Amazon Product Image Requirements, Met in Minutes

Amazon product image requirements are strict, and the main image is where they bite. It's the photo shoppers see in the search results, sitting in a row next to your competitors, and Amazon is specific about how it has to look.

You don't need a studio to meet them. A photo of your product, a white background generated around it, one resize. That's the job.

What Amazon Wants in a Main Image

Four things, and none of them are suggestions:

• Square, at 2000 × 2000 pixels
• A pure white background
• Your product filling at least 85% of the frame
• Saved as a JPG

That fill rule does more work than it looks. Once the product takes up 85% of a square, there's no room left for a prop, a caption or a starburst badge. Which is the point. In the search results your main image is roughly the size of a postage stamp, and at that size anything which isn't the product is wasted. Category rules vary, so check yours before a bulk upload.

So keep your scenes for the other image slots. The marble counter and the morning light belong in your Instagram photos, where they sell the product. On the main image they get in the way of it.

Put Your Product on Pure White

Open the Product Photo Generator and upload the photo you already have. A phone shot works. Straight on, whole product in the frame, no hands. If you can read the label on your phone screen, it'll be readable in the result.

Then choose square, and describe the background rather than the product. This trips people up. The product isn't something you write, it's the file you uploaded, so what comes back is your item, with your label and your colours on it, not a lookalike the model invented. What you're describing is the room it's standing in.

Pick square before you generate, not after. The image gets built square from the start, so the composition is centred for the shape you actually need. Shoot wide and crop down later and you're trimming the sides off a photo that was framed for something else.

on a pure white studio background, even soft light from the front, a soft contact shadow under the base, no props

Ask for three or four variations and compare the shadows. That soft grey contact shadow under the base is what stops a white-background shot looking like a sticker, and it comes out slightly different every time.

Get to 2000 × 2000 Exactly

Here's the part most guides skip. Choosing square sets the shape of the image, not its pixel dimensions. Square is square, but square isn't automatically 2000 × 2000, and Amazon counts pixels.

So run the download through the free image resizer and pick the Amazon preset. It fills in 2000 × 2000 for you. No account needed, and nothing gets uploaded anywhere — the resizing happens in your browser, on your own machine.

If your file saved as a PNG, the converter next door turns it into the JPG Amazon asks for.

Start from a sharp photo, though. Resizing up adds pixels, not detail, so a soft original comes back as a bigger soft original.

One last check before it goes anywhere near your listing. Shrink the finished image on your screen until it's about the size of a thumbnail. If you can still tell what the product is at that size, it'll hold up in the search results, which is the only place the main image has to work.

Have a product photo on your phone right now? Open the Product Photo Generator, put it on white, and see what your main image could look like before you write another word of the listing.