If you wish to grow your creative business as a photographer or a visual artist, an eCommerce store should always lie at the center of all your marketing strategies. This is because eCommerce websites have now become an integral part of the way we live, consume and earn our livelihood.
A well-designed eCommerce website will have more than just a home gallery, a Bio and a Blog. It will also have accessible store listings with convincing descriptions, comprehensive product photographs, related product sections, and floating carts for swift checkout. Learn how to design your website now. Here is an example of best ecommerce website templates you can check.
On the other hand, photographers with thousands of images to show are better served by eCommerce enabled galleries. Photo buyers get a better presentation with a common cart displaying different resolutions/sizes/mediums for digital downloads or prints. Learn more about ecommerce website design.
15 Brilliantly Designed eCommerce Websites on Pixpa.
If you need some inspiration or just motivation, here are some examples of eCommerce websites built using Pixpa
Warriorimages
Larger than life sports portraits and telephoto zooms of on-field action are the running themes that dominate Sarah Crabill’s online portfolio. Arkansas based Sarah Crabill is a sports fan and photojournalist par excellence.
Warriorimages collects the most human sporting moments both on and off the field - emotive athletes, faces in the crowd, cheerleaders, and animated referees in action. What works for this website is its minimalism in terms of content, letting the action ‘do the talking’.
Crabill uses a basic watercolor scheme to secure her images. Store visitors can easily choose between digital downloads, photo prints, gallery wraps, or decorative metal prints. A friendly pop cart peeps over from the right whenever a prospective buyer clicks on the shopping symbol over an image. Checkout is brisk with a simple form.
Warriorimages uses an eCommerce gallery to display image galleries in a neat grid arrangement. If you are new to eCommerce, this site is an excellent example of a clutter-free User Interface (UI) - something that even professional web designers struggle with.
WoodsandWhimsy
The importance of visual imagery to store design cannot be overstated. Researchers have time and again emphasized that the brain processes visual information many times faster than it does the written word. Sandra Pratt’s exclusive line of organic deodorant, Happy Pits, combines beautiful contextual photography with superb presentation.
Pratt uses typical props from nature, such as patchouli and peppermint with jute and cotton embroidery, to enliven her store portfolio. Juxtaposed with words such as ‘Vegan’, ‘All-Natural’, ‘Healthy’, and ‘Toxin-Free’, these images bring her fragrances to life.
Her packages explicitly reveal the herbal ingredients of her product’s biotic origins. A featured blog that cheerfully chirps on about how she came up with the idea of chemical-free antiperspirants gently persuades her buyers to buy. Pratt’s website is a beautiful example of a cohesively designed online store.
Her website theme and the use of soft colors lend an atmosphere that invokes soothing aromas to keep you fresh all day. In terms of product presentation, Sandy Pratt’s website is bang on target.
Arteri sells collectible items, vintage tools, and items that you would have found in the old civil tradition of a cabinet of curiosities. The eCommerce website features authentic product photographs and precise descriptions that leave no ambiguity as to what the buyer will get.
The product galleries are well organized and creatively categorized, ranging from ‘automobilia’, and ‘breweriana’, to ‘ephemera’, and ‘kitchenalia’. USPs such as postage packaging and worldwide delivery are strategically advertised. Arteri also has a Search tab to find product listings and an announcement bar that declares discounts and deals whenever they become available.
With fully functional shopping carts, abandoned cart notification mechanisms, and original minimalist design, you can see that Arteri means business. This is the perfect example of a no-nonsense, classic web interface, where it would appear as if the products speak for themselves. However, the carefully lit and textured portrayals reveal that a lot of thought has gone into the making.
Rachana Reddy
Rachana Reddy describes herself as a fashion entrepreneur dealing in niche fashion accessories with a penchant for bringing artful concepts to life. Like Arteri, her website sports a minimalist user interface, albeit, in a more artsy manner.
Rachana’s home page displays a stunning signature clutch resting on what appears to be a leaf over a splendidly embroidered fluid blue fabric. It takes but an instant for the viewer to comprehend that this business deals in creative fashion for women.
A thoughtful page titled, ‘Customer Diaries’, lists clients who have benefited from Rachana’s accessorization. Her Bio does an excellent job of communicating her creative credentials. Check out her colorfully assembled platform to learn how to deliver an artistic feel to your eCommerce store.
James Henry
Nature and wildlife photographer, James Henry, is quite passionate about travel. He specializes in visual travelogues from uninhabited wildernesses. From the Yukon valley to the jungles of Costa Rica, Henry captures wildlife portraits against expansive landscapes.
Henry’s online store lets visitors vicariously experience human-free environments in all their natural colors and tones.
As with the other examples mentioned above, Henry chooses the minimalist structure for his website interface.
Clean visuals, a simplified online store, and precise categorization make for delightful user experience on this platform.
George Shubin
George Shubin is an urban landscape photographer based in Oregon City, Oregon. He sells his spectacular photographs of the Oregon viewscape in the form of calendars, greeting cards, and prints.
His eCommerce store avoids the complexities of winding descriptions. Instead, it opts for economy of text. Much of George’s work speaks for itself, be it the breathtaking aerial spectacle of the massive West Lynn Bridge, or the iconic Seventh Street.
As with most urban photographers, George employs color saturation and light exposure to capture wide-angle photography at its best. George’s product pages are easy to navigate, with a related-items section to induce further purchases.
As a standard feature, website designs must include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for better discoverability on Google.
Sasha Lovelle
Singapore based florist and photographer, Sasha Lovelle’s online store features hand-crafted bouquets, photo framed bouquets, and herbariums. Sasha accentuates the feminine grace of her products by pitching them against understated pastels. She lets on just enough information for the buyer to start caring for the delicate blooms once bought. However, she also makes it easy for her clients to get in touch via both email and WhatsApp.
Clive Grylls
Clive Grylls is an accomplished photojournalist who specializes in capturing ‘conflict’ - between men, man, and animal, or man and the environment. His pensive observations from unique vantage points have produced some remarkable visual stories from India, Nepal, and many other culture-rich locations.
Clive uses the eCommerce gallery feature to make his images available to the buyer. For seamless customer experience, there are no logins required. The purchaser merely needs to fill in his email and delivery address at checkout before making the payment.
Christie Joyce
Christie Joyce is a wedding photographer who captures a versatile range of styles through her images. She also dabbles in food, portrait, fashion, and architectural photography.
Christie employs intimate content to trademark her skills at calling attention to detail, including the romance between couples who are at the heart of the event.
Joyce uses the eCommerce gallery feature to enable viewers to purchase their favorite photographs. Each client receives a username and password for authentication. This can be shared across multiple users, such as family members and close friends. Collectively, they can mark images they like, send comments or requests for modification, which can be picked up by the site owner instantly.
Poketto
Poketto is a minimalist classy apparel store that provides individually sourced, screen printed, custom care labeled tees and jackets. In consonance with its youthful audience, it uses a stylish red and white theme with strategically placed product images. One can scroll down to see models in candid shots.
This site uses a classic e-commerce interface with products individually arranged and described along with price markers. Visitors can click on an item to see zoom-in images from different body angles. This feature gives the buyer a sense of how she would look when she does put on the Pocketto outfit. At no point does Pocketo’s interface look repetitive, filling up just enough space to show content and value.
Yay Party Prints
Heather Carter is a full-time mom who makes fun graphic designs for birthday parties, games, drop bags, bottle labels, signs, and car wrappers. Heather’s is an entirely digital product aimed at kids, moms, and families. Hence, she keeps the interface light with a creative flourish. She cuts out visual clutter by keeping the navigation and checkout process simple.
The Stationer
A brainchild of entrepreneurs Saurabh Mehta and Rishab Jain, The Stationer, is an attempt to rebrand mundane utilities of everyday use into creative objects that people will find endearing. Products range from an all-purpose folio with notepad, post-its, and pen, to creatively shaped paper clips.
Product portfolios are spot-on with beautiful image captures that bring to the fore the ingenuity of the stationery design. Once again, The Stationer employs a distraction-free 3-menu layout. While the grid layout is easy on the eyes, the owner bio impresses with its intelligent storyline.
Adventure 18
As the name suggests, Adventure 18 specializes in adventure sports apparel and gear. Created by professional rock climber and athlete Mohit Oberoi, this site showcases products developed by famous outdoor brands such as Northface, Valandre, and Beal, among others.
The website has a professional clear-cut design interface with precise descriptions. A crucial element of this store is it’s explicit ‘related images’ format below the store purchase page.
Wayne Holt Chan
Hong Kong-based Wayne Holt Chan’s fine art prints quickly showcase his exceptional eye for light, color, geometry, and emotion. His photographs display enduring vistas and pleasant, cool colors.
Wayne also does wedding, portrait, and family photography. His neatly framed limited art prints, set against a pristine white wall, make it clear how those images would look on your living room panel.
Austin Siadak
American landscape photographer Austin Siadak showcases his exquisite expositions of nature through art prints. His expansive images cover oversized image captures of natural scapes such as mountains and clouds. Austin’s images are available in three sizes - standard, panorama, and photo card.
Conclusion
Ecommerce website optimization is critical if you want to turn your artistic endeavors into an earning opportunity. A photographer, illustrator, designer, or architect, working on her own, needs to have a basic understanding of what sells. This does not put you in direct competition with eCommerce giants such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, and their likes.
As a creative, your audience is limited by its niche requirements. These requirements make it easier for you by limiting your audience. It helps you focus on what you do best and the people who want to buy what you do. Read more tips on eCommerce marketing here.
If you liked our list of the best eCommerce stores for photographers and creatives, you may enjoy making one of your own. Here is a detailed guide on How to start an online store. As mentioned before, with Pixpa, you get more than one option to put up an online shop. But that's not all. You can also integrate a killer blog, SEO crawl codes, social media integration, and more.