Starting in July 2012, eBay sellers will face a number of policy changes about the photos that the use to sell goods in their eBay auctions. The changes are designed to improve the ways that eBay buyers see items they're about to buy—and ultimately, therefore, the performance of sellers' eBay auctions.
Here's what to know about eBay's new photos policy.
- Pictures have to be a minimum of 500 pixels on their longest side.
While this kind of numeric, specs-oriented requirement can give some
regular non-techie folks fits, most of the time setting your camera or other
device to its highest quality setting will do the trick. Very old devices,
however, or images that are significantly trimmed, may not be up to snuff.
- Decorative borders are not allowed. No "dressing an image up"
with borders that frame the item. This can mean very classic borders that
simulate a picture frame or very fun, decorative borders like words that run
around the edge of an image. No decorative borders. eBay does understand
that in some cases (say, those of square items), a sort of "border" is
unavoidable as the item is framed against whatever was in the background
while you shot the picture. But if eBay thinks you've done it just to be
decorative, you may find your listing pulled.
- No additional text or artwork added to images. No more bright
yellow copyright notices, big banners that say "free shipping" or "free
gift" or anything else added to the image in order to communicate with your
buyer. Put this stuff in the item description if you need to list a feature,
provide a disclaimer or something similar.
- Watermarks are allowed—with caveats. You can include
"watermarks" for ownership or attribution information only for the
image, but it also has to be a true watermark: less than 5 percent of the
total area of the image and at least 50 percent transparent so that you can
clearly see the image through the text or mark. No URLs, web
addresses, or email addresses are allowed in image watermarks.
- No stock photos for used or AS-IS items. This one is tough for
casual sellers, but the use of stock photos ("new item" catalog photos) for
used or
non-working item listings is forbidden. This means
no
pulling common product photos for the item from Google Images search or
anywhere else. The item pictured must clearly appear to be in a real-life, a
non-store/non-retail setting, and clearly used unless it is being sold as
"New" or "Refurbished." eBay wants to avoid giving buyers the impression
(thanks to a stock photo) that they're getting a new item only to have them
disappointed by what they actually receive.
- All listings require at least one picture. Combined with the previous rule, the net effect is that sellers of used items generally have to take a picture of the actual item for sale and use that in their auction listing. This has always been amongst the best practices for eBay photos (as has including at least one picture of some kind in general) but now eBay has made it a rule.
eBay Wants Your Photos to be Great
Because eBay is making a push to ensure that pictures actually enhance eBay sales performance and customer satisfaction, they're making a push on two additional fronts, beyond rules, to try to help sellers' item and listing photos to be great:
- Encouraging the use of eBay image hosting. Because mobile devices
have different screen sizes from desktops, eBay modifies item listing
images' sizes and shapes to work well on mobile devices so that mobile app
shoppers will also see great product images. eBay can't do this, however,
for images that aren't hosted using eBay's own picture services (one example
of this might be images that a seller hosts on his or her own web server,
including them in the item description portion of the listing using special
HTML
code). For this reason, eBay is strongly encouraging all sellers to use eBay
picture hosting services for all of their images, particularly as mobile
continues to explode as a shopping platform.
- Providing tips and tricks for photo quality. Because poor seller-supplied images have been a bugaboo at eBay for a long time, eBay has created its own page to address and enhance listing image quality by providing a few easy-to-follow and well-illustrated tips and tricks.
eBay Wants Your Photos to be Free
To encourage all sellers to include a great set of photos despite all of these rules, restrictions, and suggestions, eBay has also decided to make all photos up to and including the first 12 of every item listing fee-free, meaning that for most sellers, photos will rarely if ever be a part of the fees calculation any longer. So starting in July 2012, sellers have no more excuses not to include great, mobile-capable, and multi-angle images in their item listings. Go forth and shoot!
