Standing out on marketplaces: what the best listings do differently

That sounds like bad news, and for most brands it is the opposite. When everyone gets the same frame, the difference between you and the listing below you is almost entirely the quality of what you put in it. That is a solvable problem.

There is a catch, though, and it is the part most articles on this subject skip.

Most of your marketplace listings are not made by you

If you sell through dealers, retailers and distributors, your products are already on marketplaces, listed by someone else. A retailer uploads what they have. A distributor builds a listing from the file that came with the first order. A reseller you have never spoken to finds an image somewhere and crops it.

So before you optimise the listings you control, find out what the ones you do not control look like. Search your own product names on the two or three marketplaces that matter in your markets. You will usually find three versions of the same product, two of them with an image you would not have approved, and at least one with packaging you stopped making.

That is not a listing problem. It is a supply problem, and it has a fix: make the right file easier to get than the wrong one. We wrote about that side of it in a range that still looks like one brand.

The rules are not the same everywhere, and they are mostly about image one

Every marketplace publishes its own image specification, and they differ in the details that matter: whether a plain background is required on the main image, how much of the frame the product has to fill, whether text, logos, badges or props are allowed, the minimum resolution, the aspect ratio, and how many images you are allowed in total.

Two practical consequences:

Check the specification per market, not per marketplace. The same platform often has different rules in different countries, and a local requirement about labelling or packaging can make a perfectly good image unusable.

Design for the strictest one. If you produce a main image that satisfies the tightest specification you sell under, it works everywhere. Producing a looser version first and fixing it per platform afterwards is how you end up with four slightly different main images and no idea which one is current.

The three jobs inside one listing

A listing is not a gallery. It is three jobs in a fixed order.

Image one does the clicking. It is not really a product page image at all, it is your advertisement in the search results, shown at thumbnail size next to twenty competitors. At that size, detail is noise. What survives is the silhouette, the contrast against the background and whether the product fills the frame. Most listings lose here by using an image with too much empty space around the product.

Images two and three do the convincing. This is where the buyer looks after they have clicked and before they have read anything. A detail of the material or the mechanism, and something that shows size. Scale is the most under-produced image in e-commerce and the one that prevents the most returns.

The rest do the reassuring. In use, in a room, on a person, with what is in the box. These slots are where most competing listings are empty, which makes them cheap wins.

A note on text on images: many platforms allow it in the supporting slots and not on the main image. Where it is allowed, it works, because a buyer scanning a listing reads a label on an image long before they read a bullet list. Where it is not allowed, a listing can be suppressed or rejected for it, so check before you produce a set with text baked in.

The set we would send a marketplace

This is what we would consider complete, per product. It is short on purpose, because a set that is too long never gets finished for the whole range.

1. The main image, to the strictest specification you sell under.

2. One detail: the material, the finish, the mechanism, whatever your product is better at than the cheaper one.

3. One scale reference, where the product is judged against something ordinary.

4. One in-use or in-context image.

5. One information image, where the platform allows text on image.

6. Market variants of the main image wherever the packaging or the label differs.

Point six is the one that gets forgotten, and it is the one that causes returns. If your German packaging is different from your Dutch packaging, a listing in Germany showing the Dutch pack is a promise you are not keeping.

What breaks when the range grows

Three things, and they always arrive in the same order.

A new colour or variant is added, photographed slightly differently, and now your category page has one product that does not match the rest. A seasonal pack is introduced and never replaced afterwards, so in March you are selling a Christmas box. And a retailer re-uploads an old set because the new one was hard to find, which puts last year's product back on the market under your name.

None of these is a photography problem. All three are version problems. The fix is that there is one place where the current set lives, named so that the right file is the obvious one, and that your partners can reach it without asking you. That is the same argument we made about your own catalogue in consistency reads as reliability.

A test you can run this week

Pick your ten best-selling products. For each, look at the marketplace listings you do not control, and write down three things: would a buyer recognise these as one brand, is the main image the one you would have chosen, and how old is it.

Then fix the worst three at the source rather than on the listing. Sending a correction to one retailer solves one page. Making the current set easy to get solves the next twenty.

Where LensLab fits

We produce product visuals with AI and a creator from our team in the loop, built on the Brand DNA of your brand, so a main image for a marketplace and a lifestyle image for your own page come out of the same style rather than two different sessions. Variants, markets and crops come from the same approved set, which is what makes point six above affordable.

The approved set then lives in one central library, and through the distribution module your dealers, retailers and sales partners have one door that always holds the current version. You can see how it works in more detail, or look at our use cases.

To be straight about what is not there yet: Shopify and WooCommerce integrations are planned for November 2026, and insight into which images are actually being used is in development.

In closing

On a marketplace you cannot out-design anyone, because nobody gets to design. You can out-prepare them. Produce to the strictest specification, fill the slots your competitors leave empty, and make sure the people listing your products on your behalf can find the current files in five seconds.

If you want to know which image belongs in which slot in the first place, start with which image each channel needs. And if you want to see what a complete set looks like for your range, try LensLab free with five credits.