Everything’s E-commerce now. Ecomm. Ecommerce. E Commerce. However you spell it, it’s all ecomm.
A true child of the internet, demand for e-commerce photography has grown exponentially over the last 20 years. Everybody sells online so everything is technically e-commerce. Front. Back. Side. Detail. Change. Makeup selfie. Next. Within that simple framework a whole genre was born. But whilst the internet buckles under general critique of fashion photography, e-commerce imagery is like the dirty family secret that’s rarely discussed in public.
A brief history of E-commerce
Once upon a time, Next, Grattan, Littlewoods & M&S had art directors and marketing departments with years of experience in turning round beautiful lifestyle photoshoots driven by predictable product cycles with glossy printed catalogues and in-store POS. A lot of photographers got very rich shooting nothing other than ‘pre-commerce e-commerce’ on a beach somewhere. Herb Ritts and Yasmin Le Bon were both involved in the first Next catalogue.
The bar was set high. Initially the first e-commerce players tried to keep some quality - after all, the high-street brands were still their direct competitors. ASOS (initially As Seen On Screen) rewarded skilled, freelance photographers with a great day-rate to create their images. But eventually this was unsustainable as the number of new products exploded and the (largely Manchester based) fast-fashion revolution flooded the market. With hands-on owners involved in every aspect of low margin/high volume business models they just needed photography to be as cheap and as quick as possible. Disposable online-only images for the week-long life span of each micro trend.
If 1990’s product photography was organic free range, the late 00’s moved swiftly to a battery farm model.
The rise of in-house teams based in the corner of a disused stock room allowed one lead photographer to create a static, standard lighting set-up for an army of junior photographers. A second army of in-house retouchers were employed to paper over the cracks. You didn’t need great equipment when the largest size the image would ever be seen at was 1000px on a cracked phone screen. Very quickly nobody was using freelancers for their e-commerce and, with the move to in-house photographers, e-comm day-rates plunged almost as quickly as the quality.
If you were good enough to create consistent e-commerce images with little need for retouch then you were good enough to stay away from in-house roles. And so e-commerce photography was for over a decade the lowest form of the art. It simply didn’t need to be anything else and nobody commissioning it or consuming it could tell one end of Herb from the other.
A Maturing Market
But slowly, e-commerce photography together with the army of photographers that cut their teeth in it, has grown into itself. The ugliest of the internet’s children is finally emerging as a complex, cool & interesting teenager. ‘E-commerce’ is no longer always synonymous with ‘awful’.
I’m talking here about the actual *product* photography - the images you see on the ‘New In’ pages rather than the banners, micro campaigns and social content. Virtually every business that sells something now has an online store and that online store needs to be constantly fed with product imagery. Even Primark who famously don’t have an e-commerce platform inexplicably still goes to the trouble of creating images of all their products for their website. As a photographer in 2021, to ignore e-commerce is to remove a huge and ever-growing revenue stream. Whilst most of the large players still run in-house teams and rarely hire in freelance talent there are thousands of brands with smaller inventories or longer, more sustainable product cycles and an eye on quality that still all need regular e-commerce shoots.
But what is driving this increase in quality? As the fast fashion e-commerce players grow and consolidate the key players are flexing their profits to differentiate and create identity. Quality and creativity are ramping up across every channel. When every brand’s products looked the same and were shot the same way on the same faces something had to change. Large players are hoovering up bankrupt high street names that already come with an identity. Karen Millen, Topshop, Debenhams - their customers expect their brands to look mature (in terms of identity rather than age-group). No budget has given way to *some* budget.
After countless hours, days and years of repeating the same actions the in-house teams have grown into well oiled machines of experienced experts. There’s only so many times they could shoot the same thing over and over before wanting to change, refine and improve on it. Businesses (and their owners) who started out knowing nothing about imagery are now much more informed. They understand they can’t sell across all their channels using the same photographic formula. It’s a swift realisation that in the online world imagery is the only differentiator and will impact sales to differing degrees. If the product is at a low price point quality imagery on good models will elevate it. And for premium products, sustainable brands and micro labels the product imagery has to be of a higher quality or have a different vibe to that of the fast-fashion pack.
E-commerce as Editorial
Let’s lazily (but justifiably) take Zara as the Gold Standard. Have you looked at their e-commerce recently? It shares more DNA with high end editorials than their fast fashion peers (whilst still managing to be named the most sustainable company in the retail industry three years in a row by the DJSI). It’s still largely shot in-house across their 15+ studios in Spain. They shoot around 20 looks per day per model so a maximum capacity of around 300. Quality over quantity. They spend money on the sets. They spend money on the models (rarely using influencers). They get in Steven Klein every now and again. They understand the idea that fashion is about a vibe more than it is about clinically capturing the front, back, side and detail.
As Europe’s biggest clothing retailer you could argue that Zara don’t need to spend so much on the quality of their e-commerce photography, that it would sell anyway. Or I’d like to think that they’re Europe’s biggest clothing retailer because their e-commerce operation is so good. The ROI appears to pay off. You could also argue that I’m looking at it from the perspective of a creative rather than a consumer - but I can’t believe all that effort and cost is being expended without extensive market research to demonstrate that actually yes, the average consumer is influenced by the quality of the images.
Elevated E-commerce
So to go back to where I started - everything is e-commerce now. Just as online retail is swallowing the high-street, e-commerce photography is swallowing every other genre of photography. Whilst writing this post I had an enquiry to use an image shot on an e-commerce shoot for a billboard campaign. This highlights the not-entirely-transparent way e-commerce has evolved into a convenient synonym for any photography for an online retailer. It is often still expected to be delivered for the rates that brands became accustomed to paying for the simple white background, single lighting setup studio shots that e-commerce initially meant. But just because they’re photographs of products for a brand that describes itself as an online retailer does not automatically make it e-commerce photography. If e-commerce images are repurposed into a campaign can it still be just e-commerce? If a shoot is half a day of product followed by half a day of banners and social content is it still just e-commerce?
If you hire an e-comm photographer to shoot your e-commerce then that’s exactly what you’ll get. White wall, maxed out hard flash, hours of retouch requirements and images that are indistinguishable from any other brand. Just about anybody with basic knowledge of a camera can manage that. The rates for that style of e-commerce justifiably reflect the lack of skill required and the low barriers to entry. It’s a race to the bottom within a saturated market. But if you hire an experienced campaign photographer to shoot your e-commerce then what you should be getting is really good e-commerce for a very small premium. And hopefully that’s what you want for your brand. Really good e-commerce. Elevated e-commerce.
