If you have an eCommerce website, naturally you want it to run as smoothly as possible, be esthetically pleasing, and produce sales for your business. Optimizing your shopping cart is imperative to ensuring your customers have a pleasant shopping experience.

There are advantages and disadvantages to adding photos, or images, to your shopping cart. By adding photos to your shopping cart you increase the likelihood that your customers will buy your product.  However, if you do not optimize the photos in your shopping cart then you may lose business because your customers will lose patience and leave your site if they are forced to wait for long periods of time for photos to load.

You want your photos to load with speed and efficiency, in order for this to happen you need to do optimize the photos.  By cropping, resizing, changing resolutions, and using proper file formats you can optimize your photos and offer your customers a pleasant shopping experience.   For those of you who are not familiar with these terms, here are some examples:

• Cropping – By selecting only a portion of the photo and deleting the rest you can quickly eliminate areas of a photo that are not needed.
• Resizing – Adjusting the height and width of the image.
• Change Resolution – The higher the resolution, the larger the photo file, the longer it takes to load.  Lowering resolution also lowers quality of photo so be careful.
• Image Format – Saving files in a JPEG or PNG load faster than TIFF files, and GIF files are even faster (but are limited to 256 colors).

There are a number of programs and tools available to help you manipulate, optimize, and store your photos.  Many of these programs also have an option to “Save for Web & Devices..” option which will allow you to experiment with web friendly options.  Depending on your level of experience, budget, and Web needs you should be able to find a program that works best for you.  Image editors are available for free download, but more advanced users and websites will probably need a better program which is still usually very affordable.

If you are not comfortable in manipulating your own photos for your website, blog, or email we would suggest you hire a webmaster who is familiar with shopping cart optimization so you do not lose sales due to poorly loaded images.