Master Stock Photos: Your Essential 10-Step Quality Checklist
How do you benefit from stock photos used by the Amazon product photo studio that’s designing your listing?
In brief: it saves your budget big time. And if used the right way, the composites with stock images amp up your product gallery images as powerful conversion tools. Let’s see what we mean by “the right way.”
We know what we’re talking about: the content we make increases our clients’ conversion rates by 29% on average. We’ve developed over 1000 top-performing Amazon listings and analyzed the results. In most cases, our clients see a sales increase of 30% to 40%, with some products experiencing sales growth in the hundreds of percent. Even when a product is of similar or worse quality, compared to competitors, sales typically rise by about 15%. Check a mini-gallery of our works (all the images here are stock-based):
Using stock photos is bad, right?
No. The reason you might think it’s bad is that you’ve seen too many bad stock photo composites on Amazon. They look repellent for either of two reasons: a bad stock photo was chosen, or the insertion of the product into the stock photo was screwed up. The latter, in turn, can happen because the person working on these images spent too little time doing it or didn’t have proper skills to handle the task. Or both.
In fact, most (if not all) FBA sellers use stock photos for their listings. The world’s leading companies use them. You just need to know how to select them, and after you put some work into post-production, you’ll end up with stunning visual compositions.
But why use them, again?
Cost-effectiveness
Stock photos are way cheaper than an Amazon product photo shoot. You won’t need to rent a location or hire models. In some cases, depending on your product, your budget, and your long-term goals, it’s wise to invest in a photo shoot for Amazon. More often than that, assembling some of the images for your listing out of stock photos and studio photos of your product is a better option. It’s cost-effective, and the quality will still be high.
Diversity and authenticity
Stock images add valuable diversity to your Amazon product gallery. With a wide range of models of different ethnicities, ages, and body types, you can help more customers see themselves using your product. Additionally, diverse settings—from urban to rural, professional to casual—showcase your product’s versatility. This variety makes your listings more inclusive, appealing to customers with different lifestyles and preferences.
And here’s the crucial point: How do you ensure that the quality is high? Take a look at our 10-step checklist: it’s your chance to learn everything you need to know about using stock photos from pros.
Before we dive in: Remember how your customers think
When browsing Amazon, shoppers make decisions fast. It’s referred to in behavioral economics as System 1 thinking (see the brilliant book by Daniel Kahneman). When they see a stock photo with your product clumsily photoshopped to it, they may lose interest immediately.
So your photo composites must always be realistic. Let’s see how to achieve it, and how to achieve more: to make them appealing and converting.
Step 1
Don’t use outdated stock graphics for your Amazon listing pictures
Some photos are just screaming “STOOOCK!”. We don’t think we need to explain it in much detail: take a look at the photos above, and you’ll know what we’re talking about. The emotions in them are too overt, the smiles too wide, and the look at the camera too blatant.
Today’s savvy Amazon shopper quickly labels them as fake in their mind and moves on without second thought. An experienced Amazon photography and design team quickly weeds these out when selecting stock photos for you.
You can do the same. Just avoid unnatural behavior from the models in those photos. If the photo looks outdated, or if the models are wearing clothes that went out of style when your dad was in high school, don’t choose those photos. And if you have any doubts, just don’t. Images like this cause more harm than good.
Step 2
Avoid labored studio shots for your Amazon products photography
The neutral background, the unnatural poses, the heavy retouching, the straight-on look at the camera: all this gives away staged photos that no-one will believe.
The people in the photos above are photo models. They’re making this up. The guy clearly is not a real chef. They don’t care about (or even know anything about) your product. Why should your customers trust them?
The answer is that they shouldn’t. Your customers will quickly disregard images like these, so don’t choose them for your listing.
Step 3
Steer clear of easily recognizable stock models
Remember this guy? The chef-turned-doctor-turned-patient reveals the “stockness” of these images to anyone who sees stock photos a lot, experienced shoppers included.
So even before thinking about how to take Amazon product photos, make sure you don’t use the stocks that have already been heavily used before.
Step 4
Make stock photos work by playing with them a little
Both images above advertise a makeup mirror with lights. The white one is extremely unimaginative: it uses a dull stock photo as is. And the stock photo itself is a disaster: it’s unnaturally symmetrical and doesn’t have a single wrinkle. In a word: over-retouched.
The image on the right features a stock photo, too, but it’s much more interesting: her face is believable and relatable. We did a little magic with it to paint a realistic picture of someone using the mirror, including the signature rectangular reflection of the mirror lights in the model’s eyes.
Step 5
Show real-life situations
The first image advertises a cold therapy system. As you can guess, it’s a composite: the guy is from a stock photo, and the cold therapy machine was photographed in a professional studio. The two are combined seamlessly: the background, the person’s pose, and the device’s positioning clearly show how the customer can receive cold therapy in their everyday life.
The second image is about a knee massager. We wanted to show that both athletes and non-athletes can benefit from it, so we put the device on a gym-goer and a woman reading on a couch. Both resulting images show more than a product: they show an enhanced lifestyle, and the customers who will show them will want to enhance their lifestyles, too.
Step 6
Post-production. Keep things real and avoid obviously clumsy pictures
We can now move on to how to edit product photos for Amazon. The first and most important thing is simple: the images you use must not be ugly.
Do we need to comment on the first image above? The guy is laughable. But the sad reality is that you’ll see a lot of poor content like this on Amazon. Unless you really want your images to be funny, which is a solid option for some products, by any means avoid awkward stock composites.
The second image has processed stock photos in it, too, but they’re incorporated into it with much more precision and wisdom. It does look like two sporty people using the weighted jump rope, although the rope was actually photographed in our studio and carefully added to the thoughtfully selected stocks.
Step 7
Mind the context
There are so many things wrong with the first image. Apart from awful editing (the pillow doesn’t belong here, and everyone can see it), the shopper can be confused by where this model is: the product is marketed as an airplane pillow, while she is in a car.
Note that the second image is made of stock photos, too, but it doesn’t look fake. The model is in a plane, and the pillow is inserted into the photos with all the rules of visual perception in mind.
Step 8
Check composite images for Photoshop mistakes
Every Amazon FBA photography and design team has a formal list of requirements that the final image must meet. We’ll show you ours, and you’ll see the many reasons why the examples above couldn’t possibly happen in a studio that’s worth its salt. Here are the main things you must remember about when making a composite image:
- Clipping
- Size
- Angle
- Focus
- Lighting
- Shadow
- Reflections
- Color tone
Take a look at another example below. Let’s see what problems it has.
The device seems to be bigger than it actually is. It’s not positioned correctly along the table edges. Wrong parts of it are in focus and out of focus. The shades don’t match the light source in the stock photo. Reflections are ignored. The shade of white isn’t right.
Even to someone who hasn’t ever processed photos using a graphic editor, the image will look off. They might not explain why, but they’ll have this strong impression that something’s wrong with the picture. You don’t want it to happen for your potential customers, so you should follow the checklist to make the composite perfect.
Step 9
Do some work around the inserted product
Note the little out-of-focus twigs in front of the composter on the composite image above. They’re a minor detail that shoppers won’t probably spot, but they’re doing an important job. They intensify the impression that the photo is real.
This is just one possible trick you can use. The goal here is to make the picture realistic so that your customers don’t think you’re messing with them. For every product, you can come up with a trick like this to make the product snugly fit the photo.
Step 10
Polish till it's perfect
It can take hours of post-production to make a composite image. The exact amount of time will depend on how visually challenging the product is, how important this specific image is for your listing, and how much you can invest in it. In any case, you want to spend as much of the available resources as possible to perfect even the tiniest details. Note the state-of-the-art shadows on the image above: they took truly meticulous work.
The reasoning here is straightforward: a stunning image grabs the shoppers’ attention and helps you convert them into your customers. So polish it until you’re sure it’ll make them go WOW.
Your next steps
Now that you have the 10-step quality checklist, you can scrutinize your design team’s work and make sure that each image meets the high standards expected in today’s competitive marketplace.
If you don’t want to scrutinize your design team’s work, you can choose to work with experts who stick to the quality checklist in the first place. That’s us. Get in contact, and let’s build a listing together for you that’s both powerful and cost-efficient.
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