Avoid These 5 Amazon Product Photography Mistakes to Ace the World’s Largest Marketplace!

Bad product photos make no sales. That’s a fact when you’re dealing with the world’s largest online market. Unless you’ve hit the golden goose and your product is the very first on the market solving a worldwide problem… yeah, it’s still not going to sell with a bad photo. You can search for every Amazon product photography tip in the book, but if you don’t know the mistakes to avoid, you could wind up gathering dust instead of making sales. 

Let’s fix that.

With these Amazon product photography tips, you can avoid the common mistakes that sink products harder than the 20th page on google. Even by mastering just the basics, your products can get in front of the buyers who need them. But first, let’s go over the top 5 mistakes you are going to avoid. 

You are going to avoid them, right? Good. We know you have it in you.

Mistake #1: Your backgrounds look busier than a crosswalk in downtown Tokyo.

Repeat after us. White. Clean. Backgrounds. 

Amazon prefers to promote product images that showcase the product in a clean and clear manner. That means your very first photo, known as the Main Photo, should feature a white background and a clear view of your whole product. 

Photos with colored backgrounds are acceptable if they showcase a specific product feature, but they should be relegated to your secondary photos. Your customer’s first encounters should be clean and pristine. 

If you really need the perfect amazon product photography backdrop and white just won’t do, keep it a solid color. Black, Green, and Red are your friends in such scenarios, but they can be hit or miss.

Mistake #2: Showing products that you aren’t selling.

If we had a nickel for every time we clicked on a link, excited for a product, only to find that the actual product being sold wasn’t what we’d been excited for in the photos, we could probably buy Amazon. 

Props are great for your Facebook and Instagram. They’re great for showcasing your product’s functions. But they should stay FAR away from your Main Photo. Show exactly what the customer is receiving in the Main Photo. Let your product strut its stuff on its own. Secondary photos are the domain of product props only if they add to showcasing its features. 

Mistake #3: Your photos look like an MS Paint Masterpiece.

We don’t expect everyone looking to sell on amazon to be a celebrity-level photo editor, a photoshop warrior, a blend tool guru, so on and so forth. 

Amazon does. 

That may be a little exaggerated, but they do expect a baseline quality for photographs. Amazon is going to tell you that your photo can be a PNG, TIFF, GIF, or JPG.

What they don’t tell you is your photo should be a PNG, or a TIFF if you’re feeling fancy. PNG’s are lossless, meaning that the image you save is the image that’s going to appear on your customer’s screen. They save full size and don’t have any pesky artifacting JPG’s can render. That’s the weird fuzz and miscolored dots you sometimes see on lower-quality photos. Let’s avoid that. 

GIFs are fun to show all angles of your products, but you really should avoid using it as a catch-all solution. Instead, take a few good quality PNGs of the angles and hold off on the GIF unless your product does something amazing while moving.

Aside from the technical details, make sure your product is in focus, filling up at least 85% of the photo (remember that number, you’ll see it again soon) and if your product is media, aka a book, movie, cd, or dvd, then you need to make sure the front cover is 100% of the photo.

Mistake #4: Lights, Camera, Reshoot!

Lighting is one of the most important aspects of photography. You’re taught from day one that light is important. That’s great until they forget to explain what kind of lighting you should use and how to get that perfect shot. 

For Amazon, bright white lighting should be used. Avoid letting the light hit your product directly to reduce glare. This is where a good quality lightbox like MacroFrame’s really should join your amazon product photography equipment. The light is positioned to fill the box rather than point directly at your product. This allows you to just set your item in the lightbox and shoot your picture without the hassle of making sure the lights are positioned just right.

Mistake #5. Forgetting the Basics

Amazon has a clear and consistent set of rules that every seller must follow to get their products featured. First and foremost is the core 5:

• 1000px by 1000px square image
• Save it as a PNG, TIFF, or GIF
• Save it as RGB
• Use 85% of the frame. (Told you it’d come up again.)
• Save your photo by either its UPC, or the Amazon ASIN

These aren’t hard, but you’d be surprised to learn how few remember, causing their chances to be featured to sink. If anything is permanently stuck in your head, let it be these 5 rules. These are the baseline for getting your product onto Amazon. Getting them right the first time will save you potential headaches far into the future.

Now you know what to avoid.

A lot of people see Amazon photography as either a simple matter or this goliath that must be tamed. The truth is it’s somewhere in the middle. So long as you follow the rules and avoid the pitfalls we mentioned above, your diligence will reward you with an awesome Amazon shop and happy well-informed customers.

Don’t forget to check out our other blog posts, and follow MacroFrame on Instagram and Facebook for even more photography fun for both hobbyists and small businesses.