Images are Emotional Recognition Tools

Another critical area of importance on an Amazon product details page are images. Images, perhaps more than anything else, can cause a shopper to either click on your listing or to keep scrolling.

To capture buyer interest and land them on your product page (where there is a 15% conversion rate!), spend the time and effort to use high-quality images for your product. If you have an independent online store, you can use images that work well there. But, Amazon does have a few of its own rules.

Product Image Rules

Amazon requires that the main image for your product include only the product that you are selling, on a white background.

This allows for the search results on Amazon to appear clear, uncluttered and uniform. Amazon tests everything, and they determined in the early days of their existence that visitors to their site bought more — much more –– when products were displayed against a plain white background.

Main images should not include accessories that are not included in the purchase, models or action shots of the image, nor text or badges such as ‘Organic’ or ‘Made in the USA’.

Once a shopper is on your product page, and can often be a determining factor as to whether someone purchases your product or not. Depending on your product type and category, Amazon will allow you between 5-9 images for your listing.

Make an effort to use all of the product images offered, and don’t use inferior images just to fill up all allowed spaces. While your main image is required to be against a plain, white background, Amazon allows for other image types on secondary images.

These could include:

Your product from different angles (side, top, close up)
The back of a product label
Images of your product in-action
Images that list your products features or compare it against other products
Informational images with text/charts, etc.
Images that show your product’s size as compared to a human holding it

Amazon requires that images be a minimum of 1,000 pixels x 1,000 pixels to take advantage of its zoom feature, which allows buyers to scroll over an image to enlarge it. This is a popular feature with Amazon buyers, so take advantage of it. If you can, use images that are 2,000 pixels x 2,000 pixels, for added granularity.

Once your listing is live, you should test your image placement to see which images elicit the highest conversion rate for your product. To do this, track your total sessions, number of sales, conversion rate (unit session percentage) and total revenue over the course of a week, then change the order of your images, and measure the same data over the next week . You may find that a certain image order elicits a much higher conversion rate than another.