Key takeaways
Media is typically the largest contributor to page weight on retail ecommerce sites. Slow load times directly reduce conversion rates, with a one-second delay costing up to 20% of conversions.
A DAM stores and organizes your assets but doesn’t transform or deliver them. Ecommerce image optimization requires a delivery layer, which is a separate problem.
Amplience Dynamic Media generates every image variant from a single master asset, on demand, at the point of delivery. No pre-rendering. No file sprawl.
Serving images in modern formats like AVIF delivers 20-30% better compression than WebP. That directly improves LCP scores without reducing visual quality.
Because Amplience combines DAM and delivery in a single platform, you’re managing one system instead of three. Fewer integrations. Fewer failure points.
Retailers using Amplience Dynamic Media have seen a 60% conversion uplift at DFS, a 44% site speed improvement at Clarks, and a 40% site speed increase at The Gym Group.
Your shoppers decide in milliseconds. A hero image that hangs, a product shot that pops in late, a video that buffers. Each one is a reason to leave. And media is almost always the heaviest load on the page.
This is the first of a two-article series on Amplience Dynamic Media. Here, we cover why media performance is a revenue problem, why a DAM on its own won’t fix it, what Dynamic Media is, and the results customers are seeing. The second article covers how it works and when to use it.
Why media performance is a revenue problem
Images and video make up the bulk of page weight on most retail ecommerce sites. When that weight goes unmanaged, pages load slowly. And slow pages cost money.
The link is direct. Google measures real-world load speed through Core Web Vitals, and those scores feed both search ranking and conversion. As one of our customer’s developer put it, “a one second delay in load time can impact conversions by up to 20%, so every millisecond matters.“ Slower pages mean higher bounce, lower ranking, and fewer baskets.
The old way of managing media makes this worse, not better. Your team pre-produces a separate image file for every size, crop, device, and channel. One product becomes dozens of files. Multiply that across a full catalog and every campaign, and you have a production line that’s slow, manual, and expensive. Storage grows. Agency and studio bills grow. Engineering time disappears into resizing and reformatting work that adds no value.
Then, the channels multiply. New devices, new screen sizes, new formats, new markets. Every addition multiplies the asset problem. You’re waiting on developers or production for the simplest change. The content supply chain seizes up at exactly the moment the business needs it to move faster.
Unmanaged media is a quiet drag on digital revenue, brand consistency, and team velocity all at once.
Why a DAM alone won’t fix your media performance
It’s an easy assumption. You buy a digital asset management system, expecting it to solve media performance. It won’t, because that’s not what a DAM does.
A DAM stores and organizes your assets. It handles versioning, metadata, tagging, and governance. All useful. But put an image in and you get the same image out. A DAM doesn’t transform that image for each device, doesn’t negotiate the lightest modern format, and doesn’t deliver it from a global edge. Storage and organization are not the same as transformation and delivery.
So, the performance problem stays unsolved. Your team still pre-produces variants by hand, or worse, you serve heavy originals straight to shoppers. Upload a 3MB master and a DAM will happily serve a 3MB file to a phone on a mobile connection. That’s the exact opposite of what Core Web Vitals reward.
To close the gap with a DAM-only setup, you end up bolting a separate image CDN onto the stack. Now you’re running three vendors and three contracts. A CMS, a DAM, and an image delivery service. Your transformation logic lives in one system and your assets live in another. Every integration is another failure point and another thing to maintain.
This matters even more as new DAM products add asset stores without a delivery layer underneath. A store is table stakes. The performance advantage is in what happens at the moment of delivery.
What is Amplience Dynamic Media?
Dynamic Media is the delivery layer a DAM doesn’t give you. It transforms and delivers images and video in real time, from a single master asset.
Here’s the core idea. You store one high quality master. Every variant a shopper or channel needs is generated on the fly through the URL or API. No pre-rendering. No file sprawl. One source of truth, many outputs.
The capabilities behind that idea include:
Real-time image transformation. Resize, scale, crop, and rotate through simple URL parameters, plus effects like sharpening and color adjustment. Hundreds of transformations, all on demand.
Smart, automatic formats. Add fmt=auto and the CDN detects the browser and serves the best format available, from AVIF to WebP to JPEG. AVIF through Amplience Accelerated Media offers 20 to 30 percent better compression than WebP, which cuts page weight without cutting quality.
Responsive delivery and point of interest cropping. The right image, at the right size, automatically cropped to keep the subject in frame across every device.
Rich media. Zoom, 360 spin sets, shoppable images, and video transcoding that converts a single video into the formats, resolutions, and aspect ratios each device and channel needs.
Global delivery and caching. A multi-tier caching architecture, from the browser to a global edge network, keeps media fast at scale and steady under traffic spikes.
It’s API-first and URL-driven, so it fits a composable or headless stack and slots in alongside your existing systems. Crucially, in Amplience the DAM and the delivery layer are the same platform. Assets, metadata, transformations, and delivery in one place, not three.
How does Dynamic Media handle catalogs with 100,000+ SKUs?
The math is what makes this decisive. A brand with 100,000 SKUs needs a thumbnail, a product page hero, a mobile crop, a zoom view, a social square, and an email variant for every product. Pre-generating all of that means more than 600,000 files, every one of which has to be re-rendered whenever something changes. That’s operationally impossible to keep current.
Dynamic Media replaces it with one master per SKU. Every downstream variant is a URL parameter away. Adding a new channel is a new URL template, not a new production run.
How does Dynamic Media improve Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are a confirmed Google ranking signal, so for retailers whose revenue depends on search, this is direct commercial ROI.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint). The hero or product image is almost always the largest element on a commerce page. With fmt=auto, Dynamic Media serves a right-sized, modern format from the edge, which is exactly the lever that improves LCP. A plain DAM serves whatever was uploaded.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). Images that load without declared dimensions cause the page to jump. Dynamic Media delivers correctly sized images that let you reserve space and remove image-related layout shift.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint). Lighter pages parse faster, which contributes to quicker, smoother interactivity.
The outcome is the part that matters. Faster pages. Consistent, on-brand media on every screen. Better search visibility. And far less manual production work.
What results are Amplience Dynamic Media customers seeing?
A leading US home and houseware retailer rebuilt their content operation on Amplience and put marketers and designers in control of high-quality media without constant developer input. The result was high image quality with no performance penalty, response times consistently below 125 milliseconds even through pandemic traffic spikes, Lighthouse accessibility scores of 94 and above, and a 77% year over year increase in traffic.
John Lewis replaced Adobe Scene7 with Dynamic Media for over 70 million images, using transformation templates, video transcoding, and automatic point of interest cropping to optimize and deliver media at scale.
Published Amplience case studies point the same way. DFS reports a 60% conversion uplift and a 90% reduction in production time. Clarks improved site speed by 44%, lifted add-to-basket rate by 79%, and grew conversion by 19%. The Gym Group increased site speed by 40%. The pattern is consistent. Lighter, faster, smarter media moves the numbers that leaders care about.
What this means for your revenue
Media is the heaviest part of your page and one of the biggest levers on speed, ranking, and conversion. A DAM stores your assets. It doesn’t deliver them. Dynamic Media turns a slow, manual production problem into a single master and an API call, and delivers the right version, in the right format, at the right size, from the edge. That’s what moves your Core Web Vitals and clears out your image operations overhead.
See it on your own content. Book a demo.