Why listing photos get rejected

Rejections cluster around a short list, and almost all of them are checkable before upload. The frustrating ones are not the obvious violations but the near-misses: a background that is 250 instead of 255, a fill of 81% instead of 85%, a file 40 kB over a cap.

Background and fill

Together these are most of it. An off-white background fails a pure-white requirement even though it looks white on your screen, and there is no partial credit — 250,250,250 is not white. Under-filling is the other half: a product sitting small in the middle of a large frame misses the fill rule, and it happens most often to people who added a margin for tidiness. Both are measurable rather than matters of taste, which is the good news: sample the corner pixels, measure the product's bounding box against the frame, and you know before you upload rather than after.

Text, logos, watermarks and props

Amazon's main image rule is blunt: no text, no logos, no watermarks, no borders, no props, nothing but the product. That includes the things sellers add believing they help — "Free shipping" banners, size call-outs, a brand logo in the corner, a decorative border, a prop hand holding the item. Secondary images are far freer and are the right place for all of it. The watermark case deserves its own mention: a watermark on a listing photo is not protection, it is a rejection, and it is why this app does not put one on free exports at all.

Resolution, file size and format

Under the dimension minimum is a hard reject. Over the file cap is a hard reject on Etsy and Shopify. Over 25 megapixels is a Shopify reject. And a transparent PNG uploaded where a white background is required is a reject even though the file itself is fine. A subtler one: a heavily upscaled image passes every automated dimension check and still gets flagged in manual review as low quality, because the numbers say 2000 px and the pixels say 600. If the stretch factor is above about 2.5×, expect that.

Check before you upload

The mechanical checks take seconds and catch nearly everything: sample the background pixel value; measure the product's long edge against the frame's; read the file size against the cap; confirm the dimensions against both the minimum and the zoom threshold; and look at the main image for anything that is not the product. The app runs exactly these checks against the preset you chose and reports what fails, including the one that a naive check would get wrong — a frame whose *edges* are white because it was padded, while the middle still contains the original background.