Top 10 eBay Photo Mistakes to Avoid

Here’s a list of the top ten mistakes to avoid when prepping images for your eBay auctions.

eBay Photographer We’ve all seen them. On many occasions, they made us hit the back-button as quickly as we came. I’m talking about lousy pictures on eBay listings. At best, they are embarrassing. At worst, they are misleading and borderline fradulent because they misrepresent the item being sold. Usually, they just give potential bidders a bad impression of the seller’s dedication to quality which is not the image they should be trying to convey.

Photo mistakes are seemingly epidemic on eBay. To give you an idea of how common the problem is, it took me less than an hour of poking around the action site to find the examples below.

Out of Focus If the auction photo is out of focus, how is the buyer to confirm the item’s condition? To help with focus, use a tripod or other solid surface to help you keep the camera steady. Overall, an out of focus image makes me question the quality of the seller. Are they deliberately trying to mislead me? If they can’t manage to focus the camera, can they manage to pack the item for shipping?

(Remember, these are real auction photos - I can’t make this stuff up!)
Distracting Backgrounds A good eBay photo keeps the prospective buyer focused on the item being sold. It should be free of distractions in the background. While a couch is not a horrible background for your eBay image, I might be subconciously judging you as a seller by your taste in furniture relative to my own. Tossing a plain, clean, light colored blanket over the furniture in the background would keep me focused on your item.

How’s this for a distraction? This pictures beow are from an auction for a car trunk part. Note the seller’s tongue and face peeping through the hole. Creepy!
Glare Glare is usually caused by a reflection of the camera’s flash on a shiny surface. To prevent glare, try taking the picture with an indirect light source such as next to a window on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, or with some lamps providing light from the side or an angle. If you choose to take the picture next to a sunny window, make sure that the window is on the side and not in the background - otherwise you will have a silhouette in front of an overexposed background.
Stealing Other People’s Pictures If you pull it straight from their server, the other seller might swap the image file your “borrowing” with something like the one below. See how many bids that gets you…
Clutter Again, you want potential bidders to focus on what you are selling. Remove or cover the background clutter whenever possible.
File Size I’m not going to slow down my page loading time by including an example of a massive image file that is still too common on eBay. Suffice to say that they still aren’t hard to find. Huge image files make your auction take too long to load and cause potential bidders to scroll up & down, left and right to see the different parts of whatever widget you are selling. Both issues will cause the visitor to click on the back button long before they click on the bid button. Remember, just because you have broadband internet service doesn’t mean your bidders do. In fact, according to a GAO report, 21% of US households don’t even have access to cable or DSL. So think about that next time you upload a massive file. Set your camera to “image size: small” or resize the image in your photo editing software. If this confuses you, I suggest you stick with eBay’s image hosting service. They automatically resize any images you upload to no larger than 400 x 300 pixels.
Cropping Sometimes all an auction picture needs is a quick crop to help the item being sold be the center of the potential bidder’s attention. Need some software to help you do this? Download Google’s Picasa for a free and easy to use image editing application. A crop would help the image below. At least the sink isn’t full of dirty dishes!
Lack of Close Up Unless the auction is for the cardboard box background, I the picture below speaks for itself. Zoom-in, step closer, or crop the image so the item being sold fills most of the frame.
Stock Photos Stock photos are fine if you are selling new items. However, when you are selling used items, a stock photo could mislead the consumer as to the condition of the product. Auctions involve a significant amount of trust on the bidders part. Pictures are one way of developing that trust. Providing accurate pictures helps the bidder determine if your definition of mint condition matches their definition.
Poor Lighting If an image is too dark or too light, the buyer is going to have some difficulty making out the details of the photograph. Image editing software will be able to help with some exposure issues, but your best bet is to get the lighting correct when you take the picture.

So here’s the moral of this story, if you aren’t putting much effort into taking and posting good eBay pictures, bidders aren’t putting much effort into looking at them.

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