If you have spent the last two years optimising images for Shopify, Shopee and Amazon, China's domestic marketplaces will feel like a different sport. The pixel dimensions are smaller than you expect, the file size limits are brutally tight, the fifth main image slot has a job you have never had to think about, and the platform actively suppresses listings whose photos carry too much promotional text.
Taobao and Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Douyin's in-app shop and Xiaohongshu together account for the overwhelming majority of Chinese online retail. Whether you sell through a cross-border route like Tmall Global or JD Worldwide, or supply a Chinese distributor who runs the storefront, someone has to produce images that fit these rules. This guide covers the specs that matter, the conventions that are not written down anywhere in English, and the traps that quietly cost you search visibility.
The China spec table at a glance
Every one of these platforms defaults to a 1:1 square main image, and every one of them serves the mobile product description page at a fixed 750 px width. That consistency is the good news. The differences sit in file size ceilings and image counts.
| Platform | Main image | Ratio | Max images | File size | Mobile detail width |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taobao / Tmall | 800 x 800 px (1000 x 1000+ preferred) | 1:1 | 5 | 3 MB limit, aim under 500 KB | 750 px |
| JD.com | 800 x 800 px | 1:1 | Category dependent | Aim under 500 KB | 750 px |
| Pinduoduo | 750 x 750 px | 1:1 | Category dependent | Up to 1 MB | 750 px |
| Douyin shop | 800 x 800 px, or 750 x 1000 px portrait | 1:1 or 3:4 | 9 | Aim under 500 KB | 750 px |
| Xiaohongshu (notes) | 1242 x 1656 px | 3:4 | 2-9 per note | 300-800 KB sweet spot | Full-bleed feed |
Note how small those numbers are compared with Amazon's 1600 px zoom threshold or a 2048 px Shopify master. Chinese platforms were built mobile-first on networks where a 3 MB hero image was a conversion killer, and the culture of tight compression has stuck. If you are exporting from a Western master set, you are downsizing, not upsizing.
Taobao and Tmall: the fifth image is not optional
The single most important thing to understand about Taobao and Tmall is the bai di tu, or white background image. Taobao gives a listing five main image slots, and the fifth is conventionally reserved for a pure white background shot at RGB 255,255,255. That image is what the platform pulls into search results, category grids and recommendation feeds.
The rules for that slot are strict and worth memorising:
- 800 x 800 px is the standard, though 900 x 900 px is widely used and safe.
- Background must be pure white, not near-white, not a soft grey gradient.
- The product should be centred and fill roughly 70-80 per cent of the frame.
- No models, no logos, no watermarks, no text, no borders. Nothing but the product.
- Keep it under about 300 KB so it loads instantly in a scrolling feed.
The other four slots are yours to use for scene shots, detail crops and comparison images, but Taobao's zoom function only activates when the main image exceeds roughly 700 x 700 px, which is why 800 x 800 px is a floor rather than a target. Shooting and exporting at 1000 x 1000 px or 1200 x 1200 px gives buyers a usable magnifier without breaching file size limits, provided you compress sensibly.
Non-square images get cropped, not letterboxed
Upload a 3:4 portrait into a Taobao main image slot and the platform will crop it to square automatically. It does not pad with white. Whatever sits at the top and bottom of your frame is what disappears, which is exactly how sellers end up with listings showing a headless model or a shoe with the toe cut off. Portrait assets belong in the main image video slot or the detail page, not the main gallery.
The detail page is a long image, not a text block
Western product pages are HTML with a few inline photos. Chinese product pages are, almost universally, a vertical stack of tall images with all the copy baked in as pixels. Mobile detail pages render at 750 px wide, desktop around 790 px, and each individual slice should stay under about 1500-2000 px tall with a file size under 3 MB. Sellers typically stack 30 to 50 slices.
This means your typography, size charts, ingredient lists and shipping information are all image content. It also means any text that must be legible has to be sized for a 750 px canvas, not a 1440 px desktop layout. A 14 px caption in your design file will be unreadable.
JD.com: the same numbers, a stricter culture
JD mirrors Taobao's core geometry at 800 x 800 px square with a 750 px mobile detail width, but JD's positioning as the trusted-authenticity platform means its category quality teams are less tolerant of anything that looks embellished. Clean white background, accurate colour, no aggressive retouching that changes what the product looks like in hand.
JD's category requirements vary more than Taobao's, and some categories mandate specific angle sets. If you are going in through a distributor or a JD Worldwide flagship, get the current category checklist from your operations partner rather than assuming the generic spec covers you.
Pinduoduo: 750 px and price-first framing
Pinduoduo standardises on 750 x 750 px main images with a more generous 1 MB ceiling, and its detail page slices are usually capped shorter, around 1200 px tall, with 20 to 40 slices being typical. The platform's shopper is price-led and group-buy driven, so the visual convention leans towards clear, uncluttered product shots with the value proposition doing the work rather than aspirational styling.
That said, do not read Pinduoduo's lower resolution as licence to upload soft images. A 750 px image that started life as a 900 px crop from a supplier catalogue looks exactly as bad on a phone as it would anywhere else.
Douyin shop: the 3:4 platform
Douyin is the outlier and the one worth adapting for properly. It accepts the standard 800 x 800 px square, but it also supports and visibly favours 750 x 1000 px portrait (3:4) for apparel, footwear and accessories, because a portrait card occupies substantially more screen area in a vertical feed. You get up to nine images.
Douyin still wants a compliant white background shot with the product centred, 1:1, at 800 x 800 px or larger, with no text, watermarks or borders. Product video is where Douyin actually converts, and the convention there is 9:16 at 1080 x 1920 px in MP4, kept short.
The practical implication for a multi-market seller is that Douyin needs its own crop, not a resize. A square hero cropped to 3:4 either loses the sides of the product or leaves awkward dead space, so plan the portrait framing at the shoot.
Xiaohongshu: content specs, not listing specs
Xiaohongshu behaves like a social discovery platform that happens to have a shop attached, and its image conventions follow the feed rather than a product catalogue. Notes run at 3:4, commonly 1242 x 1656 px, with 2 to 9 images per note and a target file size of roughly 300-800 KB per image.
Two conventions matter here. First, keep roughly the top 15 per cent of the cover clear so overlaid titles and interface elements do not collide with your product. Second, unlike marketplace main images, Xiaohongshu covers are expected to carry a bold text headline. Restrain it to one or two text zones and let the inner carousel images stay clean.
The text-on-image trap
Chinese sellers have a name for main images plastered with promotional badges, price flashes and starbursts: niu pi xuan, literally psoriasis images. Taobao and its peers algorithmically down-weight listings whose main images look like this, and the effect on search visibility is real. Coming from Shopee or Lazada, where a discount badge on the hero is standard practice, this is a genuine habit to unlearn.
Also prohibited across these platforms on main images: QR codes, contact details, references to other platforms, third-party logos and collaged multi-panel layouts in the white background slot. Save the messaging for the detail page slices, where selling copy belongs.
Hosting and delivery: assume nothing carries over
Images on Chinese marketplaces live on the platform's own image storage, uploaded through the seller back office. Do not plan a workflow that hotlinks to a Shopify CDN or a Cloudflare bucket. Beyond the technical restriction, foreign CDNs are slow or unreachable from mainland China, so an image that renders in Singapore in 200 ms can stall for seconds in Chengdu. Upload the assets, let the platform serve them.
This is also why the tight file size ceilings deserve respect rather than workarounds. They are tuned to a mobile-first audience on a network where every kilobyte is a real delay.
A workable production plan
The efficient approach is to shoot once at high resolution, build one clean master set, and then derive the China variants rather than reshooting. In practice that means keeping a 2000 x 2000 px square master and a 1500 x 2000 px portrait master per SKU, then exporting to each platform's numbers. Batch tools that let you define a preset per platform and run a whole SKU folder through in one pass, such as PixelPrep, turn what would be hours of manual resizing into a few minutes per catalogue drop.
The one thing you cannot derive is the portrait crop. Frame it at the shoot or you will be cropping compromises forever.
Pre-upload checklist
- Square main image exported at 800 x 800 px minimum, 1000 x 1000 px or larger preferred for zoom.
- Pinduoduo variant at 750 x 750 px; Douyin portrait variant at 750 x 1000 px.
- Dedicated pure white background shot at RGB 255,255,255, product centred at 70-80 per cent frame fill, under 300 KB, with no text, logo, model, watermark or border.
- Every main image genuinely square, so the platform's auto-crop never touches your product.
- Main images free of promotional text, price badges, QR codes and rival platform references.
- Detail page slices built to 750 px wide, each under 1500-2000 px tall and under 3 MB, with all text sized to be legible on a 750 px canvas.
- Files compressed to JPG at 80-85 per cent quality, landing between 200 and 500 KB, with PNG reserved for graphics that need transparency.
- Colour converted to sRGB before export, so nothing shifts on upload.
- Xiaohongshu assets at 3:4 with the top 15 per cent of the cover kept clear.
- Category-specific requirements confirmed with your seller back office or operating partner before a large upload.
Get the fifth-slot white background shot and the square-crop discipline right and you have cleared the two obstacles that trip up most overseas sellers. Everything else is a resize job, and that part you can automate.