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When it comes to selling on Amazon, making sure your products are visible to potential customers is the first challenge, while securing the sale comes later.
Images on Amazon are of heightened importance – they help to achieve click throughs onto your product pages as well as being partly responsible for closing sales on the marketplace.
While one of the best things about the marketplace is that customers tend to be in a “ready to buy” stage, high quality photos are essential to win sales on Amazon. Optimising your images so that they influence customers to make a purchase is key.
So, how can you make sure your photos fit within Amazon’s image requirements? How can you optimise your product photos so that they lead to sales for your business? What additional types of images on Amazon can you use to encourage more sales?
In this guide, we take you through some of the criteria for Amazon product photos, so that you can optimise your images accordingly and continue to turn a profit on the marketplace.
One of the first places to look when getting ready to take product photos for Amazon is the marketplace’s technical requirements. These are general rules that you’ll need to follow in order to make sure that your images comply with Amazon’s expectations of its sellers.
For any images that are named by the product identifier without a variant code or named with the MAIN variant and display as the main image on the product detail page, Amazon has the following product image standards:
While there is no best size for Amazon images, you'll want to ensure that your photos are of high enough resolution to avoid fuzzy or pixelated product photos, so that you don’t deter any potential customers from purchasing your items on the marketplace.
One of the most important aspects to fit with Amazon’s image requirements is that they are of a high resolution so that customers can make use of the zoom function on the marketplace.
The zoom feature benefits customers as it allows you to see details on the product. Take, for example, a Nikon camera being sold on Amazon. The zoom feature enables interested parties to see fine detail on the camera, such as small buttons and other features.
While one piece of the puzzle is to get your main product image clicked on, you’ll need to make sure that additional photographs of your products are equally high in quality to help turn those click throughs into actual sales for your business.
It’s standard practice on to have your Amazon product photos clearly displayed on a white background. This helps customers to see the product easily, especially when searching through multiple pages of a product search.
Lighting is an especially important factor when it comes to selling more products on Amazon. While we would always recommend professional photography to really catalyse on those important sales figures, for some businesses it is not always an option.
For new Amazon sellers, find a good location in your home and use a white sheet as a background to trial out how your camera or phone is with crisp, clean shots.
To help your products stand out and get product page views, it’s not uncommon for some Amazon sellers to edit and correct their images. For instance, in this product photo of a vacuum cleaner, it’s clear that the colours have been edited to suit a computer screen.
It’s attention to these finer details that can really help a product to sell quickly.
If you’re not a whizz when it comes to Photoshop and don’t have the time to use other image editing software, it may do you well to get professional-grade product photos taken to support your business on the marketplace. Quality images really do win sales.
Remember that the main product photo needs to stand out and call attention. When it comes to sustaining success on the marketplace, you need to concentrate your efforts on both Amazon Keywords and the product photos and descriptions.
Keep in mind that if you make substantial edits to a product image that it can be good practice to make customers aware within the product’s page description. This can help alleviate any worries or concerns about the purchase.
For additional “other view” images, Amazon recommends the following to fit within the requirements of the marketplace:
Offering multiple photos of your products can help increase your sales on the marketplace. You can display multiple angles of a product so that your potential customers can get a feel for what your product is really like and decide whether or not they want to purchase it.
This is common practice not just on Amazon but on other marketplaces too, such as eBay.
Another photo element that may help you to sell more on Amazon is to use size reference images in your additional images. These help customers make more rational and faster decisions when it comes to purchasing your product.
For example, if you were selling a chest of drawers, size dimension images on Amazon can help customers get a feel for whether or not it would fit in their home space.
See more: 13 Amazon seller tips
If you are selling a product on Amazon that has detailed material (e.g. a cushion or clothing) you could include an image of the material pattern or similar product detail.
By doing so, buyers on Amazon will have more of an idea as to whether they like the pattern or not – saving on time, money and hassle if a buyer makes a purchase to later regret it and give you the hassle of sorting out their refund and resolving any complaints that they make.
Consider how using some of your additional images on Amazon in a lifestyle setting could add value for your products.
Let’s say you were selling a chopping board and chose to take a snap or two in a home kitchen setting. This helps shoppers to idealize what the chosen product would look like in their own home and it may increase the likelihood of more sales on the marketplace.
What’s more, images on the web that include a human face are generally seen as having a higher conversion rate, although there are no statistics to back this up as being true for Amazon.
If you have Photoshop or similar software, then you could even make use of stock photos and edit the image into a place on that particular photo. You may find that this saves a lot of time over taking multiple product photos in a kitchen setting or similar scenario.
If one thing’s for certain, it’s that you can’t ignore product photography on Amazon.
While one step of the selling process is to get your products showing in the search results on the marketplace, it’s another step entirely to get a click through to lead to a sale.
It’s also important to fit with Amazon’s image requirements to protect your account on the marketplace. Taking the time to get your Amazon product photos on point is key when it comes to increasing your sales on the marketplace.
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