Having an image accompany an online product listing can help boost sales; if a customer is looking for a specific part, a photo can help them ensure they are getting exactly what they are looking for. The next phase in digital product photography, 360-degree imaging, can provide even more product detail for customers.
This type of photography involves taking photos from all angles of a product. Those photos are then integrated together so that customers viewing an online catalog entry can rotate the item, just like they might turn it over in their hands if they were looking at it in a store. It's much more complex and expensive than traditional product photography, but for parts where having a good view of an item from all sides can be important for fitment verification, it could help boost sales. A few companies in the aftermarket are already testing out the concept.
The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) has established a Digital Asset Best Practices document for traditional still images, and has been developing guidelines for other digital assets like video, audio and PDF files. The 360-degree images are considered a separate category of digital assets, since they are more complex than regular images.
"There are two things driving this," says Pat Weilmeier, vice president of Visual SKUs and chair of the AAIA's Digital Asset Best Practices workgroup when the guidelines were updated last year. "First, some companies see a competitive advantage in having that type of image versus just having stills. Second, aftermarket companies want to sell the right part to reduce returns. If the customer can engage with the image and control how they look at it, it helps them buy the right part."
While only a handful of aftermarket companies are utilizing the technology, it is fairly common in the consumer electronics and other markets. It is also used to sell bicycles, which is how Michael Stoll, director of marketing data management at Robert Bosch, first encountered the technology. "I was looking for a new mountain bike, and a website I visited used 360-degree images," Stoll says. "We began utilizing it two and a half years ago."
So far, Bosch has produced this type of imaging for approximately 10,000 products. "We think this will give us a competitive advantage, because not many companies in our markets have done this before," Stoll says.
Weilmeier thinks that performance parts and accessories could benefit from the most from this type of photography, since customers are keenly interested in the look of those products as well as the function. "Other parts that could benefit are ones that are very technical or hard to determine if they are correct," Weilmeier says. "You want to see a lot of different views to make sure it's the right product. Items that are heavily returned would be another target area."
A complex process
360-degree images currently aren't part of the product data standards, which Weilmeier says will hamper adoption since there are no firm guidelines on the format of the images or how they should look. "They are also four to 10-times as expensive as stills, because the equipment is very complex, you have to take a lot of images, and then they have to be edited together."
"We had to ask for a budget for this, and we got support from everyone internally in the company," Stoll says.
Bosch partnered with Visual SKUs on the 360-degree product photography, and using one of the several vendors that provide such services is usually the best option for most suppliers since the process is complex. Weilmeier says that some companies, though, may opt to manage the process in-house.
"To do that you have to buy the equipment and you need expertise to operate it," Weilmeier says. "It's an investment, and you have to weigh the costs and the benefits of that versus outsourcing."
This type of photography usually requires 24 to 72 separate still images or more to be taken (the more photos you have, the smoother the animation when you rotate the image). They also require an embedded viewer for the images to work correctly. "You don't just have an image, you have a series of images in a folder, and you have a product viewer that grabs those images and allows the consumer to move them around," Weilmeier says. "It's more complicated. And if you're NAPA, for example, what viewer do you want to use? How do you want the images formatted and named? Right now, each retailer could have separate requirements."
Aftermarket parts present special challenges, since not all parts can be placed on a table and photographed. Some have to be suspended in the air and carefully rotated and lit for the images to work.
"At Bosch there were a lot of complex product categories," Weilmeier says. "In those cases, you have to suspend or prop the part up using an apparatus, and it makes it more complex to shoot. If you're selling throttle bodies, you have to see the opening on the throttle body, so you can't just sit it on a table."
"If you have a fuel pump, you have to hang it in the air," Stoll says. "If you have an oxygen sensor, you have to arrange the cables in a certain way, and that takes time."
It will likely be another few years before the technology is widespread in the aftermarket, primarily because the distributors and retailers either don't use the images, or have conflicting requirements. "None of our customers are really asking for this yet," Stoll says. "They aren't ready to handle the images."
However, the company does leverage the images internally. "Anybody who wants to know how a product looks just goes into the product information system and they can see all of those images," Stoll says. "A product manager may be responsible for thousands of products, and they don't know what everything looks like when products are released. Now they can get a complete view."
Bosch has also made the images available via a mobile app, which links to the image database on the company's website.
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