I took my first product photos on the kitchen table, with a lamp and a lot of hope. They were bad, and I only understood how bad after reading a piece on Taopifa about how buyers scan a listing. So I started again, and the second batch actually sold.
The main change was light. I stopped fighting my kitchen and moved to the window, on a cloudy morning, with a sheet of white card bouncing light into the shadow side. Cloudy beats sunny, because hard sun makes shadows that swallow the texture. I dropped the lamp and the flash, and the colours stopped lying.
Then the background. One plain grey board, used every time. I tried white first and hated it, because white blows out on a cheap camera and the edges of the item vanish into the page. Grey gives the eye somewhere to rest and the shape stays.
Showing scale took longer to get right. A necklace floating on grey means nothing to anyone. I put it on a hand, then beside a coin, then on a person wearing it. Once people can tell how big a thing is, the size questions stop.
Angles next. Front, back, side, a close up of the detail that matters, and one in use. That is enough. More than that and the page turns into a gallery nobody scrolls through.
The last thing was consistency. Same board, same window, same distance, same crop. When the thumbnails sit next to each other on a category page, they look like one shop instead of a jumble of strangers. Buyers read that as care, even if they never say it.
Redoing everything took a weekend. Sales did not double. The returns dropped, and the messages asking how big something was disappeared, which was worth far more than the weekend.
