Yo, Online Retailers - Old, Bad or Non-Color Corrected Photos P*ss Off Your Customers!!!
Hello online fish breeders and retailers! As some of you may know, I am a nano fish farmer and online retailer of fish. I am also an online purchaser of fish, and my biggest pet peeve when shopping online is bad product photography. I believe bad product photography hurts our hobby as a whole. Lazy, cheap or distracted online retailers fail their customer big time. The worst of these livestock photos are:
Dated,
Taken in misleading photos, and
Needing post-production (color correction, exposure correction; sharpness enhanced).
Let's look at these issues one by one.
Every professional breeder and online retail (pros) knows that a great photo can sell a million fish. That's why fraudulent and newbie online retailers yoink pros' photos online, to sell their fish. Any pro retailer also knows that due to copyright law, they can't do that sort of thing. They need to produce their own breed/product photography or pay for stock photos - if they can find any close enough to what they are selling. While some of pros are blessed with great cameras and photography skills, others don't have the skills or time to take their own pictures. Theses pros spend a lot of moolah creating digital assets and platforms. I mean a lot. And once they have everything in place, they just want to be done with that and move on.
What happens is over time, those perfect pictures of the fish no longer match the breed stock for sale. Their is genetic drift and mutations that occur in isolated breed stock over time. Some retailers will try to skirt around this by saying that they are maintaining the original dna of the founding breeders, but really they're just not culling the fish that do not match the original breed stock, and selling them as pure or genuine whatevers. The result of this sloppy genetic husbandry is buyer gets a descendant fish that no longer matches the breed photo. If your buyer is a breeder, or a picky hobbyist, that buyer is likely to ask for a refund at best. At worst, they will not communicate their disappointment with you. They'll just never trust you enough to purchase from you again.
The moral: maintain your breed lines or create new photos to sell the "drifters". Don't mislead your customers with old photos.
Some pros and non-pros are so desperate to sell their non-standard fish that they will use lighting tricks to make their fish appear to be a certain color or size. Some of these tricks include different lenses and colored light and filters. Some of these manipulations are legitimate if the end product matches what the fish looks like in person. But other times, it can be used to deceive the buyer into thinking they are getting something they are not. Like using colored light to "enhance" a fishes color. Or (even more unethically), feeding the breed stock dye to alter their colors. It like putting a "soft" filter on a headshot to look 30 years younger and putting it on a dating site.
The moral: manipulated photos sell fish. Advertising fraud however is illegal.
Some product photography is misleading or impossible to clearly discern because the photo needs post-production (exposure, brightness, contrast, sharpness; color-shifted to match the actual live fish, using photo editing software. An bad photo can be corrected to be an okay photo that accurately reflects the breed line for sale. As an example, I saw a photo this week with a title claiming the fish were pink. Instead they looked like they were monarch butterfly orange. They were good looking fish, but without color correction, I'm not interested in them. The picture is what I see and believe. If the color is not right for my needs, as a breeder, I don't want it. A online retailer can lose sales with poor quality, non-corrected photos advertising their product, or sell people products that they don't want.
The moral: don't post crappy photos online to sell your products. Learn (or pay for) photo correction.
As an online customer, if:
I see a beautiful, accurate, current photograph of a breed line fish for sale, AND
The fish I receive reasonably resembles what I thought I had bought, AND
the online retailer reasonably stands behind their product, THEN
Voila! I have been made into a loyal customer! Loyal customers make repeat sales, will talk you up at clubs, follow you on YouTube, stalk you at Aquashella, etc. What I described is the shopping experience the online customer wants - particularly aquarium hobbyists. Give it to them, or up your game, buckos - because there's always competition waiting in the wings, willing and ABLE to do it BETTER. Be the online breeder and retailer you customers expect you to be. Be AWESOME! Fix your pictures.
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