The Visual Revolution Has Arrived – Is Your Online Business Ready?

If you want your company website to be more appealing to online shoppers it is time to put your best "visual" foot forward.

You might have a great company website, selling products and services, but if you don’t have a compelling visual experience online, you soon may struggle to keep up with competitors. Two ways to embrace the visual revolution is to understand the innovation and then seek to build emotional connections.

Visual Innovation

According to Kissmetrics color psychology research, “For retailers, shopping is the art of persuasion. Though there are many factors that influence how and what consumers buy… [and] 93% of consumers place visual appearance above all other factors when shopping online.”

So, how does this impact your online business? Well, it has the same effect as product placement and store layout does in bricks-and-mortar stores. Therefore, it is a case of fight or flight for retailers, with global competition and technological changes confirming a greater need for visual innovation when it comes to online business.
Emotional Connection

Online retailers sometimes forget that people have always communicated in a visual manner, dating as far back as the days of prehistoric cave painting. Nowadays, we connect emotionally to images more than video, audio or text. “How many times have you heard, ‘I didn’t believe it until I saw it.’ Studies show that the old saying ‘seeing is believing’ is mostly true… The ability of visual stimuli to communicate and influence is undeniable and inescapable.” (Source: Do It Yourself: Billion Dollar Graphics)

People make decisions and take action quicker when prompted by images, rather than reading a lot of text. According to Hubspot, “90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.” So, why is there a need for a visual revolution? Simple. Ecommerce sites are yet to perfect the art of visual display as well as physical stores have … and now today’s generation demands it.

Driving Forces Behind the Visual Revolution

Millenials, the demographic ranging from ages 18-34, are the driving force behind the visual revolution that is taking place in e-commerce. This key demographic is part of a new ‘visual generation’ that is driven by visual imagery even more so than their predecessors.

Research suggests, “Fifty-two percent of millennials rank far above or above average when it comes to being early adopters of technology. That means more than half of adults ages 18 to 34 want to be the first to have the latest electronic equipment, are willing to pay almost anything for an electronic product and actively want to be a source of information on electronic equipment to others.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words then you don’t want your online presence to be speechless. This could not be truer in today’s society where images have become even more popular — reinforced by technology, mobility and social media.

For example, “86% of retailers report that customers use mobile phones while shopping in stores, according to the results of [a] recent Retailer eCommerce Study.” Meanwhile, many shoppers use their mobile devices to take photographs of products in-store that they wish to purchase later on. But the question remains: Why wouldn’t online retailers quickly encourage and even influence this behavior?

The visual generation readily adopts new shopping technologies, but they are hungry for more to further enable online and mobile shopping. Millennial consumers expect a richer visual experience while shopping online. These shoppers are not only more visual in their web usage, but it is a part of their inherent nature to share their shopping ideas with friends.

Visual Technologies for Online Retailers

So, if you want to make your company website more appealing to online shoppers it is time to put your best “visual” foot forward. Here are three technologies that allow online retailers to engage and delight the visual generation.

Interactive display’s help shoppers browse an entire product suite to find items that catch their eye, while increasing time on site, conversion and average spend for online stores. Online shoppers can spin, zoom and click through items delivering a more immersive interactive experience.
Zoom technologies like Magic Toolbox allow online retailers to showcase products up-close in stunning detail, providing a rich visual experience for site visitors that is second only to physically viewing the product.
With visual shopping engine’s, like PicCommerce, customers can visually search online stores by color and shape, meaning that shoppers can enjoy a shopping experience closer to the sophisticated outfit matching and color coordination experiences that happen when shopping in the real world.

Shaylee Rogers is the Marketing Coordinator at thereitis Show. See. Sold. an interactive display for Shopify.

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