Part of what draws us to retail stores is their ability to connect to our senses: sight, touch, hearing, and smell. Connections that extend beyond products include decor and store employees. When transforming the experience into online shopping, these natural senses are substituted with a sense of the virtual experience.
Providing an exceptional shopping experience to sports and fitness enthusiasts in Spain and throughout Europe is the primary goal of Deporvillage, a top online sports retailer. Offering more than 60,000 premium-brand products, Deporvillage is expanding in Europe and plans to grow globally. With monthly unique page views totaling 30 million on its site, which features over 8,000 images of seasonal products, the company faced a formidable challenge early on to render the site responsive on all devices at all times.
Every image is unique, so are website visitors. In a perfect world, we would adapt images to be "just right" for all users, i.e., perfectly cropped with responsive dimensions, correct encoding settings, and optimal quality in the most suitable format.
See this example of a photo of a cat:
Short videos of animated GIFs are spreading like wildfire around the web, especially in media and news sites, and people frequently share animated GIFs on social apps. However, because those GIFs are not optimized, their sizes are huge, consuming heavy bandwidth and slowing down page loads. Also, resizing and transforming a large number of animated GIFs, one by one, to match the graphic design of your site or app is a lengthy, CPU-intensive process.
Images. More likely than not, your web or mobile app is filled to the brim with images, which, from graphical appeal to size and access times, figure prominently in the browsing experience. Image appeal could motivate visitors to return and, in the case of e-commerce, become customers.
No matter how outstanding the page design is, many of the images that you as web developers must embed are not in your direct control. Not to mention that social websites contain user-uploaded profile photos; the product photos on e-commerce sites are too numerous to be edited one at a time; and media outlets invariably contain many photographs of different standards.
Cloudinary offers an automated tool that tweaks and retouches images by sharpening or blurring them. Obviously, you can also sharpen blurry images with that option.
Many modern homepages feature a slider or carousel to rotate images of, for example, offers from or characters of the brand. Have you noticed that homepages are slow to load, though? The size of the images on sliders could be to blame.
When was the last time you bought a product without looking at its images or videos? The chance of customers buying a product increases by an order of magnitude when you effectively showcase your brand and products with images and videos. And when you have customers interacting with your brand across different channels and devices, you must meet them everywhere as they go from discovery to purchase.
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Gaurav Pant, Chief Insights Officer of Incisiv, recently shared his outlook for the retail industry with the Cloudinary team, specifically as it relates to digital retail transformation.
You only have to be a consumer to know that digital has dramatically transformed the consumer buyer journey. It stopped being linear and location-based a long time ago. So what can retailers do to deliver the kinds of digital experiences that today’s consumers have come to expect?
Happy New Year, folks!
As a relentless technology advocate and a developer who’s worked on media transformation for numerous projects over the years, I decided in late 2019 to go on a 25-day journey of sharing my learnings on Twitter. The aim was to show my audience the options available for them to do magic with any type of media file and spark ideas that would take maximum advantage of those techniques in their future projects.