Your product photos are doing the job that a shop assistant used to do — letting customers touch, examine, and fall in love with a product before buying. In e-commerce, you can't let customers pick something up. Your photos have to do it for them.
The good news: a modern smartphone and €50 of equipment can produce photos that convert as well as a professional studio shoot, if you know what you're doing. Here are the 7 principles we share with every client before they shoot their product catalogue.
Bad lighting makes a great product look cheap. Good lighting makes a cheap product look premium. It's the single highest-leverage variable in product photography.
The best light for product photography is soft, diffused natural light — but controlled. Here's the cheapest setup that works:
If you're shooting consistently (same products repeatedly or a large catalogue), invest in a €40-60 softbox LED kit. The consistency is worth far more than the cost — your photos will match each other perfectly across your product catalogue.
White backgrounds are the standard for e-commerce product shots — and for good reason. They're neutral, they don't distract from the product, and they're easy to make consistent. A white sweep (curved white background paper or card) removes shadows and gives that clean catalogue look that customers associate with professional stores.
But white isn't your only option. The best approach:
For 90% of webshop owners, a modern iPhone or flagship Android (Pixel, Samsung S-series) will produce results indistinguishable from a €1,000 mirrorless camera when: the lighting is good, you're shooting in good light, and you know how to use the phone's camera app properly.
Where a camera still wins: very small products (jewellery, watch details, food close-ups) where the phone struggles with macro focus; products with complex textures where you need depth-of-field control; and situations where you need to shoot in lower light consistently.
For most clothing, accessories, home goods, and beauty products: shoot on your phone, save the camera budget for advertising.
Amazon's research (and countless CRO studies) consistently shows that more product images = higher conversion rates, up to a point. The minimum set for any product:
White background shots tell customers what the product looks like. Lifestyle shots tell them who they'll be when they own it. Both matter, but lifestyle images typically drive higher conversion rates because they trigger an emotional response.
A lifestyle shot doesn't require a professional model or a studio. A person wearing your product in a relevant environment — a coffee shop, a park, a kitchen — shot on a phone in good light will outperform a studio white-background shot for social media and homepage hero images every time.
Tips for DIY lifestyle photography:
Every product image needs basic editing before it goes live. This doesn't mean heavy Photoshop work — it means consistency. Free tools for this:
The single most important edit: make sure your whites are actually white. Open your image in any editor and check that the background hits 255,255,255 (pure white). A slightly grey or yellow white background looks dirty and reduces perceived product quality.
Large images are one of the biggest page speed killers in e-commerce. A product image doesn't need to be 8MB. It needs to be as small as possible while still looking sharp on a Retina display.
The right approach:
Run every product image through one of these tools before uploading. A 5MB product photo compresses to 150KB without any visible quality loss. That's a 97% size reduction that directly translates to faster page loads and higher conversion rates.
We build webshops that make your products shine. Design, performance, and conversion built in.