Product Photo Specs That Pass Every Marketplace — Sizes, Backgrounds, Files

Amazon: main image pure white (255,255,255), product filling at least 85% of the frame, minimum 1000 px long edge for zoom (3000 px recommended — zoom quality is conversion-relevant), maximum 10,000 px, JPG or PNG. Secondary images allow lifestyle context; the main slot does not. Text, logos, watermarks and props are main-image rejection causes.

eBay: minimum 500 px, square recommended for the modern grid, maximum 30 MB — far more permissive than Amazon because quality drives search placement softly rather than via hard rejection. The first image is the one that wins the click; white or neutral background, product at a realistic scale.

Etsy: 2000 px minimum on the long edge for the best display, square-ish composition favoured, up to 10 images per listing, and the first image is the search thumbnail — Etsy's guidance is honest about lifestyle shots being acceptable and often better-clicking than sterile white.

Shopify: you own the page, so the real spec is performance — 1920-2560 px wide masters, compressed with the image compressor and WebP-delivered for the theme, square or the aspect your product grid uses, and the same zoom math (a 2000 px product photo supports a 2x retina grid plus a full-width lightbox).

Photographers shoot on seamless white and still get rejections: a lit white wall lands at RGB 240-250 with gradient shadows, and the bot checks the corners. The reliable route is the cutout-and-matte pass: remove the background to a transparent PNG, then convert to JPG with a pure-white flatten — which produces the exact 255,255,255 the spec demands, around a subject whose edges were cleaned in the cutout step.

The fill rule gets the other half of the rejections: the product occupying 70% of the frame because the photographer framed generously is a rejection regardless of background. The crop-and-resize step is 'tighten to 85%, then export at the long-edge target' — for a catalogue, one crop-ratio batch followed by a resize batch to 3000 px squares handles it uniformly.

A supplier folder of two hundred photos goes through four shared-setting passes: (1) cutout and matte where backgrounds fail — the browser batch does 20 at a time (the batch conversion guide covers the workflow); (2) crop to square with the product centred and filling 85%; (3) resize to the long edge the platform wants (3000 px for Amazon zoom masters, 2000 for Etsy); (4) compress to weight targets — Amazon is not weight-strict, but a 500 KB-per-image listing set loads faster on mobile buyers, which is the number they do not print in the spec.

For genuinely open-ended catalogues (thousands of SKUs, weekly drops), the honest tool is a scripted ImageMagick pipeline on a desktop; browser batch is for the launch prep and the daily additions. In both cases the no-upload property earns its keep during pre-release work: photos of unreleased products are the file category whose leak has a price tag.

Secondary-image best practice (and the actual conversion lever): fill the allotment — 45-degree angle, back, detail close-up, in-hand or in-context lifestyle, and a scale shot with a familiar object. The white-box-only mindset produces listings that answer no buyer questions; the marketplace rules allow every one of those shots outside the main slot.

Two quiet specs: files should be colour-managed sRGB (Adobe RGB uploads look washed-out on platforms that ignore the profile, which includes most of them), and the aspect-ratio discipline matters more than size — a consistent product fill across the catalogue is what makes a grid look professional, and the grid is the first thing a buyer browses.