Images - What's best for customers?

[Baa]

From a marketing standpoint rather than a webmaster what do you use for images and why? I have lightbox and popup images but I can't see any difference in how people react to these so I was wondering about other styles.

There are an increasing number of sites who use a zoom style with by hovering the mouse over an area of the image to zoom or by use of a slider you can move about. These are still used on just the one image in the most part which isn't always ideal. Are these customer friendly (I'm a bit of a dinosaur in these matters) and do they help customers view the parts of the product they want or are they just another faddy mouse tail that will quickly become annoying in a year or two?

[seamus]

I tend to use the lightbox style mod on images or a flash slideshow for galleries, I'm not too keen on the image hover type of mods.
Personally I don't want to have images enlarge just by hovering the cursor over them, I think its quite distracting, I like images to enlarge only when I want them to, with the image hover mods the images have a habit of appearing when all I'm trying to do is move the cursor to the menu and I've rolled over an image on the way, before I know it I've a full size image on my screen that I didn't want, can be slightly annoying.

thats my opinion atleast, I've no idea if people preffer them or not 

[Andy c]

yeah I to much prefer an image that I have to click on to enlarge ,there is nothing worse than trying to view and read a page when I flipping box overtakes what you are reading ...that facebook share thing is bl++dy bad enough

[Baa]

TBH I agree with you both, I find the hover n zooming thing really slow and distracting.  I tried to give an example but the link took so long to open I'd started to get annoyed  I like the lightbox effect especially those with the option to view other images without having to scroll but I also know some viewers really hate them as well. I don't like the pop up images myself.

I'm trying to find ways to make it less click based for the customer to find information they need.

[Andy c]

er .... can I suggest ...... please don't take this the wrong way , I spent hours adding your model numbers to every item you sell as they weren't in the csv file I downloaded ..I find that to be the best way to find any item on your site and to get around
yep I've gone from part time to full time on your items have only been live 2 days but am getting there .

[Click SSL]

Hey thank you all for sharing beautiful information. Customers are God of any business and in e-commerce sites it is very importance to know how to grab them and know what they really needed..