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A picture is worth a thousand words but a good product picture is worth a lot of money. The best selling online stores today are the ones with unique, high-quality pictures. Simply put, you must learn how to take professional product photos if your customers should order from your store. A whopping 67% of consumers consider image quality crucial when making a purchase online! This makes a lot of sense as the picture of the product is the only thing they have going before they make a decision. If the customer were present, they could feel the product before deciding, so your product photos have to do a lot of work in convincing them to place an order. Taking great product picture should be a high priority if you run an online store, as all the details of the product will have to be captured. So here we are, with a very cheap way to get professional looking product pictures for your online store.

What you need
Camera: Best Choice- The first thing you need is a camera. Consumer DSLR are getting cheaper every year so if you plan on taking lots of product photos it may make sense to invest in a good digital camera.
Cost-effective Choice- Most smartphones in today’s market come equipped with great cameras. If you own one of those, then you may just have a DSLR alternative right at your fingertips. Target phones with higher pixel ratings.
Here are some smartphones with great camera features.
Apple iPhones 5s, 6 and 6s: 8-megapixel or more, iSight camera, Autofocus, LED flash, image stabilization, etc.
Samsung Galaxy s5 and above: 16-megapixel camera, autofocus, LED flash, etc. There are many other smartphones with excellent cameras pick one, and you are ready.

Backdrop/ Background: Best Choice and Cost-effective choice — White poster board paper or white cardboard paper. Create a white seamless background so that it is not only behind the product but also underneath it as well. This is called making a “sweep” with the backdrop. Pin the edges of the cardboard both on top and below to keep the background in place

Lights- You need lots of consistent lighting to bring out the life in your products.
Best Choice: Studio Standard dual lighting setup at either side of the product.
Cost-effective choice- Natural light or two reading lamps (depending on the size of your product)- The easiest and the most budget-friendly option is to use natural light. Set up your product and equipment near a large window to allow for ample light in your frame. If natural light is difficult for you to find, try using a larger lamp or a set of reading lamps depending on how big the objects may be.

Image Stabilization- Cameras take a good picture when you place them in a fixed position for a little while. This is why photographers use a tripod.
Best Choice- Use a tripod if you are using a DSLR or smartphone. This is extremely recommended as shaky hands, however slight will impact the output of your product picture. There are many portable phone stands there buy one and use.
Cost-effective choice- Turn your hands into a very useful tripod and keep them fixed and steady for a very long time before taking the picture avoiding even the slightest shake… lol, are you still reading? Seriously though, get that tripod if you can.

Table: Utilize a flat surface table so that your product sits higher, which will make it easier for you to photograph your product during the shoot.
Best Choice- An expensive table… it will make you feel good during the shoot. Ha!
Cost-effective choice- A cheap table. Either ways just get a table.

Cardboard- If you are using natural light, you often find out that the light from the window casts a shadow of the product to the other side. Use the cardboard to reduce the shadow cast on the other side of the product and give it a cleaner look.

Editing: Add a final touch to your images before they go live on the web, this will be good to crop out the slight flaws and adjust the lighting and contrast if necessary.
Best Choice- Adobe Photoshop for desktop or Adobe Photoshop Touch app for phones which is a replica of the desktop version.
Cost-effective choice- You can download some free apps from the Google Play store for your photo editing e.g. Adobe Photoshop Express, Photogrid, etc.

Things to remember.
1. Leave lots of free spaces in and around the product frame, do not take a product picture with the product close to the edge of the image.
2. You cannot go wrong with square shaped product image. During editing, crop the product picture into a square frame, it allows you to add the picture anywhere without distortion. Also, storefront platforms like Zoafia only enable you to crop the picture into a square shape.
3. Take lots of shots from different angles, do not delete shots until you are editing them. Sometimes great pictures don’t look good the first time
So there you go, take the most amazing photos and turn them into lots of money!

To Create a Zoafia website for your shop or business click www.zoafia.com/brands
Original post was first published in the Zoafia blog www.medium.com/zoafia

A picture is worth a thousand words but a good product picture is worth a lot of money. The best selling online stores today are the ones with unique, high-quality pictures. Simply put, you must learn how to take professional product photos if your customers should order from your store. A whopping 67% of consumers consider image quality crucial when making a purchase online! This makes a lot of sense as the picture of the product is the only thing they have going before they make a decision. If the customer were present, they could feel the product before deciding, so your product photos have to do a lot of work in convincing them to place an order. Taking great product picture should be a high priority if you run an online store, as all the details of the product will have to be captured. So here we are, with a very cheap way to get professional looking product pictures for your online store.

What you need
Camera: Best Choice- The first thing you need is a camera. Consumer DSLR are getting cheaper every year so if you plan on taking lots of product photos it may make sense to invest in a good digital camera.
Cost-effective Choice- Most smartphones in today’s market come equipped with great cameras. If you own one of those, then you may just have a DSLR alternative right at your fingertips. Target phones with higher pixel ratings.
Here are some smartphones with great camera features.
Apple iPhones 5s, 6 and 6s: 8-megapixel or more, iSight camera, Autofocus, LED flash, image stabilization, etc.
Samsung Galaxy s5 and above: 16-megapixel camera, autofocus, LED flash, etc. There are many other smartphones with excellent cameras pick one, and you are ready.

Backdrop/ Background: Best Choice and Cost-effective choice — White poster board paper or white cardboard paper. Create a white seamless background so that it is not only behind the product but also underneath it as well. This is called making a “sweep” with the backdrop. Pin the edges of the cardboard both on top and below to keep the background in place

Lights- You need lots of consistent lighting to bring out the life in your products.
Best Choice: Studio Standard dual lighting setup at either side of the product.
Cost-effective choice- Natural light or two reading lamps (depending on the size of your product)- The easiest and the most budget-friendly option is to use natural light. Set up your product and equipment near a large window to allow for ample light in your frame. If natural light is difficult for you to find, try using a larger lamp or a set of reading lamps depending on how big the objects may be.

Image Stabilization- Cameras take a good picture when you place them in a fixed position for a little while. This is why photographers use a tripod.
Best Choice- Use a tripod if you are using a DSLR or smartphone. This is extremely recommended as shaky hands, however slight will impact the output of your product picture. There are many portable phone stands there buy one and use.
Cost-effective choice- Turn your hands into a very useful tripod and keep them fixed and steady for a very long time before taking the picture avoiding even the slightest shake… lol, are you still reading? Seriously though, get that tripod if you can.

Table: Utilize a flat surface table so that your product sits higher, which will make it easier for you to photograph your product during the shoot.
Best Choice- An expensive table… it will make you feel good during the shoot. Ha!
Cost-effective choice- A cheap table. Either ways just get a table.

Cardboard- If you are using natural light, you often find out that the light from the window casts a shadow of the product to the other side. Use the cardboard to reduce the shadow cast on the other side of the product and give it a cleaner look.

Editing: Add a final touch to your images before they go live on the web, this will be good to crop out the slight flaws and adjust the lighting and contrast if necessary.
Best Choice- Adobe Photoshop for desktop or Adobe Photoshop Touch app for phones which is a replica of the desktop version.
Cost-effective choice- You can download some free apps from the Google Play store for your photo editing e.g. Adobe Photoshop Express, Photogrid, etc.

Things to remember.
1. Leave lots of free spaces in and around the product frame, do not take a product picture with the product close to the edge of the image.
2. You cannot go wrong with square shaped product image. During editing, crop the product picture into a square frame, it allows you to add the picture anywhere without distortion. Also, storefront platforms like Zoafia only enable you to crop the picture into a square shape.
3. Take lots of shots from different angles, do not delete shots until you are editing them. Sometimes great pictures don’t look good the first time
So there you go, take the most amazing photos and turn them into lots of money!

Well. What if there was a way to retain the advantage of not having to make your own website, but remove the disadvantage of your brand being swallowed by the marketplace or retaining your customers?
www.zoafia.com gives you a website for your shop, helps promote your brand and it costs only N1200 a month to set up.

Recently, Oyihoma Saleh of Kosava deals wrote a great piece explaining why online marketplaces are not helping eCommerce grow in Nigeria. It was a truly impressive piece as he drove home some of the core issues concerning eCommerce as we have come to understand it in Nigeria. We agreed, this was exactly why my team and I started building [url]zoafia.com[/url].

What is [url]zoafia.com[/url] anyway? It’s an eCommerce platform focused on shops who plan to grow into big online brands.

How do we do this? By providing a storefront (mini-website) for every store brand on the platform. There is a dashboard where brands can control everything that happens on their website, from managing inventory and handling orders to updating their brand policies. Even including heartfelt welcome messages for their customers. All these results in a beautiful web store that could be set-up in less than 5 mins.

But Nigerians still love marketplaces!? Yes, they do. This is why additionally, Zoafia has made a marketplace — but this time with the brands in mind. We have a #shopOverProducts policy.

What does this mean? It means that for us it’s not just important that a customer buys a product. It is more important the customer knows which brand sells that product and is referred to the brand’s website on [url]zoafia.com[/url] to complete the transaction.

So if you want to turn your unique self-designed gowns into the Prada of Nigeria, why and how is Zoafia any better?

These are the problems Oyihoma stated and this is how Zoafia uniquely tackles them.
1. “The sale is yours, the customer is theirs”, At Zoafia, your customers are all yours!

At Zoafia, the entire purpose is for every brand to acquire a growing online customer base. Every customer that has bought from a brand is available for that brand. They can up-sell them, send them gift packages, offer them special discounts etc., and turn the customer into a repeat customer. We have already written on why repeat customers are absolutely important for any brand. The trade-off is that the brand itself also owns the responsibility of customer acquisition which is fair considering that they essentially run websites even though the Zoafia marketplace may trickle in customers in the long haul.

2. “It is not just about revenue- the market will scale and fast!”

The problem of marketplace competition affecting merchants has been greatly minimized. At the Zoafia market, a brand can place a price protected by its brand. For e.g. If I exist in a market with Louis Vuitton, and we both sell a brown shoe that looks similar, they can fix a high price which is protected by their brand (Louis Vuitton!) but I won’t be able to sell mine for the same amount because I have no brand protection. However, because every brand takes control of their own web-store and does not have to depend on the market… everyone’s destiny is really in their hands.


Selling online is interpreted differently by merchants in Nigeria because the first people who first told them (all of us really) about eCommerce are the big marketplaces! “Give us your products, we’ll list them and when you have an order, we’ll contact you”. This brought merchants to the concept of online commerce -which in itself is a tremendous achievement but also wrote a single story.

Growing brands in the West or Europe are used to online customer acquisition efforts, checking their web store and fulfilling customer orders, packaging customer orders and delivering them with their logos printed on the package. On the other hand, merchants in Nigeria are used to listing at several marketplaces and waiting for a call, this perhaps is the mentality change necessary to produce successful online stores and subsequently, strong online brands.
Selling online and having an online store does not have to be mutually exclusive though. The truth is brands or not, people want to make sales.

However, it is wise to keep long-term growth in mind and invest in an online store as it will ensure a brand’s future is secure with loyal customers as they grow into a household name.

To create a shop on Zoafia go to [url]zoafia.com[/url] and click on "Create a shop"

#supportNigerianBusinesses #ShopOverProducts #shopToBrands

We are beyond excited to announce that the Zoafia platform is now live at www.zoafia.com! You can visit the site now to create and brand your online shop – a mini website – easily.

Zoafia provides not only a mini-website but a marketplace as well. The Zoafia market will work to bring additional customers who have come to buy in the market to your shop

Once you set up your shop, feel free to share your shop URL to your customers and start selling! If you happen to run into any issues as you do, don’t hesitate to reach out to us by replying to this email or contacting hello@zoafia.com.

Great post. I think starting up or deciding to start up is the main problem for a lot of people. It certainly was mine. On the issue of setting up an online store, there is this platform I stumbled on www.zoafia.com. I think they are pretty cool. By creating a shop you get your own mini-website. No upfront cost. No commission percentage and there is a free version of the platform for shops who are just starting out. You should check it out. I created a shop there please visit and buy from me www.zoafia.com/payche.

alnames:
Hello Everyone,

I really want to know please how do Nigerians get paid doing any of the online businesses.

(1) Let say i want to build a website to start selling e-books locally and internationally?

(2) Affiliate website to earn commissions especially with foreign companies say Affiliate Network companies?

(3) Any others say like Facebook, Google etc

For (1) above : What payment button one expected to have on the website if a customer is interested in purchasing your e-book will click on and what to pay and you getting the money in your account?

For (2) and (3) above: How do Nigerians get their money? Do they pay directly into our local bank account? Or what kind of account acceptable to them to get your money or which of the e-money can a Nigerian present to them to get money?

I really need this info so please, questions, views, comments and suggestions are highly welcome..

Thanks.

Checkout http://zoafia.launchrock.com/

Currently, there are 90 million+ Nigerians on the internet and they spend the majority of their time on social media, popular blogs, and eCommerce websites. With all that traffic, you would think it’s easy for sellers to launch successful shops that are focused on Nigerian audience online, but this is not the case.

Big online marketplaces like Jumia and Konga get most of the internet traffic, and thus compete with smaller shops and entrepreneurs. Yes, they often distribute products from some of these small shops but they do not go as far as promoting them, advertising them or giving them a solid online identity so that customers who have bought from them before can find them when next they want to buy. This makes it difficult for the sellers who sell on such platforms to have repeat customers.

For a seller, new customers + returning customers = Growth

In the US they have platforms like Shopify and Etsy who boast of housing individual shops that average more than a million dollars in revenue sales selling from the platform alone! In Nigeria we have the numbers on the internet ( 90 million plus ) so why aren’t we breeding shops of similar calibre? Why is it still difficult for an individual seller to set up online and start serving millions of Nigerians? Or to have a sizeable and growing customer base online?

Well, it for this very reason we have created Zoafia. Zoafia allows sellers to not only sell, but build and promote their shop brand online, reach more customers and retain their repeat customers. Zoafia achieves this by providing a free storefront (mini-website) for all registered sellers and a general marketplace as well. For us we believe Zoafia is the future.

So… With excitement and great anticipation, we look forward to launching Zoafia to the public in June. But before we do that, we would like to open up the platform to sellers first.
To sign up as a seller visit our pre-launch page http://zoafia.launchrock.com/ and drop your email with us so we can reach you ( needless to say we'll take this down soon as we only want a few sellers, so hurry)

To know more about Zoafia and follow the launch readiness, visit our blog on medium www.medium.com/zoafia
Like the zoafia page on facebook: [url]facebook.com/zoafia[/url]
Follow on twitter: @zoafiaNG

Ps: Share this with your friends who have young or old businesses so they can benefit.
#BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira #SupportNigerianBusinesses #StayHustling

This is a sample shop on Zoafia

If you look around a city like Lagos in Nigeria, it’s easy to see the frustration on the faces of most young adults. Between 1.2 and 2.2 million young Nigerians join the labour force every year, and less than one-third of that number get corporate employment.
These days NYSC has introduced the Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development called SAED. Corpers learn a skill (e.g. bead making), and slowly turn that into a business. But there is a greater opportunity.
Currently there are about 90 million Nigerians on the internet, this means that what a seller needs will now be to have a storefront on the internet that he can post inventories to and start growing an online identity and brand for their shop... Potentially you can sell to 90 million Nigerians.

The problem is that there are already existing marketplaces where sellers sell online, however these marketplaces also have inventory of their own and because of that, they starve individual shops of an identity and more importantly their customers cannot return to buy from them because they don't remember them.
Returning customers = Growth.

BUT

Something is cooking, it's called Zoafia, it's a storefront and marketplace that allows sellers to list inventory, sell, grow their shop's online Identity, and keep their customers coming back. Zoafia does not own inventory of its own, therefore won't compete with sellers' shops. If you are a seller, with Zoafia your customers can find your brand easily, they can follow your shop to see every new inventory you have. Zoafia also has a marketplace where your shop will appear once you open your shop. This means that old customers will come back to buy, new customers can discover your shop. THIS IS THE REAL MEANING OF ONLINE BUSINESS GROWTH.

To be invited to Zoafia beta test click here http://zoafia.launchrock.com/

To find out more about Zoafia check this out https://medium.com/ZoafiaNg/for-nigerian-entrepreneurs-4962f9416f59#.2e4x9f6pp