Things to bear in mind when editing images

No primary category set

Image EditingThere was a lot of discussion yesterday at both the Ecommerce Expo and the iwoca Meetup about the new eBay picture standards.

We’ve published the dates that changes will be effective from for eBay but there are a couple of things you need to be aware of. Firstly although if you have a non-compliant image on a good til cancelled listing it’ll be fine until the end of the year, it does mean that you can’t edit the listing.

What that means is, if after the 30th of October you get new stock in and want to add it to an existing listing then your image will need to meet the new guidelines. If it doesn’t the edit will fail and your listing will be ended until you correct it.

Either get your stock listed before the end of October, or make sure you’ve got new images ready to go.

The second useful tip was from Catherine at Remove The Background (Who can of course do your image editing for you). We all know eBay’s minimum picture size is now 500 pixels, but what size do you need to get the zoom feature on your listings. What about Amazon or Google? Catherine’s done the hard work finding out and here’s everything that you need to know about image sizes:

Amazon, eBay & Google image requirements

Amazon

eBay

Google

Universal
Image
Compliance
Specification

 
 


 

Minimum 1001 Pixels


Maximum 3000 Pixels


 
 


 

Cropped tightly with 5% margin on all sides


 
 


 

White Background


 
 


 

Remove borders, text, logos and watermarks


 
 


 

Minimal pixel dimension on the longest side

1001 Apparel, 500 in all other categories 500 800

Size needed to activate zoom

1001 1000 N/A

Recommended size

2560+ 1600 N/A

% of frame to be filled by product

85% 80-90% recommended N/A>

Background Colour

Pure white (RGB 255,255,255) Plain light coloured N/A

Borders, text, logos permitted?

No No No

Watermarks permitted?

No Yes. eBay Seller ID or company name only. Not obscuring the item. Not larger than 5% of image. Opacity less than 50% No

Mannequins permitted?

No Yes Yes

Enforcement Date

27th June 2013 US: 1st July 2013
UK: 30th October 2013
Rest of EU: 2014
15th July 2013

Consequence of not complying

Images suppressed from search and browse results New or revised listings will not be permitted with non-compliant images Non-compliant items will disappear from Google Shopping

Final tip added from Tamebay – we know that a lot of sellers, especially those using some third party flat file tools, may host their own images and add them to eBay Gallery as URLs rather than uploading images. It’s very much preferable to upload your images to eBay and then you can let eBay picture hosting render your images for mobile devices.

11 Responses

  1. If I have an image, for example, that is 350 x 350. Is there any way to make it meat the 500 minimum.

    For example could I import the image into powerpoint and save it as a jpeg with a bit more white?

    Does the minimum apply to images within the variations?

    Thanks

  2. The variation pictures don’t need to meet the criteria.

    I have just spoken to eBay and expressed my surprise that they had selected the busiest week of the year as a deadline.

    Her suggestion was to just end the listing.

    One year ago my ebay:Amazon split was 80:20 now it is 10:90.

  3. “If it doesn’t the edit will fail and your listing will be ended until you correct it”

    ‘Your listing will be ended until you correct it’ – is this sentence worded right? I’ve not heard of temporarily ended listings before.

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