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We all know the importance of taking good photos for our eBay listings. It's true what they say, a picture paints a thousand words! Wouldn't it be nice if a picture made you a thousand dollars?
Well, I can't make any promises, but here is a quick eBay selling tip that will make your product photos look ultra professional: Watermarking them!
Watermarking your product photos adds your business name or eBay username to images. Here's an example:
As you can see, the seller has added their logo to the bottom-right of the photo. In doing so, the seller makes full use of the two main benefits of watermarking your product photos:
The Benefits of Watermarking
1. It prevents other sellers from taking your photos and using them as their own.
2. It strengthens your brand and shows that you are an established, trustworthy business.
eBay's Watermarking Policies
Surprise, surprise, eBay has some tight rules around watermarking product photos!
Here's eBay's quick do's and dont's guide:
How to Watermark Your Product Photos
Watermarking is made easy with some of the free and simple-to-use tools available. I often use Watermark.ws. It's free, fast and you don't have to download or install any software or even create an account. Here's what their website looks like: (You might remember my cute little banana baby suit from my recent blog post).
Other options (that look good, but I haven't personally used) are TSR Watermark and PicMarkr.com. You can also watermark your images automatically when you upload images to eBay. You'll find it in the "Bring your item to life with pictures" section of the listing form. Click on the "Add or remove options" link. While this is a fast option, just keep in mind that the eBay tool is a little less flexible than other options.
All these tools are easy to use so I'll spare you the boring step-by-step tutorial. You just upload your photo you want to watermark, enter the name of your business, store or eBay user name, drag it to where you want it to go and save it out. If you get stuck, watch the tutorial here.
If you sell high end products or you take your branding and graphic design very seriously, you can get a professional graphic designer to create a custom watermark for you and place it on each of your product photos. Otherwise, I think the free options are just fine.
Optimal Watermark Placement
There's a bit of a catch 22 in watermarking product photos: If you watermark it enough to prevent other sellers from stealing it, you can prevent your buyers from being able to view the product properly. But, if you don't watermark thoroughly enough, you can leave your product photo open to getting used by other sellers.
Here's an example:
If I wanted to, I could easily take this photo and use it as my own, even though it's watermarked.
I'd just cut the watermark off... Simple!
How do you prevent this from happening to you? Place your watermark where it counts! Place part of the watermark over your product, but only just. The selller of the dress in my example I showed you earlier does this well: See how the watermark is overlaid onto the dress, so no one can steal the photo, but the watermark doesn't obstruct from important parts of the dress?
If the watermark was on the neckline, it would obstruct details that are important to the buyer, but in this case, it doesn't. So make sure you place your watermarks in an optimal place.
I hope you find this quick eBay selling tip useful. If you need help with this or any other part of your business, leave me a comment below.
any advise would be appreciated.
on he ebay website it is a little unclear.
Perhaps an ultra closeup to pick up the pattern of the typically low grade pulp they printed on back then will be my best solution?