Updating pictures with selection changes?

Shopping cart selection changes

[AFemaleProdigy]

Hello everyone! I am trying to find shopping cart software which will update the picture of the item as the user changes details such as color. So let's say you are looking at a green t-shirt with the color green selected. You change the color selection to blue and the picture updates to show a blue version of the same shirt. I have yet to find shopping cart software that already is programmed to do this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks so much,

Jessica

[lorax]

Greetings and welcome to WebmasterWorld!
This isn't likely to be a standard function in an off-the-shelf product.

[jecasc]

I agree with lomax. If you want to have customized features I would suggest you go for an Open Source shopping cart like Oscommerce and find someone to add the features you need.

I know that for OSCommerce several contributions (add-ons) exist that come close to what you need and could easily be adjusted.

[oscommerce.com...]

[jsinger]

Better question is whether such gimmicks are worth the effort. Web doesn't render colors accurately. Not even close in some cases.

Are you talking about switching out actual photos as some of the "big sites" do? Or do you intend to "colorize" a line drawing, which is cheaper to implement.

There are loading speed and maintenance issues to consider. I see a lot of newbie sites with these gimmicks. Come back 6 months later and they've been removed.

If you offer your shirts in a few colors with common names (ie. red, black), you don't even need swatches from my experience.

[webtress]

Dynamically changing the image based on customer selection will most likely have to be custom programmed. One company offers this as a service with either monthly fee or purchase software and server outright. For the monthly be ready to spend at least 1k month. If you are serious sticky me for the name but please only if your serious as I'll have to hunt that email down again.

[pbradish]

CS Cart does this automatically.

[CernyM]

We had the x-cart developers custom implement a solution for us. Charge was reasonable, a few hundred dollars for that and some other customizations, if I recall.

We load standard sized images into the cart and it swaps them out for us when the user mouses over that color swatch.

We sell women's clothing in a variety of colors. Being able to show the colors, even with the imperfections of various monitors is important in our market. "Red" or "blue" or "black" is simply not enough. Is it a cool red or warm? Is the black a true black does it have a grey or blue cast? How much violet does the blue have in it?

[jsinger]

Being able to show the colors, even with the imperfections of various monitors is important in our market.

Far, far more is involved than just monitor variations such as type (CRT or LCD) or monitor adjustments. Where are you getting the colors to start with? An actual product or a product photo. RGB or CMYK graphics? What kind of video card and settings?

At one time we didn't use swatches and stuck to products with fairly obvious colors...white, black, red. A very few people asked for swatches or they wanted to see the actual item in the "real" color.

So we added swatches around 2001--not 100% accurate ones, of course. But as good as possible. Wine looks like brown on many machines. Light colors tend to do better. Funny thing, not one customer has ever mentioned that our product didn't match the color on their monitor. Our site does emphasize that all swatches are approximate.

[CernyM]

Far, far more is involved than just monitor variations such as type (CRT or LCD) or monitor adjustments. Where are you getting the colors to start with? An actual product or a product photo. RGB or CMYK graphics? What kind of video card and settings?

We shoot all our own photos of all our own products on all our own models in our own studio with known light sources and temperatures. We then do all of our digital photo processing/editing using a calibrated monitor and video card setup.

Before we showed the clothing in all colors on model, we got many calls asking us to better describe the colors. Verbal descriptions of colors can only go so far, but putting the actual images up has cut the number of calls on that topic to virtually zero. Some returns do come back with "color is not as expected" as a return code, but that percentage is vanishingly small.

It would be better if all monitors were correctly calibrated, but in our market, showing colors imperfectly is superior to not showing them at all.

[jsinger]

We shoot all our own photos of all our own products on all our own models

Gee, I thought I was doing ok with my Sony camera and a tiny photo studio in a corner of the basement which I use when our suppliers don't have useable graphics. You're probably in the top .01% of websites with that set up

[CernyM]

You're probably in the top .01% of websites with that set up

Really?

Our entire camera+lighting+backdrops+software+hardware setup could be had for less than $2500.00. It all fits nicely in the unused lobby of our office.

Our normal model is less than $50/hour though we've spent more than that occasionally when we had a specific look we wanted.

[minnapple]

I worked for twenty years in printing business mostly with retailers and catalog companies including LLBean, Target, LandsEnd.

We spent many years perfecting color matching and set up standards that optimized the process from photography to print.

Those variables were somewhat in our control.
As mentioned, with the deviation in monitors, calibration is out of your control.

However, there are certain colors groups that will vary more than others depending on what medium you are using to present them.

In short, buy a few cheap used monitors and used them to determine the natural variation of color groups, and when possible, try to avoid purchasing/selling the colors groups that have the greatest variation.

[jsinger]

Minnapple, would you agree with my (limited) experience that darker colors, such as wine or navy, render more unpredictably on the web than lighter colors?

Also, do you have any opinions on how best to create web color swatches:

1) Cells with BG colors
2) Solid color gifs created by software
3) scans of actual products

I've seen swatches/color samples done each way over the years.