How to use AI photo editor tools to drive more sales this holiday season
TL;DR
Holiday shopping is a highly competitive time, making it crucial for ecommerce retailers to have high-quality product photos that stand out. Product photography is often the deciding factor in a purchase, as clear, visually appealing images help build trust and showcase product value. AI photo editors, like Photoroom, make it easier to create, edit, and adapt these images quickly for different platforms, from social media to ecommerce sites. By automating tasks like background removal, adding seasonal elements, and retouching images, AI tools save retailers time and resources, while improving the overall quality of their visuals. This ensures that businesses can focus on driving more sales with professional-looking, adaptable product photos during the holiday season.
Holiday shopping is now a truly omnichannel retail experience. At least one third of shoppers plan to exclusively shop online this holiday season with the remainder opting for a hybrid of online and in-store purchases. Showing up across each of these touchpoints is critical, especially during the busy and competitive holiday season.
Photography plays a critical role in that strategy, especially online. 33% of respondents to a recent Instore Magazine survey said that a retailer’s website—and how their products were presented—was the single most influential factor in their purchasing decision.
As a result, retailers of all sizes, from small ecommerce businesses to artisans to big box stores, need to make high-quality and versatile product photography a central focus in their retail strategy. Product photographs need to be high-quality, of course, but retailers also need to be able to adapt and alter them for use across all of their sales and marketing platforms.
AI photo editors, like Photoroom, can help with this process by making it easier to create, edit, and adapt high-quality images for use across various online and in-store platforms. This article will highlight how you can use AI photo editing to easily improve and alter your product photography to drive stronger sales this holiday season.
Table of contents:
The importance of photography for holiday ecommerce sales
There’s no other shopping season quite like the window between Black Friday and Christmas in the United States. Shoppers flock in record numbers to in-person and online stores during this window each year to buy gifts and score deals that aren’t available during the rest of the year.
Why the holidays are important for retailers
Competition is fierce, and the stakes are high for retailers. The holiday shopping season typically accounts for roughly 25% of most retailers’ annual revenue, driving a huge influx of traffic and sales in just a few weeks. That frenzy is only accelerating, especially for online sales.
Retail ecommerce—or sales from online stores—made up 19.3% of U.S. holiday sales in 2023, up from 11.3% in 2022. The total value of those sales was an eye-popping $253 billion, jumping 45.4% from 2022. And if that’s not enough to highlight the importance of online sales during the holiday season, consider that those numbers are expected to grow once again in 2024.
Holiday sales are massively profitable, and online ecommerce is growing rapidly year over year. Having a strong online presence to take advantage of that trend, therefore, should be a top priority for any retailers. And a major part of that strategy is product photography.
How product photographs drive more online sales
Eric from last year’s Photoroom Christmas panel, puts the importance of photography perfectly:
“People buy with their eyes.”
He’s exactly right. In fact, 90% of surveyed shoppers say that high-quality photos are either “extremely important” or “very important” to their purchasing decision. And 60% of digital shoppers want to see an average of three or four images when shopping online for a product.
“If you can create an atmosphere that shoppers can picture themselves in,” explains Eric, “it helps to drive more sales.”
To do that, you need high-quality product photographs. You also need to be able to adapt those photographs to the various settings that shoppers may encounter you in—from ecommerce stores to social media to banner ads. Unfortunately, adapting images to fit all of these settings can take a significant amount of time and resources.
With AI photo editors, they don’t have to. Let’s look at seven ways that AI photo editors like Photoroom can help boost holiday sales by extending your photo editing capabilities and reducing time spent on adapting your imagery.
7 ways to use AI photo editors to boost holiday sales
AI photo editors provide retailers with incredible speed and flexibility, allowing them to quickly create and refine product images with fewer resources. From basic edits like cropping and resizing to advanced features like background removal and image generation, these tools streamline the photo editing process.
As demand surges during the holiday season, AI editors can alleviate time pressures while enhancing product quality. For ecommerce merchants looking to boost their holiday marketing, here are seven ways AI photo editors can help make a big impact.
1. Recycle existing product photos by removing their backgrounds
Reusing your existing product photos is a smart, time-saving strategy for retailers with limited time and resources at their disposal—especially during the holiday rush.
By removing the backgrounds from your current product images, you can easily update and repurpose them for all your holiday campaigns, and for use across your various sales platforms.
Clean, background-free product photos allow you to drop your items into any setting, whether it’s for an online store, social media, ecommerce marketplaces or even in-store digital displays. This makes it easy to create festive, seasonal visuals without the hassle of scheduling new photo shoots.
Removing backgrounds ensures your product is the main focus, free from distractions, and ready to fit any theme you need—from Black Friday sales to Christmas promotions. Once the background is gone, you can add holiday touches like snowflakes, twinkling lights, a cozy backdrop, or any other theme you’re going for, allowing you to create eye-catching visuals that stand out in crowded marketplaces.
Photoroom’s AI Background Remover is a great tool to handle this process quickly and efficiently. It automatically detects the subject of your image and removes the background in seconds, allowing you to either replace it with a new one, or export it with a transparent background. With the batch editing feature, you can also edit entire sets of product photos in one go.
2. Add seasonal and themed backgrounds to product photos
Taking your usual product photos and giving them a festive makeover is an easy way to capture the holiday spirit, align with shoppers, and create unique image variations for use in a seasonal campaign.
Adding holiday backgrounds is one way to do this, and is especially useful for ecommerce retailers looking to refresh their marketing without reshooting new product photos. You can take existing images and apply festive backdrops that align the specific campaigns or themes that you’d like to promote.
Photoroom’s AI Backgrounds tool makes this process quick and easy. You can choose from a range of pre-made holiday-themed templates from the background library or create your own custom scenes. Depending on your campaign or sales and marketing platforms, you can also opt for solid backgrounds. Photoroom also gives you the option to change image background colors in seconds. In all cases, just make sure the background complements your product without overpowering it.
Keep it simple and use contrasting colors to ensure the product stands out. Testing different holiday styles—like traditional, modern, or playful—can help you find the look that resonates most with your audience.
3. Generate new holiday-themed visuals for marketing campaign
Fresh and engaging imagery is important during the holiday shopping season—both for differentiating from the competition and for aligning with the season and existing campaigns. Backgrounds help with this, and so does adding entirely new elements into the image that give it a festive look.
With AI-generated imagery, you can endlessly adapt your existing product photos by adding entirely new backgrounds or objects. Most importantly, you can do this in a matter of seconds using your existing image files, rather than having to re-stage your products and take new shots.
Photoroom’s AI Images tool allows you to create AI images and entirely new, festive scenes based on simple text prompts. For example, you can ask Photoroom to place your product image under a Christmas tree alongside other gifts, or place it in a setting that aligns with how it will be used in real life.
For the best results, be as specific as possible—describe the scene in detail to ensure it matches your vision.
For example, the image below was created using this AI prompt:
A living room with a Christmas tree, stockings, and a glowing fireplace
Once you’ve generated the image, you can seamlessly integrate your products into the scene, creating a cohesive look. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different prompts and styles to keep your visuals fresh and engaging all season long.
4. Quickly adapt your photos for different online platforms
Ecommerce happens across various online platforms, all of which have their own image file specifications. Historically, creating product photos for each of these platforms would be tedious and manual, requiring you to individually resize and save images into various formats.
AI photo editors significantly speed up this process, allowing you to export images in a variety of preset formats that align with major online platforms.
In Photoroom, you can instantly resize images are use on:
Instagram
TikTok
YouTube
Facebook
Pinterest
Ebay
Amazon
Etsy
Shopify
And dozens more.
More importantly for retailers, you can also handle resizing in batches, meaning you can take a large folder of product images and resize them all at once for use on specific platforms. This saves hours of time that would otherwise be spent on manual edits, freeing you up for more impactful work.
5. Retouch and repair product photos without having to reshoot
When preparing for holiday sales season, the last thing you want to do is waste time on simple and repetitive photo edits and repairs. There’s likely not enough time for re-shoots, but you still need to be able to update images as needed.
That’s where AI in photo editing can come in handy, allowing retailers to retouch and repair their images without going back to the studio. Whether it’s removing unwanted objects, fixing blemishes, or adding realistic shadows, these tools help improve the overall quality of your photos quickly, keeping your holiday campaigns running smoothly.
For example, if a product shot includes distracting background elements or unwanted objects, the Magic Eraser tool from Photoroom can remove them in seconds. This is perfect for ecommerce retailers needing to create clean, professional images without investing in reshoots.
Similarly, AI Shadows can add studio-quality shadows, giving depth and realism to your product images, which enhances the visual appeal on platforms like your website or social media ads. The example below includes both shadows and a reflection of the product to make it stand out even more.
Other tools at your disposal include color or black and white filters to create specific moods and themes, an image brightener, a blur background tool, and an image resizer.
All of these features are available with a few taps, allowing you to quickly update and export new product photos for use across all of your sales and marketing properties.
6. Add stickers and graphics to boost engagement
Stickers and graphic overlays are a tried and tested sales technique that helps you call attention to specific holiday deals and promotions. They’re simple graphic elements that help you emphasize limited time offers and sales, helping you grab shoppers’ attention and pull them toward specific products and offers.
You can also use stickers and graphics to add playful and engaging elements to your product photos, helping them stand out on social media and on ecommerce platforms. For example, you can include callouts for different parts of the product that differentiate it from the competition.
AI photo editors like Photoroom allow you to quickly add stickers and graphics to your photos, without having to waste time in bulking editing suites. Photoroom’s sticker library, for example, comes stacked with hundreds or premade graphics like “30% off” labels and other festive icons.
7. Highlight promotions with curved text
Lastly, you can add creative, curved text to product photos to further draw attention to holiday promotions and special messages for your customers.
Curved text captures attention from shoppers, ensuring that your message is delivered and consumed. It makes the perfect addition to product photos, turning them into marketing banners, social media ads, and other holiday-themed promotions.
Photoroom’s curved text features lets you add and edit fonts directly over your product photos, wrap it around images and into festive shapes.
Key benefits of using AI photo editors to prepare for holiday sales
To maximize sales during the holiday season, retailers need to ensure that their product photos are captivating, usable across platforms and campaigns, and detailed enough to convert browsers into buyers.
AI photo editors not only simplify the editing process but also open up new creative possibilities that help you position your products in the best possible light, and differentiate yourself in a crowded online marketplace. Tasks that once required hours of meticulous work—like removing backgrounds or making complex adjustments—can now be done in seconds, allowing you to experiment and innovate without being bogged down by manual edits.
Here are some specific benefits of using AI photo edits to prepare for holiday sales:
Time savings. AI tools like Photoroom allow you to quickly edit large batches of images, freeing up time to focus on other areas of your business.
Cost efficiency. With AI, you can achieve professional-quality edits without the expense of hiring external designers or photographers.
Enhanced creativity. Automating routine tasks allows you to experiment with creative elements, from custom backgrounds to unique image effects, enabling more engaging holiday visuals.
Improved image quality. Tools like background removal, object erasing, and shadow creation ensure your product images are polished and ready to convert.
Scalability. AI tools empower small teams to handle large workloads, making it easier to manage high-volume product listings or campaigns during peak seasons.
Ultimately, AI photo editors not only improve the quality of your product photos but also enable you to focus on driving strategic growth, increasing conversions, and delivering a seamless customer experience during the holiday season.
"Whether it’s repurposing an existing photo with a new background or turning a simple photo into a sale-generating masterpiece, Photoroom will continue to play a pivotal role in our growth and success.”
— Nick Hawkins, Founder, The 1994 Candle Co.
Prepare for the holiday shopping season with Photoroom
Product images play a critical role in driving buyer engagement and sales, and that’s no more apparent than during the holiday seasons. Retailers rake in, on average, 25% of their annual sales during the holiday season, making it the single most important period of the year. There’s limited margin for error, and retailers need to be able to put their best foot forward, without having to spend hours on repetitive, low impact tasks.
Photoroom AI photo editor helps to relieve some of the immense holiday season pressure by dramatically expanding and expediting your photo editing capabilities. Forget about reshooting product photos or spending hours in Photoshop, Instead, you can update, expand, and reuse for your existing product photos across all of your online sales and marketing platforms—all within a matter of seconds in an online or desktop app.
Get your product photography ready for the holiday season with Photoroom, either using the desktop version or by downloading the mobile app through the App Store or Google Play Store.
FAQ
What is an AI photo editor?
An AI photo editor is a software tool that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically enhance and manipulate images. They can perform tasks such as:
Background removal
Background and object generation
Object recognition
Color correction
Image retouching
And more
All of this is possible with minimal user input, and at a fraction of the time required from traditional photo editing applications.
AI photo editors like Photoroom use machine learning and neural networks to analyze and understand images, for more efficient editing processes.
Why are product photographs important for holiday sales?
High-quality product photographs are crucial during the holiday season because they capture the attention of shoppers in a competitive market. Well-shot images help showcase the product’s value, build trust, and increase the likelihood of conversions, especially when customers can’t physically interact with the item.
How can AI help to drive ecommerce sales?
AI can significantly boost ecommerce sales by streamlining tasks like product photography, data analysis, and customer segmentation. It enables businesses to personalize shopping experiences, optimize pricing strategies, and test user behavior to improve conversions, helping retailers make smarter, faster decisions during high-demand periods like the holidays.
