How much does ecommerce product photography cost?
There's no single price — it depends on how you produce the images. Here's what each option typically costs, and the hidden cost most stores forget: time.
The four ways to produce product photos
1. Professional studio or freelancer
Highest quality and the right choice for hero and campaign shots. Pricing is usually per finished image (often ~€5–€25) or a day rate (~€400–€1,500), depending on market, styling and retouching. Costs add up fast on a large, frequently changing catalogue.
2. In-house studio
Buy a lightbox, lighting and a camera once, then shoot yourself. Lower per-image cash cost, but real ongoing staff time for shooting, editing and uploading — and someone has to own it.
3. DIY phone + manual editing
Cheapest gear (a phone you already own), but the time cost is high: removing backgrounds, cropping, naming files and uploading by hand for every SKU.
4. Automated software
Shoot in-house on a phone and let software do the editing and publishing. You pay a small fixed fee per image with no photographer and no manual editing — which is where Shelfshoot fits.
The hidden cost: time
Cash cost is easy to compare; staff time is where DIY quietly gets expensive. If editing and uploading one product takes 10 minutes, a 500-SKU catalogue is ~83 hours of work. Automating that — scan, shoot, auto-publish — is usually the biggest saving, not the editing tool itself.
How to calculate your real cost per image
- Add the production fee — photographer, or software per-image cost.
- Add internal time — shooting, editing, file management, uploading (at a realistic hourly rate).
- Divide by finished images to get true cost per image.
- Re-run it monthly — the cost compounds with every new product.
Cut the cost per image
Shoot on a phone, skip the studio and the manual editing, and pay a small fee per image. See the plans, or try Shelfshoot free.
See pricingFAQ
How much does ecommerce product photography cost per image?
It varies by market and complexity, but a professional studio or freelancer often charges roughly €5–€25 per finished image (or a day rate of around €400–€1,500). DIY lowers the cash cost but adds a lot of staff time, while automated tools like Shelfshoot charge a small fixed fee per image with no studio or photographer.
What is the cheapest way to get product photos for an online store?
The lowest total cost usually comes from shooting in-house on a phone and automating the editing and publishing — that removes both the photographer fee and the manual editing time, leaving a small per-image software cost.
How do I calculate my product photography cost?
Add up the photographer or software fee, plus internal staff time for shooting, editing, file management and uploading, then divide by the number of finished images. Time is usually the hidden cost DIY underestimates.