Friday, March 03, 2006

2.Take a Good Photograph

  • Take a Good Photograph (or a few).
    This is important, as it the only wayt that a prospective customer can imagine exactly what he or she is going to get if they buy the item from you.You MUST include photo's on your ebay listing.
  • Take your photo's with a decent digital camera, there is no substitute, normal photography and a scanner will not cut it.You can pick up a perfectly reasonable one for £40 these days ,but obviously you can spend anything you want on a camera.
    Just make sure that it has the resolution needed to take a large clear photograph of your product.
  • Many people set up a home studio and have a tripod with a camera on it permanently,but I think this is going over the top.
  • Either way make sure the background of the photo's will not be distracting or messy, it really puts buyers off.Neat is good,but plain colour backgrounds with no distractions at all is really good.
  • Make sure your product is well lit.
    If possible don't use your flash,as it leaves a harsh light that can give a wrongly coloured pallour to your item.
    Light the item from more than one direction as a fill in lighting will make shadows go away and you will see more of the item.
  • Personally I prefer to set up on my dining table after I have returned from my suppliers. I can put two lights on in that room and can use a table lamp for extra lighting if required.
    I take one of each of the lines that I have bought and proceed to take lots of photo's of each item
    from different directions (above ,side ,straight on,the back of the item,out of the box, photo's on the box,If there are any special points a close up is in order),so that when I get back to the computer to edit the photo's I can choose from virtually everything I could imagine.

  • Editing is an artform, but the photo's don't have to be artistic, just very, very clear , in focus, and easy to look at.I would also suggest to make fairly large photo's .Ebay will upload one photo for each listing for free upto 60k and you will see that the free one's are pretty small.
  • I prefer 2 or 3 of about 450-500 pixels wide so that a buyer can get a good look at the item.
  • There are plenty of good Photo hosting sites,just stick "free photo hosting" in the google search box for several hundred ,so there is no excuse for not having enough webspace for large photo's.

  • I also like to add a logo and copyright to my photo's as t is also a way to get the message across about other websites you may have that also sell items away from ebay.Ebay has a strict "no outlinks" policy for listings but pictures are not included in this, as it will not be a live link ,just one someone will havew to type into the address bar of their browser.
  • You can also serve larger photos with a link out to an image page or gallery page of your own website.this can have what ebay call a "discrete link" to the hosting site of the image,that's great for free hosting websites, but if you serve these pages of your own website you can link to the homepage of your sales site(as it is the hosting for your images).

Cheers Pete