Second only to having a good product, product photography is hands down the most important part of increasing your sales on Etsy!

There are some truly helpful articles posted at The Storque on this subject and I’ll give you some links at the end of the post if you want to read more in depth. Here are a few tips I found especially interesting.

Good Etsy Product Photography

• Should attract people to your items – When your product shows up on the front page or in a showcase, people might only look at it for a flash. Your photograph needs to be powerful enough to cause them to linger a second longer. Then, if they’re interested, they’ll click.
• Should answer questions about the products – how big is it, what does it feel like, how does it look in its intended environment? You can answer these questions with good pictures!
• Should make your products “pop” – Good use of backgrounds, both color and texture, can make all the difference in focusing the attention on your product in a natural, pleasing, and impressive way!
• Should accurately represent colors – you can accomplish this either by adjusting the EV balance on your digital camera or using an editing software such as Photoshop Elements (which is very useful for an Etsy seller)
• Works with Etsy photograph parameters – Etsy will make your photographs 430 pixels wide, so be sure that they work at that size.  You can resize photographs in your photo editing software or online at a site such as Photobucket.com.  Also keep in mind that Etsy will crop a square image from the center of your image for use in thumbnails.

Use a Lightbox

While I’ve never tried this personally, there seems to be widespread agreement that a “lightbox” is a great tool for photographing small items, such as jewelry. There are quite a few of these available on the market for purchase. But it seems like anyone capable of making something to sell on Etsy would be capable of whipping one of these up home-made style. See this Storque article on how to make a lightbox.

Check Out This Video

This video was originally posted on The Storque at Etsy. It shows some great tips for photography of your merchandise.

Great Resources

Here are a couple of really helpful articles that can get you moving along in the right direction:

Photographing for Success at The Storque

Photographing Items – Etsy Wiki

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Tagged as: Etsy, etsy business, photography, Tips, Tutorial