Ecommerce may have replaced offline shopping — with 43% of U.S. consumers preferring online shopping vs. brick-and-mortar. But the truth is, the impact of visual merchandising on consumer behavior remains the same.
In 2025, people still depend on visual information to make buying decisions.
Data found that 75% of people rely on product imagery to decide whether to invest in a product. Furthermore, most consumers form impressions about brands’ trustworthiness and competence based on website design.
With this in mind, visual merchandising isn’t just a crucial aspect of driving ecommerce sales. It’s a big part of your company’s online reputation.
If you want to take your conversion potential to the next level, creating a visual merchandising style guide for your ecommerce brand is an excellent idea. Here’s how to do it right.
What Is a Visual Merchandising Style Guide?
Although you may not have come across one so far, a visual merchandising style guide can be handy when trying to create a consistent (and recognizable) brand look across all your digital channels.
After all, consumers tend to buy from brands they’re familiar with. It’s only natural that you’d use your website visuals to nurture that sense of familiarity. Doing so can be especially important in a conversion-oriented setting where the right merchandising strategy can help elevate your target audience’s purchase intent and boost sales.
The great thing about visual merchandising style guides is that they eliminate any guesswork about how you should present your products online.
This type of document helps with consistency and strengthens brand identity. It ensures that your website visuals align with your conversion goals. And it contributes to an overall more enjoyable shopping experience for your audience.
Typically, this document will include rules (dos and don’ts) regarding product photography, color palettes, videos, thumbnails, and positioning. However, yours can be fully customized to your brand’s needs and priorities.
So, regardless of whether you want to design a dreamy ecommerce store that inspires aspirational purchases or keep your focus on informational value and practicality, here’s how to create the perfect style guide for your brand.
Getting Started
For your visual merchandising style guide to yield the results you’re after, start the process by carefully defining your visual direction. And the only way to do so is to base your decisions on audience research.
There are two main priorities in this regard.
Define What Your Audience Wants and Align Your Visual Merchandising Style Accordingly
Different audience segments have different wants, needs, and priorities. And showing that you care about their experience is more than just a great way to position your business as a good fit. It can also be the key to converting web visitors into customers.
If you look at the latest research from Adobe, you’ll find that 71% of people expect brands to anticipate their needs. Moreover, 78% demand a consistent shopping experience across all digital channels. Do these things, and you won’t just see an uptick in sales — your customers will also reward you with their loyalty.
And it turns out that there’s plenty you can do to align your visual merchandising with your audience’s preferences.
For instance, check out Bèis. This brand understands that its target audience wants beautiful but functional luggage that looks good and performs well. Thus, Bèis chooses a visual merchandising style that combines aesthetic appeal and informational value, using its product imagery and website visuals to familiarize shoppers with its solutions in a way that will inspire conversions.
Source: beistravel.com
On the other hand, if you sell a complex solution but are targeting an audience that might not have a high level of comprehension regarding its benefits, then your visual merchandising strategy has to prioritize product understanding. Check out how Bay Alarm Medical does it with its SOS Micro Mobile Medical Alert page, using in-context photos to show how the product works and how that relates to the brand’s target audience’s needs.
Source: bayalarmmedical.com
Understand Web Visitor Behavior to Optimize Layouts
The second most important preparatory action regarding your visual merchandising style guide is to learn how your target audience interacts with websites.
This can help you make web design decisions that will ensure a better UX, but that’s not all. It will also inform your site’s layout, as positioning high-value elements in the right spots can make a significant positive impact on your conversion rates.
When getting started, you can familiarize yourself with some of the most significant web user behavior studies. For instance, how people consume online content should influence your page design. This information can help you make better layout-related decisions; plus, aligning your site’s structure with your prospects’ behaviors leads to a better brand impression.
Additionally, you can continue monitoring web user behavior even after you’ve put together your visual merchandising style guide. Heatmaps, for instance, can be a great source of information. And by aligning your design decisions with the info they collect, you can elevate how your site looks and performs and drive more conversions.
Product Photography
Once you’ve discovered how your prospects want their brand interactions to go and made rules to ensure your visuals align with their expectations, it’s time to turn your attention to product photography.
Ultimately, in an online setting, product photos are irreplaceable.
Seeing that your buyers can’t see, touch, or try on your products, enrich your site with high-quality, informative product photos that will replace all tactile and offline evaluation experiences.
Fortunately, you can accomplish all this (and more) by creating a comprehensive merchandising style guide.
Product Photography Basics
The first step toward creating a style guide that will help your product photos sell will be to define what high-value product photography means for your brand.
If you’re not sure, you can follow some general guidelines. For instance, scientific research has found that the following image characteristics appeal to most consumers: larger key objects, sharpness, warmer color palettes, high contrast, high depth of field, and social presence.
So, if you want to keep your style guide simple, just incorporate these rules into your ecommerce visual merchandising strategy. Despite being straightforward, they will help you take conversion-inspiring product photos, which are detailed but to the point.
For example, check out how GIR does it on its product pages. The brand understands that its target audience wants to invest in products that aren’t just utilitarian but also contribute to a specific lifestyle. So, all the photos are taken against a solid background making it easy to remove background distractions and keep the focus on the product itself.
They provide sufficient contrast and detail to show off product characteristics. But, GIR doesn’t limit itself to austere product photography. Instead, each product page includes a contextual photo of the product used by its intended audience, elevating the lifestyle aspect of the brand’s solutions.
Source: gir.co
UGC, Aspirational, and Lifestyle Photography
If you’re trying to target aspirational buyers, then a more artistic approach (combined with evaluation-oriented product photos) might work better to inspire your audience to buy.
The Daniel Simmons brand is a marvelous example of what this can look like on product collection pages. It regularly uses video and street-style fashion photography, knowing that these visuals are guaranteed to get shoppers to click on a product, take a closer look at its characteristics, and (hopefully) convert.
Source: danielsimmons.co
UGC can also be a big part of your visual merchandising strategy, not least because it works wonders for elevating brand trust.
Research shows that 89% of consumers decide whether to buy from a brand based on its credibility. Incorporating real-life shots of your products in genuine settings can be a great way to boost brand trust and elevate purchase intent with your product photography. For example, check out how WholeWoodPlayhouses did it, using photos of its products assembled at its clients’ homes.
Source: wholewoodplayhouses.com
Additional Visual Formats to Aid Product Evaluation
Finally, don’t hesitate to include interactive imagery, videos, 360-degree views, and AR product visualizations in your style guide.
These formats provide an approachable way for consumers to evaluate solutions while shopping online. They can be a powerful way to elevate the shopping experience in your ecommerce store and a method to boost conversions based on hyper-relevant product visuals.
Think of Warby Parker‘s Try On Virtually CTA button in the top right-hand corner of its product images, which uses the web visitors’ webcam to create an enjoyable digital brand experience that significantly eases the online shopping process.
Source: warbyparker.com
Create Systems That Encourage Image Interactions
A successful visual merchandising strategy doesn’t just help your inventory look good. It’s also effective at engaging web visitors and getting them to interact with product photos you use on your site.
After all, the more your prospects immerse themselves in your offer, the higher their likelihood of converting into customers.
That’s why your visual merchandising style guide should include instructions on how to present and utilize visuals in a way that will drive engagement.
Naturally, your possibilities will depend on your site’s UI design. However, there are several ways you can attract and guide web visitors’ attention — even without employing advanced interactive web design.
White Space
For starters, white space can be a valuable design element to ensure your branded visuals pop. Because it separates webpage components from their surrounding areas, it’s a marvelous way to establish importance and attract user attention.
That’s why brands like Tiffany & Co. use ample negative space on their product collection pages, knowing that it’s a great way to highlight attractive product designs or even emphasize specific characteristics.
Source: tiffany.com
Engagement-Oriented UI Elements
Another simple yet effective method to engage consumers browsing your products is to use UI elements that will drive that engagement.
For instance, something as simple as gallery navigation arrows — like the ones used by Ridge — or high-resolution images that shoppers can use your site’s zoom function with are all excellent ways to get web visitors to engage with your product gallery (and hopefully find something they like).
Source: ridge.com
CTR-Boosting Tactics
Finally, don’t forget to create visual merchandising rules that will maximize the click-through rates on your product collection pages.
Consumers spend a significant portion of their buyer’s journey browsing brand inventories. Using design tricks to allow your products to pop can be hugely beneficial in encouraging shoppers to find something they like.
One of the best rules you can implement in your visual merchandising style guide in this regard is to always use more than one preview image on collection pages.
For instance, you can allow shoppers to scroll through several shots. Alternatively, you could do what Sewing Parts Online does and provide additional images when web visitors hover over a specific product.
Source: sewingpartsonline.com
Or, if you plan to use merchandising triggers — like the “bestseller” banners on the Mannequin Mall homepage, badges, or color overlays — make sure that they don’t clash with your product imagery. Something as simple as mapping these elements out in advance will give you a solid idea of how much white space you need in your product photos so that you don’t risk creating a collection page that’s too busy and overwhelming to drive conversions.
Source: mannequinmall.com
The Value of Specificity in Creating a Visual Merchandising Style Guide
The last thing you need to consider when creating a style guide for your visual merchandising is to be very specific with any of the rules you want (or don’t want) to implement.
Essentially, this document aims to standardize the visuals on your website. You’ll want to create highly specific rules for each visual format you intend to use.
- For product imagery, decide on dimensions, formats, orientation, mandatory product shot angles, lighting and color rules, thumbnail aspect ratios, etc.
- For your backgrounds, define the colors you intend to use (and include a color code next to each share) and set rules regarding shadows, gradients, and transparency.
- As for your site’s layout, define the amount of negative space around each product, create spacing rules for product collection pages, and decide on alignment.
- It’s also important to have rules regarding how hover and interactive elements behave, how your zoom function works, and whether videos autoplay or if they require user input to start.
- Finally, don’t hesitate to include a “Don’t” section in your visual style guide. Whether this includes mistakes you’ve made in the past or examples of what you don’t want to see on your website is entirely up to you. But rest assured that such info will be helpful — especially when your ecommerce brand starts to grow and you bring on more staff who may not share your specific ideas of what’s right or wrong for your brand.
Wrapping Up
There you have it, everything you need to consider when creating a visual merchandising style guide for your ecommerce brand.
At first glance, the process may seem overwhelming. But you don’t have to rush it. Instead, take your time to determine the aesthetic rules that will contribute to your brand’s positive reputation among your target audience.
Ultimately, design trends will change over time. And, sure, your ecommerce website needs to look fresh and modern if you want to stand out. However, it’s much more essential to create an online store that’s on-brand, user-friendly, and successful at engaging visitors. That’s the only way it will do its primary task — converting new customers for your business.
