Five mistakes teams make with product photography

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit product photography.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Consistent lighting and background make a catalogue look professional
• Scale shots prevent returns from size surprises
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

One excellent photo beats six mediocre angles. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

A reasonable first step

In practice

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Three things worth confirming about product photography before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Scale shots prevent returns from size surprises — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.