Thanks to Andrew Maffettone of Seller’s Choice for contributing this guest post on improving your product imagery.

When people shop online, your product is only as good as its pictures. Photos are one of the most powerful tools you have to create a compelling narrative which will convert your brand into sales. Product imagery is a key component of a complete brand strategy that can dominate e-commerce sites.

There is no such thing as a good product image. There are only images that contribute to compelling brand stories, and images that don’t. A non-blurry image with a white background may sell screwdrivers, but an out-of-focus shot in a forest might sell mountain bikes. The good image is the image that works. Consumers make decisions by locating products in values, goals, and strategies. Let’s go through four ideas to help you move toward compelling, story-driven images that sell products:

• Have a diverse portfolio of images to use for different situations.
• Use the right tools, either through in-house setups or outsourcing.
• Tell a story with bold images
• Work from images to brand, not brand to images

An Amazon A/B testing tool helps e-sellers figure out what exactly about their product listing drives customers to act. In a traditional Amazon split test, sellers run variants of their product listing, collecting data over time to figure out which listing garners more conversions and sales.

These four tools can help you carry out an Amazon A/B test. The first three gather data from live tests on the Amazon marketplace. The data comes from actual customers who browse your products—although they do not know their shopping behavior is being monitored for a test.

The fourth helps you choose which variants (such as title, images, and description) customers will like best before you go live with your product and outside of the Amazon marketplace, giving you more control.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Henson Wu from FeedbackWhiz for the following guest post.

Product reviews are an important part of the Amazon marketplace. Almost everyone checks product reviews before making a purchase, and around 84% of people will trust a product review as much as a recommendation from a friend or family member.

Unfortunately, most customers do not leave product reviews. Product reviews are critical to your success, but they can be hard to come by. So what is a seller to do? How do you prompt customers to leave product reviews on Amazon without violating Amazon’s strict terms of service?

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Charles Palleschi of Spark Shipping for the following guest post.

The saying, “What gets measured gets managed” (often erroneously attributed to Peter Drucker), shows that tracking key metrics is important. But it still leaves the question, what e-commerce metrics should we be measuring? These seven KPIs should top your list. Let me explain why.