What the platforms actually require
The rules differ in detail but converge on the same idea: the main image is a clean, honest representation of the product on a plain background, and everything else is up to you.
Amazon is the strictest. The main image must be on a pure white background (RGB 255,255,255), the product must fill about 85% of the frame, and there must be no text, watermarks, logos, borders, props or additional items that are not part of what you are selling. Images should be at least 1600 pixels on the longest side so zoom works, and it is worth exceeding that. Additional images are much more permissive — lifestyle shots, props and infographics are all fine there.
eBay requires a minimum of 500 pixels on the longest side, prohibits added text and borders on the main image, and prefers a plain background without mandating pure white. Etsy is the most relaxed, with no background requirement at all, and a marketplace culture that rewards styled lifestyle photography over clinical cut-outs.
The practical consequence: shoot once against white, and you can meet Amazon's rule and satisfy the others. Shoot styled-only and you cannot list on Amazon without reshooting.
Lighting is the whole game
If your product photos look amateurish, the cause is almost always lighting, not your camera. A modern phone has more than enough sensor for product work; what it cannot do is invent soft, even light that is not there.
The property you want is 'soft' light — light from a large source relative to the subject. A bare bulb is a small source and produces hard, black-edged shadows. The same bulb fired through a sheet of tracing paper becomes a large source and produces a gentle shadow gradient. This is the entire principle behind every softbox and light tent ever sold.
A setup that genuinely works, for very little money: two desk lamps with the same colour temperature bulbs, one on each side at roughly 45 degrees to the product, each shooting through a sheet of baking parchment or tracing paper clipped a few inches in front. A sheet of white card curved up behind the product gives you a seamless background with no visible corner. Turn off the room lights, so you are not mixing colour temperatures.
Mixing colour temperatures is the most common self-inflicted problem: daylight from a window is around 5500K and a warm domestic bulb is around 2700K, and a photo lit by both has an orange side and a blue side that no white balance setting can fix simultaneously. Pick one light source type and commit.
Camera settings that matter
Three things are worth controlling, and the rest can be left alone.
Shoot from a tripod or a stable surface. Product shots benefit from small apertures for depth of field, which means slower shutter speeds, which means camera shake. A phone propped against a stack of books is fine.
Lock your white balance rather than leaving it automatic, so a series of shots matches. If you are shooting on a phone, this may mean using a manual camera app — worth it if you are photographing a catalogue.
Do not shoot from too close. Wide-angle lenses at short distances distort — a mug photographed from 20 cm has a bulging front and a shrunken handle. Back up and zoom in slightly; perspective flattens and the product looks like itself.
The shot list that converts
Buyers are trying to answer specific questions, and each image should answer one. In rough order of value:
- The main shot: product filling the frame on white, straight-on or at a slight three-quarter angle.
- Scale: the product next to something universally recognisable, or held in a hand. This prevents the single most common return reason — 'smaller than I expected'.
- Detail: a close crop of texture, stitching, material or finish. This is where quality is communicated.
- In use: the product doing its job, in the context a buyer imagines it in.
- What's in the box: everything the buyer receives, laid out flat.
- The imperfections, if you are selling used. Photographing the flaw honestly reduces returns and disputes far more than it costs you in sales.
Getting a genuinely white background
Even with white card and good lighting, the background in your photo will not be pure white — it will be a light grey, somewhere around 240,240,240, because the card is reflecting less light than a perfect white. Amazon wants 255,255,255.
There are two ways to close that gap. The photographic way is to light the background separately and slightly brighter than the product, so it blows out to pure white in camera. This is what studios do and it produces the most natural result, because the product keeps its own soft shadow.
The practical way is to remove the background afterwards and composite the product onto pure white. This is faster, works with any photo, and is what most home sellers do. The thing to watch is edge quality: a cut-out with a hard, jagged edge or a faint halo of the old background reads as fake and is the main way an edited photo looks edited. Hair, fur, transparent materials and fine detail like wicker are where automatic tools struggle most, and where it is worth checking the result at full zoom before you list.
Our own tools for this are the background remover for the cut-out and the marketplace preset in the eCommerce tool, which composites onto pure white at the aspect ratios Amazon and eBay expect. Both run in your browser, so a full catalogue does not go through anyone's server.
Common mistakes
In rough order of how much damage they do:
- Shooting under mixed lighting, giving the product two different colours.
- A background that is visibly grey rather than white, which looks dingy next to competitors.
- No scale reference anywhere in the listing.
- Over-editing the colour, so the product arrives looking different and gets returned.
- Cut-outs with hard or haloed edges from an unchecked automatic removal.
- Uploading at the minimum resolution, so the zoom view is soft.