Retail and e-commerce guide

Cloudinary is a powerful microservice that seamlessly integrates into your tech stack, managing images and videos end-to-end at scale to ensure exceptional performance, quality, and a standout visual experience.

For e-commerce, this translates to faster load times, visually cohesive product displays, and a seamless, high-quality shopping experience across websites, marketplaces, and social platforms.

To get the most out of this guide, we recommend the following approach:

• Start with Best practices to understand the foundational elements Cloudinary provides. This section outlines key considerations that will help you make informed decisions before implementation.

• Explore Visual differentiators to find out which branding, personalization, and immersive image and video techniques you'd like to incorporation in order to create a distinctive and engaging shopping experience for your customers.

• Use the Workflows section for step-by-step guidance on structuring efficient image and video workflows. This section provides detailed examples for managing both product and non-product images, helping you tailor Cloudinary’s capabilities to your organization’s needs.

Best practices

This section covers foundational elements Cloudinary provides to elevate your image and video strategy—ensuring speed, SEO, accessibility, and seamless optimization from the start. Learn about key considerations before implementation.

Concept	Description
Single source of truth for assets	Maintain a centralized Media Library to ensure consistency across all platforms.
Store once, transform dynamically as needed	Store a single original asset and generate transformations on demand for different use cases (e.g., print, web, social media). This approach simplifies asset management, reduces redundancy, and streamlines updates for branding and layout changes.
Manage asset rights and compliance	Track, manage, and enforce usage rights for image and video assets to ensure compliance with licensing and branding guidelines.
Optimize assets for SEO	Take steps to maximize your SEO, including hostname, friendly URL structure, and alt-text and video transcription.
Ensure asset accessibility	Ensure your site meets accessibility standards, including color contrast compliance, automated alt text for images, and video translation and transcription for users with hearing impairments—all of which also benefit SEO.
Improve image and video performance	Automate image and video optimization with CDN delivery, resizing, compression, format conversion, lazy loading, and adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) to improve performance, reduce load times, and ensure a consistent experience across devices.

Visual differentiators

This page highlights techniques for creating a unique and engaging shopping experience by strengthening branding, personalizing content, and using immersive images and videos to capture customer attention.

Feature	Description
User-Generated Content (UGC)	Manage and display content created by users, such as reviews or social media posts.
Personalization at scale	Tailor images and videos to specific audience segments for better engagement.
Images to videos	Convert images into dynamic videos for enhanced product presentation.
Interactive video experiences	Add overlays, clickable elements, and dynamic effects to videos to boost engagement and conversion rates.
3D and immersive image and video experiences	Manage and deliver 3D images for interactive and immersive customer experiences, including 360 spin sets, and augmentative reality.
Image restoration	Restore old campaign images so that you can reuse them in great form.

Workflows

This section provides step-by-step guidance on structuring efficient image and video workflows, covering both product and non-product images.

Workflow	Description
Product images and videos	Automate the end-to-end workflow for managing, optimizing, and delivering product visuals with consistency and quality.
Non-product, content, or editorial images and videos	Organize, optimize, and distribute non-product images and videos, including editorial content and promotional assets. Note: Companies may use different terms—content, editorial, or non-product images and videos. For consistency, we'll use non-product images and videos throughout.
Multi-channel content delivery	Ensure optimized images and videos for web, mobile apps, social platforms, marketplaces, and email campaigns.