NA users are frequently asking me for additional photos of games I'm selling on JJGames.  One photo wouldn't quite be enough.  I can totally understand. 

We recently started taking three photos of every cartridge game that comes into JJGames and showing them on the website. Front, back, and top label.  Looks like the below screenshot after clicking any of the blue camera icons.  You can cycle between the images by clicking on them to make them larger.  And the photos are available on every product page and on the shopping cart page too.
For example:
https://www.jjgames.com/product/6506/super-mario-bros-3-nes

I'd love to hear feedback on this feature.  Think these photos are enough info?  Any other improvements we can/should make to help you when shopping?

 

I think that's perfect. I think maybe a board pic of more expensive games of 50+ maybe if you sell those. No reason to complain with those photos though. You know what you're buying.

Better lighting across the board, and beware blurry photos. The first SMB3 I came across that actually had photos looks like this:



It looks like there's some backlighting going on, but that's not going to show much of what people actually want to see.

This one looks pretty good overall:



But this one seems to be more the norm (at least on SMB3 games, which is all I checked):

Awesome feedback.  I'll definitely work with the photo folks to improve the quality of the images.  I've shared a few tips with them based on the setup we have so hopefully they will be better quality going forward.

Thank you

 

However you fine tune it, I think this is an excellent decision. Well done!

You could try to rig a couple light stations. Affix a ringlight under a small table (like an end table) and put the camera under the table, also affixed to it. Then run a button to it and just have your picture takers push the button, flip, push the button, flip one more time.

Mark a square for the area in the photo ans have them place an ID tag below the image. Something like this could improve the time of photography and help improve the quality.

I second games over $100 having board pics, ans maybe even lower. If you can streamline the process with home-built hardware like I mentioned, taking the extra time to photograph boards of, say, 10-15% of your carts shouldn'r be that bad.

It would be nice to have pictures of the Manuals and inside of the Genesis cases. These are things I look for when buying Genesis and Master System for that matter.

We have a photo station built similar to what your describing.
https://blog.jjgames.com/2019/02/how-to-take-multiple-produc...

This is version 1.0 but we are working on 3.0 now to improve the quality and give photographers more room for their hands (instead of using a box).  

Thanks for suggestions on boards.  I'll think about how we can do that.  We do open an inspect every board for games over $100 (or commonly faked) to ensure the games are genuine but we don't have anything setup to share those photos.
 

Thank you.  I'll try opening a few of those for photos of contents for Genesis boxes.
 

I'll be honest, so long as an online seller has a no-strings-attached return policy, I'm not affraid to order potentially fake games because I know I can just ship them back.  In that case, and for your company, I don't need the pics.  Still, there are others who may not read the fine print and seeing the boards might get you additional sales.   I don't know.  Some people just aren't as prone to return stuff as I am.

Regardless, thanks for taking advice.

EDIT

Oh, dang!  I just looked at the photos of your photographing setup.  That's pretty smart.  Better to have 3x cameras snap at once than 1x snapping 3 times!  Only (very minor) faults I see with that setup is it's cardboard so it won't last long, and the cables.  The cables are no big deal at all though.  Regarding the photos, some are blurry, some aren't.  Thos look like Logitect C920s.  I can't recall, but there might be a way to set manual focus.  if the carts land in the same general spot, you should be able to focus them once and forget it.  Logitech has two applications to manage these cameras.  Once for standard users and one for gamers.  I've only glanced at the gamer settings.  There might  be settings to change the focus but I can't quite recall.

Glad you like the setup.  Version 2.0 is an all wood box and much bigger with cords all moved to the edges.  Version 3.0 (working on now) will remove the box entirely and have boom mic stand for top camera and plexiglass stand for each game.  Should make it faster for photographers to take photos with no box to hinder their movement.  Lights will be placed on stands too.

Sounds like you know your webcams    They are C920's.  You're exactly right, if they are focused once it does remember that and keep the settings.  I just have to make sure the photographers do that every time.  We changed our photo program to go through all items for one console before moving to the next one (all NES before doing all SNES) to reduce the time needed to manually focus.

I'm going to finish work on 3.0 today and do a training tomorrow for all photographers.  Should have the focus issues fixed soon.

 

Oh man, this is the future. For the most part I only buy carts where I can see the entire label (because I'm not going to bother messaging the seller for each one). Great upgrade. It looks like I've made 33 JJGames orders in the past few years, compared to 11 estarland and 1 DKOldies, and the pictures are the main reason for that.

In addition to lighting and focus, make sure the label itself is centered for the end label pics rather than the whole cart. Some of the pics get very close to the edge or cut off the edge of the label but have the whole plastic bit of the cartridge in view, which rarely has condition issues worth mentioning.

I'll throw out there that I usually shop alphabetically searching for some variant or filler things I need. When sorting through the list, if you click a game it brings you to that individual cartridge's page, but I always want to go through the pictures of each listing available for sale to find the best one. So after seeing that a game I want in the list, I open a new tab and search for the game manually to bring the game's store page up (rather than one individual cart for sale). It would be cool to get the pop up picture link in the alphabetical list, or otherwise have an easier way to get to the game's store page from the alphabetical list.

Thanks for the repeat purchases.  Definitely appreciated.  Glad to hear the photos made the difference.

Good feedback about label being in photo and not cut off.  I'm adding a change to our Version 3.0 that will help the photographers align everything without anything being cut off.  

Photos on the "all items" page would be tough because it lists thousands of games at once.  We would need to load all of those images.  We might be able to do it only after clicking.  I'll look into that.  The other links on the specific item page are good ones.  I'll add those now and they should go into production in the next few days with the next round of updates.
 

I would suggest looking into lazy loading if you've not already done so. It's easy to implement and provides huge savings on image load for a page such as this.
 

Good suggestion.  We do that for the product pages (load the images after the page has fully loaded), but I didn't want mobile users to load 1,000 images.  They will probably only need a few for the games they're interested in.  I'll try another variation on lazy loading though where the image isn't downloaded until the user clicks on the image icon.  I did that in one PriceCharting application and it works quite well.

Definitely don't want the page load to wait for tons of images to load.  I hate slow websites as much as the next guy  
 

The beauty of lazy loading is it's more a concept than a strict functionality - you simply want to not load images to the DOM until they're actually needed. So on mobile you could still use the same lazy loading logic as on desktop, simply have them load on click rather than position/visibility.
 

Totally agree.  I'll work on getting those images onto the page with some sort of lazy loading implementation.  Thanks

 

Thanks for posting this! Found this thread looking for more info about JJ Games, as I've been scoping your store for a while. Admittedly, I've yet to make a purchase.

I love that you have photos, but in a few instances, the pics have been a tad blurry. This makes it difficult to tell how good the label actually is. It's fine if you're less selective about condition. However, if you're like me and prefer games with minimal scratches or label wear (i.e. something in truly mint condition), this makes it far more challenging to justify a purchase. Truth be told, it's prevented me from buying at least once.

The other issue is when there aren't three photos. There's a SNES game I've been looking at that only has two pics -- front and back, but none of the top. Definitely a concern, not being able to see the top of the cartridge. I personally don't feel comfortable buying a SNES game without being able to see it from above, especially with games costing $50+.

Finally, some pics of the back label are taken through what appears to be a scratched-up glass surface. This makes it really tough to tell whether any pictured wear is the game or the glass. The picture isn't as valuable if something's obstructing your view of the product. Just as an example, I wouldn't want to buy a game in a glass case without first seeing it up close; I also wouldn't want to buy it after only seeing a photo of it through a glass case.

As for other suggestions, when it comes to games with a front label that folds over the top, I love to see the top-front edge. It offers a more realistic impression of the label's condition and reveals any wear that might not be visible straight-on. This gives shoppers a far better idea of what to expect when they get the game.  

Great feedback on the photos. We try to get them as clear as possible but I'll talk with the photo takers to make sure they are getting photos more clear before they are uploaded.

SNES carts should have photos taken of all three sides. If you can give me an example when they are not, I'll definitely look into that.

I'll ask the warehouse folks to replace the glass that they take the photos through to get rid of that scratching. We use a glass panel to take the photos so we can take 3 photos at once.
https://www.jjgames.com/blog/5/ho...

Otherwise it takes too much time to take the photos of each game three times.

So I went to go buy all your Dragon Warriors a week or so back. I couldn't figure out how to add them all because you are so much more detailed than other sites, lol. I did take some time and go through the different ones, looking at the high and low. I thought it was super cool and way intense. That site is not joking around.

Question regarding the photo taking process: Is it a proper camera? Is it on a tripod? 

If you're using an SLR (you can get a cheap one - you really just need manual focus) you should be fine if you set it up ahead of time on a tripod and just always place the games in the same spot in front of them. You'd literally NEVER get blurry photos; set it up once, confirm it looks good, and you're off to the races. 

EDIT: I just saw your post... are those... webcams?

Totally understand! It makes sense taking them all in one shot. I think that's really smart!

I just sent you a PM with the specific example I was referring to.  

FYI, just browsing these again, and noticed the third SMB3 from the top (currently) is actually a super rare variant:

OOOooo, the rare Mario 3 in the Zelda case with the Zelda circuit board    I'll have them reshoot that photo.

Yeah, we use webcams.  I don't know how SLR work but the webcams work like you described.  As long as they are focused the first time, the next products will all be focused too.  The problem only arises when switching to a new product tht requires camera movement....or user error from not focusing it.

 

Fair nuf! Looks like a pretty efficient setup at the least, and far superior to any other sales system I've seen considering the amount of games going through you!