True Value Company is an American wholesaler with over 4,600 independent retail locations worldwide.

Dave Elliott, senior vice president of marketing at True Value, wanted to give shoppers an elevated customer experience. And for the hardware retailer, that means having helpful images on the product detail page in the form of 360-degree spins so a shopper can view the product from different angles as its spins. TrueValue.com replatformed its ecommerce site in April 2018 onto the Magento platform. Then the retailer began adding the 360-degree images in the summer of 2018 and now has the feature for 3,000 of its SKUs. While this is a mere 4% of its online SKUs, True Value is already happy with the results.

CONVERSION RATES UP 22%:

Conversion rates for products with 360-degree pins have increased 22% on average compared to when these same products didn’t have this feature on the product detail page.

ADD TO CART RATIO INCREASED BY 35%:

In addition, add-to-cart ratios (or the rate at which consumers add a product to their cart) for these products increased 35%

BOUNCE RATES DECREASE BY 27%:

The bounce rate (or the people who left the ecommerce site after that product page) decreased by 27% compared to when these products didn’t have the spin feature. Elliott did not reveal specific figures. 

Products without the 360-degree spins did not see comparable changes, which makes Elliott even more confident that this feature is what drove those results. 

OTHER BENEFITS:

True Value were able to use the spinning images in digital marketing ads and the differently angled images in other marketing forms, such as a print circular ad that is typically distributed with a newspaper. Previously, many of True Value’s 80,000 SKUs have one or only a few images on its site, which was often a straight-on picture.

“We’ve seen far better ROI in advertising on Facebook, for example,” Elliott says, without revealing specific data. He says that consumers find the ads that spin more engaging and useful, without revealing more. For example, on one Facebook ad of a rotating electric stove, the click through rate to TrueValue.com from Facebook was 4.5%, above a normal industry rate of 2.4%, Elliott says.

In terms of streamlining, True Value now has access to 20 high-quality images of each of its products with this feature. That means if the retailer is selecting that product for an advertisement, it has a variety of images from which to choose.

These results coincide with a recent Internet Retailer/Toluna 2018 Web Design Survey of 562 consumers in October 2018 in which consumers said seeing many images of a product is helpful—56% of consumers said “alternative views” were very important to making a purchasing decision. Alternative views was the third-highest response behind the top choice of product images at 78% and product reviews at 64% for very important features. Consumers could pick more than one response.