of your product online -- whether you have e-commerce capability or not -- will be crucial to creating interest in your store and the jewelry you sell there.

Over at Export Business Source’s “Retail Online” blog, Suze Bragg says the first thing you should ask yourself is what are you trying to accomplish when you display products online? For instance, do you want to test the interest in a particular item? Are you trying to drive customers to your store? Do you want to sell to them online? Perhaps both?

She suggests newcomers start small in broadcasting the goods:

• Select 10-25 items from each category.
• Use high quality, well-lit photos of each item, with simple background, white is best.
  
  • Extra Tip: If you do not have the photography skills to capture the light and beauty of your jewelry, get images from your supplier or hire a professional photographer (it's worth it!).
    
• When posting them to your site, make sure they have a resolution of 72 dpi, so they load quickly for customers.
• Monitor items to see what kind of response you’re getting. If you have an e-commerce site, you can measure this by orders received. You can also monitor traffic to the pages that carry the pictures and the most popular jewelry images viewed using a web analytics program.
  
  • Extra Tip: If you do not already have a web analytics program -- which monitors web traffic, click-through rates, etc, for your website --you can easily set up a free service like Google Analytics.
    
• Include an announcement on each page (in the same spot) that you feature new products on a regular  basis (determine an interval that you maintain, i.e. weekly, monthly) and encourage customers to check back often.