Top 6 Mistakes Made on Amazon Listing Images
In the days before Amazon, if you were lucky enough to get your product on the shelf of a store, the question was, “How do I differentiate from the other competing products that made it to the shelf?” Since the creation of Amazon, that question is now, “How do I differentiate from all competing products in the entire market?”
Customers judge your product by the listing images
Your product’s listing page on Amazon is how customers compare your product against other options to make a purchase. Your listing images, specifically, sell the perception of your product. Customers interpret brands who put effort into their photography and design as brands who put effort into their products and customers. This builds trust and trust sells products.
You don’t always have to beat your competitors
More competition means less room for error, but if a customer is certain your product is positively good and uncertain about your competitor’s product, you’ve won. You gain the perception of “positively good” by first ensuring your listing doesn’t make any basic mistakes.
Below are the top 6 most common mistakes sellers make on their listing images (with real examples).
1. Your listing page has less than 7 images
The less sure the customer is of what they’re buying, the less likely they are to buy. If you don’t add an image to every slot that Amazon provides, you will be at a disadvantage compared to your competitor who portrays their product as clearly as possible by using all 7 images. Adding a variety of images to all 7 visible slots (by highlighting different angles and features) will instantly upgrade the quality of your listing. This Amazon listing for a Summerset grill has only 4 images (none of which highlight any features) and is being sold for $2,199.99. Would you purchase such an expensive product with such little information?
2. Your listing has duplicate images
If you have multiple copies of the same image on your listing, the customer perceives that little to no effort was put into their shopping experience, which makes them less inclined to purchase from you. Not to mention this makes the listing look outdated, inactive, or sold by an untrustworthy third-party seller. This Amazon listing for Kirkland chocolate has 4 images total and 3 of those images show the same 2-pack option. The second image is a duplicate of the main image in worse resolution, which brings us to mistake #3.
3. Your images are low resolution
It always pays to give your product an image of quality. This begins with your logo and extends to your product, packaging, and beyond. Where this matters most for your Amazon listing is the quality and resolution of your listing images. High resolution photos on your Amazon listing support the perception of your product's quality. In the mind of a customer:
High quality photos = High quality product
Low quality photos = Low quality product
Below you can see the difference in photography quality between Bellroy’s leather wallet (high quality images) and Michael Kors’ leather wallet (low quality images). Unfortunately, neither Bellroy nor Michael Kors optimized the size and ratio of their images, which leads us to mistake #4.
4. Your photos are the wrong ratio
The photos on your Amazon listing page should either be square or vertical — never landscape. Amazon’s listing pages previously all used 1:1 square images, but Amazon is now expanding the categories and products that support vertical images such as grocery and apparel, among other categories.
To figure out whether your product supports square or vertical, look at the image thumbnails on your listing. While you can upload photos of any ratio, it is important you capitalize on the real estate Amazon provides for images since that is the first thing customers look at.
Below are two examples of listings for competing popcorn brands: Pop Weaver (left image – not properly optimized for vertical) and Preferred Popcorn (right image – properly optimized for full height images and thumbnails). Not only is Pop Weaver using a horizontal image on a vertical frame, the text is completely unreadable on mobile and this brings us to mistake #5.
5. The text on your image is unreadable
According to statista.com, 150.6 million users accessed Amazon’s mobile app in September 2019. Combine this with the fact that you view and edit your listings via Seller Central on a desktop computer and you have a recipe for a lot of images that are not optimized for Amazon’s mobile app. You could spend hours, days, or even weeks designing listing images only to find out they are ineffective or worse — they are reducing sales. If you design images with text that is unreadable on mobile (or unreadable period), two things happen:
1. Images that could be used to increase conversion are ineffective
2. You give your product an image of low quality
See the screenshots below comparing two product listings from Amazon’s mobile app. On the left, Onnit’s Alpha Brain has long body text on the image that is extremely difficult to read on mobile, while Vital Proteins has an image with simple text that is big enough to be read on both desktop and mobile:
6. Different images show different products on the same listing
Maybe among your 7 images, your fourth image shows a different product from the rest of the images, which might be a different flavor, a different size, or a different color variation. This causes confusion about which product will be delivered. The less sure a customer is of what they will receive, the less likely they are to buy. This Amazon listing for Gatorade shows 3 different containers and 2 different flavors. What exactly will I receive if I buy? The 9-gallon, the 6-gallon, or the 2-gallon? Will I receive the orange flavor or lemon-lime? I’m more likely to order from a seller that has consistent images with a consistent product description than roll the dice on this one.
