We hated the way every other shopping cart handled this.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and nothing could be more true for online stores.  Having good pictures of your products does more than just show off the item - it gives buyers a sense that they're buying something real, and that it's the exact item they're looking for.  Studies have shown that even when a customer knows the specific item they're looking for by UPC, part number, or model number, they are more inclined to buy from the site that shows a picture of the item when all other factors are the same.

The trouble with product pictures is that these images are generally used in different places throughout the site - of course you'll see the nice large image on the product's own page, but smaller versions are often used in category listings, search results, or as icons when viewing the shopping cart contents.  Additionally, if you're selling items where you didn't snap your own photos, you might find yourself with a variety of widths and heights - and they'll all need to be resized to fit.

Not anymore.

We took a different approach to the product image process and created our own proprietary sizing and storage technology.  This lets you upload one high-resolution image - we don't care how big it is - and based on the style settings for your site, our system will scale that image to fit the appropriate area where it's being displayed.  Don't mistake this for some width/height specification in the browser - we're talking an actual binary resample, the same way a graphics program like Photoshop does it.  In the Store Settings area, you can specify the width and height of how product images should be displayed in the different areas they're used and when an image is first called upon the server will open the large image you uploaded and rescale it to the appropriate size based on your settings.  And you don't have to guess at these settings either, all of the Themes and templates we offer each have their own setting, so generally you'll never even have to mess with it.

But it gets even better.  The one thing we hated the most with our own ecommerce sites was that when you had a mix of "tall" pictures and "wide" pictures, it just never looked right on the site.  We fixed that with a setting (it can be turned on or off if you don't want to use it) that renders your image centered inside a fixed-width/fixed-height transparent canvas.  This makes it so that your images will always be the exact dimensions you set, regardless of what size they were when you uploaded them.  Now you can go crazy with your CSS layouts and really make your site look the way you want it to no matter what size your product images were.

And if you change your mind and want to go bigger or smaller later, don't worry - just change the setting in the control panel, and all of your images will instantly be re-scaled to the new setting.  You will never have to re-upload different sized versions of your pictures again.