Do your photos need more zing? Give them a little “Bling”

It’s no secret that the quality of a store’s product images can have a significant impact on its sales. If you’ve invested time and effort to refine your product images, then you’ve likely found image editing can be a labor-intensive process, especially when removing and replacing backgrounds or improving the overall quality. So when I recently came across Vangie Beal’s ECommerce-Guide review of Bling! It, a new program Beal claimed could be used to easily accomplish these tasks in just a few minutes, I had to try it for myself.

As it turns out, Beal was right. While nothing compares to having professional-looking product photos to work with, Bling! It can help you correct less than stellar images with a few clicks of your mouse, and doesn’t require you to be a graphic design whiz. Most notable—and even fun—is the edge finding tool, which dissects your image into pieces (like a jigsaw puzzle), and allows you to adjust the tool’s level of detail as you work. Clicking inside of these pieces using the local brush applies a mask to these areas, and removes them from the final image.

When giving it a test run, I decided to use a slightly blurry photo that needed both a sharper focus and for the background to be removed. By using the edge finding tool and local brush to remove the background, setting a solid background color, applying the sharpen image option and adding a standing shadow, in about five minutes my photo went from this:

to this:

All-in-all, Bling! It requires a minimal investment of time to achieve very valuable results.

Bling! It can be downloaded as a 15-day free trial from Vertus’ website, and it sells for $49.95 (available for Windows only). Until February 21, 2008, Vertus is kindly extending a discount of $5 to Yahoo! Store blog readers. Use the coupon code BIYSTORE on the order page to take advantage of this offer.

Remember, having good product photos to work with is always the best option. Using a lightbox to achieve good lighting with virtually no background, or paying attention to lighting, focus, placement and angle, and positioning your product against a high-contrast, solid color background (if you plan to remove the background later) will only benefit you and save more time when editing your image. Often, though, product photos come from manufacturers and may not always be of the best quality. Bling! It is a nice option for merchants who would rather not re-shoot product photos, making it easy to display attractive images that can help generate sales.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business

1 Choice 4 Your Store Hosts Webinar on Product Sourcing for New Merchants

1 Choice 4 Your Store in conjunction with Worldwide Brands will be hosting a webinar on December 13, 2pm (EST) focused on helping new merchants source products and build stores with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.

Webinar topics include:

• What “Product Sourcing” means for a home-based E-Biz owner?
• Why are multiple sourcing techniques so important to an Online Seller?
• How can Yahoo! help you to sell your products online?

Sign up for the webinar

Giving the Gift of Increased Order Size to Yourself

I was recently reading another great FutureNow post by Bryan Eisenberg on their 2007 Retail Customer Experience Study. The study surveyed leading online retail sites on factors of customer experience such as quality of product copy, quality of product images, presence of return policy, and so on. Towards the bottom of the post you can see which sites are considered leaders in customer experience.

I noticed one of my favorite stores, SurlaTable.com, listed as the leader in the Food category. Now I love Sur la Table, so I’ll admit I was somewhat biased in looking at their site for some best practices. One immediate striking thing about the site is how completely it is geared up for the holidays.

The majority of the home page serves to guide visitors into 4 main sections and calling out “gifts with free shipping” is a smart way to get click thrus from shoppers who may be looking for a deal. The side navigation is also made over for the holidays with main sections for holiday foods and holiday gifts.

What caught my eye though on the home page were the gift sets. Looking at this page, the clever marketers at Sur la Table have really packaged existing products in such a way to make them into a gift set or ensemble. So why is this so great you ask? Now shoppers don’t have to hunt for the perfect gift in a sea of products—they only have to know what the person may like, what type of person they are, what their personality is—an easier prospect likely. Sur la Table has grouped many of these sets around celebrity chefs. Needless to say, gift sets are also a very smart way to increase average order value.

Gifts sets from Sur la Table.

While browsing the gift sets, I remembered a Yahoo! merchant I had visited some time back, Lawrence Ames, who was doing much the same thing on his Yahoo! store. In the hopes of passing along some of his experience to other merchants, I asked him some questions around how this works on his site HonestFoods.com.

Gifts sets from Honest Foods.

How long have you been selling online and with Yahoo!? How would you describe the products that you sell?

We’ve been with Yahoo! Store since the beginning. We started with Viamall as a beta test site when they started (1996), and stayed with Yahoo! after Yahoo! acquired Viamall, in 1999.

At HonestFoods, we sell all natural gourmet foods and gourmet gifts. We primarily sell the foods we love or foods we make. As foodies, we source out small artisinal manufacturers and try to get to market things that otherwise you wouldn’t find. Good examples of some very strange items include our Creole Pepper Sauce, which won First Place as Best Louisiana Style Pepper Sauce, but has very limited distribution.

How long have you been doing gift sets?

We’ve been doing Gift Sets since we opened, before the online world began, in 1982.

How do you come up with ideas for what to sell together?

Items are grouped by themes, generally. For example, our Beer Lover Gift Set has ten items made with beer. We have a Grill Master Gift Set for the Grill Master Guy! Lots of fun combinations!

I see you ship in “holiday” gift boxes. Do you think this helps sales vs. just using a regular box?

I think it is nice to offer the Holiday gift box during the holidays, but they really only sell at Christmas. The Holiday boxes are from $1.55 - $3.75 delivered.

I think that the cost is easily recovered, because you have to compare it to “no gift box” which isn’t fun to open, or “gift wrapping” which takes time and materials, and when not done well, can look less than professional. I firmly believe that when we sell products online, we are not so much in the product sales business than in the customer service business. Sure, we can sell ABC widget, but the customer is looking for something more. That something may be convenience, fast service, etc, but is isn’t just about acquiring an item. We need to provide that “something extra”. A lot of times, I think they just want to feel as if someone is paying attention to them, which is why those confirmation emails, your product has shipped emails, etc. are SO important.

Where do you get the boxes?

Two sources: We custom make our box for some of the gifts. We use our Packaging Distributor for other ones. They stock them. Most good packaging distributors have in-house stock of holiday gift boxes.

Do you include anything inside the gift box to encourage the recipient to become a customer?

But of course! Our Mardi Gras In A Box comes complete with Mardi Gras beads and a complete menu for a Mardi Gras feast, including appetizer, main courses, and dessert!

Do you find these gift sets sell throughout the year and not just the holidays?

Yes, they are good sellers all year round, but the Holidays are really the best!

Thanks Lawrence for sharing. So while gift sets may not work in for all merchants, a quick check of some sites I know showed some merchants taking advantage of this tactic:

• baby blankets, apparel, and other gift sets at Flying Peas
• sports team and political cufflink gift sets at Cuffflinks.com

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo! Small Business Follow Up

We’ve heard you and we’ve been hearing from our merchant partners since Monday, and I want to let you know what happened earlier this week and what we’re doing about it.

On Monday, and for a very short time yesterday, unusual service interruptions affected transactions in Yahoo! Merchant Solutions/Yahoo! Stores.

After an investigation, we learned that the specific servers affected were the Shopping Cart database servers that handle cart contents for each shopper. New servers were added to the Shopping Cart database during our pre-holiday planning to manage the projected increase in transaction volume. When the holiday traffic surged, the hardware and software settings caused these servers to experience delays when customers added items to the Shopping Cart to complete checkout. When delays exceeded time limits, customers saw error messages stating that the servers had timed out (were not responding).

On Thursday, the service interruption occurred between 10:13 a.m. and 10:25 a.m. PT. During this time, merchants’ sites could not be accessed by shoppers.

After investigating the issue on Thursday, we found that this interruption occurred due to a network configuration issue resulting from new server capacity that was added for the holiday shopping season.

Immediately upon identification of both of these issues, our team worked hard to improve the situation as quickly as possible, and systems are now performing as expected.

These service interruptions were unrelated to our October feature release.

We fixed the problems as quickly as possible, and we are continuing to make improvements to our systems including the addition of new hardware and system maintenance conducted on November 28. We will continue to post information about ongoing activities at our system status page http://updates.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/.

We have apologized to our merchant partners for the impact that this service interruption had on their business and their customers at this busy time of year. As a token of our commitment to them, we have communicated with them our intent to waive all sales transaction fees for the month of November.

The success of our merchants’ business is extremely important to us, and we are committed to work as hard as we can, over and above the efforts already underway, to avoid such issues in the future.

Rich Riley
SVP Online Channel Division, Yahoo!