Good product photography is ESSENTIAL to not only creating the “wow” factor when people visit your website, but also to give them as good a feel as possible for your items so they feel confident enough to order them online.
A website with a mediocre design which has good product photography will look good, yet a website with the best design in the world combined with bad photography will look terrible. So invest in good photography!
Make sure they’re a product photographer and have experience in this. For example, a wedding photographer might not know anything about product photography, and vice versa.
If you’re looking for high quality product photographers who know what they’re doing, we can recommend Cactus Images
If you have a little photography skill yourself or already own a high quality camera it may be that you just need a good lighting setup. Across the interenet there are many kits available with the lighting setup needed to take professional quality photographs yourself.
Some websites providing this are:
http://ww.essentialphoto.co.uk
http://www.photogeeks.co.uk
If you query them ask about ‘continous photo product photography’. Alternatively if you have small products this will be fine.
We’d only recommend using stock photography for generic sections of your website. Ideally, if you’re going to be selling products/items on your website, then you need photographs of the actual items.
However for more generic sections, sometimes stock photography is a good alternative to having photos done for you.