Why and how high volume eCommerce photo studios add business value !
For the past decades photographers and professional studios worldwide have relied on photo editing software to create powerful images, fast. Most professional studios rely on Capture One and its world class tethering, Industry standard color profiles, state of the art photo editing tools, speed and high quality RAW processing.
But the dynamics for the fast paced eCommerce and online business are changing and the demands for high volume photography studios to meet the business's KPIs and come out faster, cheaper and with higher quality has increased.
The whole end-to-end image production process is becoming a more important part of the enterprise and eCommerce business value chain and the product images are now a vital integrated part of the product and the brand promise to the consumer.
It is therefore imperative that both C-Level and the enterprise / eCommerce studios start thinking about the image production process as part of the product value chain and not an autonomous unit in the company with a separate production, a separate infrastructure and a separate budget.
Photographers are naturally a critical part of a professional studio. But today the reality is more than one studio, several photographers, studio managers, creative directors, retouchers, quality assurance managers, project leaders, etc. who need to collaborate, standardize and carry out the same workflows over and over again. These workflows also need to be integrated to other systems, eg. barcode scanners, PIM systems, digital asset management systems (DAM), ERP systems and eCommerce platforms etc.
To address these challenges the e-Commerce businesses and their studios needs to optimize their image production process in order to boost results across relevant KPIs. By this I mean the whole creative workflow process from sample intake, planning the production, capture, retouching, post image editing, Q&A, approval & selects, and asset delivery as part of the image production process and integrated to the Tech Stack.
Studio KPIs that add business value
If you think the image production as a vital part of the product value chain it obviously becomes clear that the studio needs to measure its performance in order to optimize and improve. This means that the Studio Manager should constantly optimize value by looking into the workflow and improve KPI's such as:
"Time to Market" - optimizing the hours spent on the image production process, from planning your image, to shoots, to publishing the final photo on your ecommerce platform.
"Cost per image" - Optimizing each step in your image production process can dramatically increase your efficiency and reduce your costs
"Turnover average Time (TaT)" - time spent (And money) from sample intake to asset delivery, can substantially and directly increase productivity and the number of products sold online (conversions)
"Reduced Risk" – Secure your image production to reduce errors and costs, thanks to enterprise exclusive features such as Image back-Up, License Management, MDM support etc.
To create this kind of value the studio managers needs to move away from manual processes, spreadsheets and moving files around manually and start to look into features and capabilities in Capture and Image editing software, end-to-end studio management software and post production & retouching software and services. You can e.g. employ features such as the barcode scanner tools, advanced guides, capture backup, capture keywords, capture metadata, capture naming, tool locks, dedicated studio workspaces and much much more.
A good end-to-end studio management software will cover most of these needs and also things like automating capture naming, metadata tagging, digital styleguides and move assets automatically through the workflow for selects and approvals and asset delivery.
Accelerate Value by collaborating, automating workflows and integrating
Once your studio has implemented e.g. an end-to-end studio management software and begun implementing its standard features in your workflows, there are further opportunities to heavily accelerate value creation by automating workflows and integrating into your IT infrastructure. Working in an end-to-end studio management software platform enhance data & integrations, collaboration and time spend in processing images and publishing the product e.g. in your eCommerce platform.
And just by automating there are some essential benefits in time savings. Just look at this simple automation example: When small things add up - and create value.
Client example: 50 stations shooting on average 30 samples/items a day, 200 days a year. All manual tasks can be automated but let’s keep it simple and focus on only two automations:
Just these two automations together would save 1 min x 30 samples x 50 stations x 200 workdays = 300.000 minutes/5.000 hours or 625 workdays.
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How would that look in your studio?
Hit the "Value roof" by securing true color reproduction
On top of your enterprise studio software infrastructure and your implemented workflow enhancements and integrations, you might also have very specialized needs and / or individual services from which you can benefit and create value.
Obviously retouching services to optimize eg. colors are a common use need for many studios. Another of those services might also be color profiling. Both are connected to a very specific KPI within eCommerce business – "Return rates":
"Returns" - Use Color profiling optimization on true color reproduction to reduce the rate of goods returned due to discrepancies in color between the actual product and the image.
By simply creating true color reproduction in your image production process, the end product will appear consistent with the actual color of the product and affect the customer experience when receiving the product. Apart from the fact that the consumer will have a much better customer experience the impact on the return rates can be enormous.
Returns are super costly to an operation, especially given the average margin for eCommerce sales. CNBC reports that the average return represents 30 percent of the purchase price. The average margin for an online order is 10 percent, and the average cost of one return is $15.00.
Imagine what e.g. 30%, 20% or even just 10% reduced return goods can mean for your business and your bottom line.
You can either secure this by requiring high quality color match / true colors in the retoucher and/or post production process or do this by implementing individual color profiles.
Color profiles will minimize color discrepancies and meet the demands of specialist product photography with more accurate colors out of the box. The enterprise / eCommerce studio can reduce editing time and save on retoucher costs with fine-tuned color profiling for the most popular e-commerce cameras. How this will this create value for your business you can see in this example:
Same case as before: 50 stations shooting on average 30 samples/items a day, 200 days a year. E-comm color profile is another one that varies from company to company (I have heard up to 30% going to re-touch).
Let’s say that 10% of your samples either has to go to re-touch or to be shoot again because of faulty colors, and we could make sure that 80% of that wouldn’t happen.
Calculation for re-shoot:
Calculation for re-touch:
The time and opportunity is now for the enterprise and eCommerce photo studios to step up and deliver image production as a more important and visible contribution to the product value chain and add increased business value.
It is up to you to grab it.
Mike Martinussen