Product photography: the questions we get asked most

The version of this that works is simpler than the version most people imagine. The questions about product photography that come up most often on our calls.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Do we need to care about this?

Consistent lighting and background make a catalogue look professional. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

The short version

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about product photography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Consistent lighting and background make a catalogue look professional — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.