This topic is red hot.
Shopping online is always something of a gamble, but there’s one controversial detail that can turn the perfect piece into a fashion fumble: color.
And, for a majority of web customers, the one color that confuses them all is red.
Yotpo, an e-commerce marketing platform, analyzed 51 million customer reviews to find that among those mentioning the color red, 70% were negative, Retail Brew reported.
The main issue with red products was a discrepancy in the shade of red that the customer thought they were getting.
“This sweatshirt looks nothing like the photo,” a one-star review noted in the report said, not naming the retailer. “Raspberry red — nothing like the soft coral in the photo.”
According to the report, there’s no way to know if the mixup is the fault of the brand or the consumer.
The brand might have photographed the item poorly or had it in bad lighting when taking the product image. On the other hand, the consumer’s device screen settings might be skewing the color.
Regardless, the stakes are higher for the brand since it now has to face the potential loss of a customer as well as cope with the likelihood and the expense of the product being returned.
The report advised brands and companies to describe the shade of red in product descriptions to avoid this kind of mix-up and hassle.
“Use specific color descriptions (think ‘cherry red’ or ‘brick red ’),” the report suggested.
It also noted that it could be a good idea to photograph the products next to “familiar red objects like strawberries” and shoot them in a variety of lighting settings to see how the color varies in different situations.
