Product photos that sell: 7 rules

The thumbnail decides whether a buyer clicks your listing at all. Everything else in your offer, the title, the price, the description, only matters after the photo has won the click. These seven rules move that number.

1. The product fills the frame. The most common mistake is a product occupying 30 percent of the image. Aim for 80 to 90 percent. On a phone the thumbnail is tiny and every millimetre counts. Amazon makes this a hard rule at 85 percent; everyone else just quietly ranks you lower.

2. Perfect white, not nearly white. Allegro checks the background automatically. RGB 255,255,255 or you carry the risk of reduced reach. Your eye cannot tell 245 from 255. The machine can.

3. Sharpness and light. The photo must be evenly lit, with no blown highlights and no shadows swallowing detail. A soft, even light beats an expensive camera every single time.

4. True colours. Use the sRGB profile and no aggressive filters. Colour mismatch is the single most common cause of returns, and a return costs you the margin, the shipping, the fee and the review.

5. Show the whole set. If you sell a kit, the thumbnail must show every piece in it. Buyers count. A photo showing three of the five items in the box generates messages, disputes and returns.

6. Give them scale. One photo with a hand, a coin or a ruler prevents more returns than any description ever written. Nobody reads the dimensions. Everybody understands a hand.

7. Use every slot. Allegro, Amazon, eBay and Etsy all let you upload far more photos than most sellers bother with. White hero first, then the product in use, then scale, then the detail that justifies your price, then the packaging. Listings that fill the gallery outsell listings that use two photos, consistently and by a lot.

The order that works

There is a reason the sequence above is a sequence. Photo one earns the click. Photo two makes it feel real. Photo three prevents the return. Photo four justifies the price. Photo five removes the last doubt. Each one is doing a different job, and if you shoot them all the same way you have five photos doing one job.

The first one is the only one with a rule attached. Get the white exact, fill the frame, and let the rest of the gallery do the selling.

Open the free tool and drop your photos in. Pick your platform preset, download one ZIP, done. No account, no limit, and the photos never leave your computer.