Some returns explain themselves, like a size that didn’t fit or a parcel that arrived damaged. Others come back with a reason that’s harder to pin down: “it didn’t look like the website”.
That reason usually points back to the product page. In a study by Coresight Research and Nfinite covering 190 brands and retailers across the US and Europe, companies estimated that 11% of their returns happened because the product that arrived didn’t match the images the customer had seen online. The figure comes from the companies’ own estimates, not from measurement. Even so, it shows how much images weigh on a problem that usually gets blamed on logistics or product quality.
What’s behind “it didn’t look like the website”
Behind that phrase there’s usually an expectation the product page created without meaning to. The customer didn’t have the product in front of them, so they filled in whatever the images didn’t show.
Colour comes first. Warm lighting, a filter or a different screen is enough for a navy blue to arrive looking black. And when a product comes in several variants but only one has an image, the rest are sold blind. Google Merchant Center, in fact, recommends a separate image for each colour or style variant.
Then there’s material and texture. A shot taken from a distance can’t tell thick cotton from thin, or a matte finish from a glossy one, and that’s exactly what the customer notices when they open the box.
How the product looks in use matters too. A lamp on a white background doesn’t tell you how much light it gives or how it looks in a living room, and an empty backpack doesn’t show how much fits inside.
Size has its own article: [how to show product size in your online store photos].
The cost of a return that hardly anyone tracks
When an order comes back, the outbound shipping has already been paid. Add the collection, the time spent inspecting the product and putting it back into stock, and, if it’s no longer as new, the discount needed to sell it. In many cases, the margin on that sale disappears.
There’s also a cost that doesn’t show up in any report. Someone who returns a product because it wasn’t what they expected walks away with a bad experience of the store, and next time they’ll think twice before buying.
At the end of the month, all of this goes into the return rate alongside size and shipping issues, and the cause gets lost. The only way to recover it is to look at returns product by product.
How to review the product pages that get returned the most
- Pull the list of products with the most returns over the last few months. If your platform lets you filter by reason, keep the ones returned as “not as expected”, “doesn’t match the description” or similar.
- Read customers’ comments exactly as they wrote them. “It’s darker”, “it’s smaller” or “it looks like plastic” tell you which image is missing.
- Open the page the way someone who doesn’t know the product would. Without it in front of you, could you tell what colour it is, what it’s made of and how it’s used?
- Note which image would answer each comment and start with your best-selling products, where the change shows up soonest.
The images a product page needs to avoid surprises
There’s no magic number of images, but these answer the questions that come up most in return comments.
- An image in neutral light with no filters, where the colour looks as it really is.
- A close-up of the material or finish.
- A sense of scale, whether that’s a hand, a familiar object or the product next to something everyone knows the size of.
- The product in use, in the place where it will actually be.
- One image for each colour or model variant.
If you can’t cover them all at once, start with the one that answers the most repeated return comment.
If you’d like to create those images from a photo of your product, you can try Picgenio for free.