You have spent months building a clean product image set. It converts well at home. Then you open a second country on Shopee, list on Rakuten, or switch on a Google Shopping feed for Australia, and the numbers collapse. Same product, same photos, half the click-through rate.
The usual diagnosis is pricing or shipping. Often it is the images. Product photos carry more market-specific information than sellers realise: the language in the corner banner, the size chart in inches, the plug on the end of the cable, the model in the lifestyle shot. Localising your images is not about reshooting everything for every country. It is about knowing which layers of an image are portable and which are not.
What actually needs localising (and what does not)
Think of a product image as four stacked layers. Only two of them usually need to change per market.
- The product itself. Portable, with exceptions. If you sell electricals, the plug type visible in the photo has to match the destination market. A UK three-pin plug in a listing sold into Singapore is fine; that same photo on a German listing invites returns and questions.
- The background and lighting. Fully portable. A pure white cutout is white everywhere. This is why your main image should be the least localised asset you own.
- Any text, badge or graphic overlay. Never portable. Language, units, currency and claims all shift by market, and so do the rules about whether the overlay is even allowed.
- People, props and context. Partly portable. Hands, feet and cropped models travel well. Full lifestyle scenes carry cultural signals: interiors, clothing, seasonality, food pairings.
The practical consequence is that a well-built catalogue has one global main image set and a per-market overlay set. Not twenty separate photoshoots.
Rule one: your main image must be text-free almost everywhere
This is the single biggest cross-border trap, because sellers coming from Shopee or Lazada gallery culture are used to designing busy cover images, then carry that habit into Amazon or a Google feed.
Amazon prohibits text overlays, badges, watermarks, promotional callouts and brand logos that are not physically part of the product on the main image. That includes "Best Seller" flashes, discount percentages, size callouts and photographer credits. Amazon's automated review now flags subtle text that human reviewers used to miss. Text and graphics are permitted on secondary images.
Google Merchant Center applies the same principle to the image_link field. Promotional text, retailer logos, watermarks and offer badges such as "Free Shipping" or "50% off" trigger a "Promotional overlay on image" disapproval. Overlays are allowed in additional_image_link, and price promotions belong in Merchant Promotions rather than baked into a JPEG. If you enable automatic image improvements, Google will attempt to strip detected text or watermarks and republish the cleaned image, which is convenient but means you lose control of what the shopper sees.
Shopee and Lazada follow the same split. Main or cover images need a clean white background with no promotional text; gallery images are where frames, infographics, badges and localised copy belong. Lazada expects the product to fill roughly 80 per cent of the frame, Shopee roughly 70 per cent.
Build accordingly: one clean, text-free hero that ships to every channel unchanged, and a localised gallery stack behind it.
Rule two: local language in images is expected in some markets, optional in others
English-only galleries are perfectly normal in Singapore, Australia and much of the Middle East's expatriate-heavy segments. They are a conversion handicap in Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, where shoppers expect a long, image-heavy detail page written in the local language.
Japan is the clearest example. Rakuten Ichiba listing culture is built around tall, densely designed Japanese-language banners and comparison graphics, not a sparse gallery. Korea is similar: Coupang detail pages lean heavily on stacked instructional images, and Korean law requires certain product information to be presented correctly, so an untranslated image set reads as an unfinished listing rather than a minimalist one.
Regulation can also force the issue. Malaysia proposed requiring seller information, product titles and descriptions on Shopee, Lazada and TikTok Shop to be in Bahasa Malaysia, excluding brand names; the rule was paused in mid-2025 pending seller feedback. Rules of this type tend to return in some form, and they are cheap to pre-empt if your overlay text lives in an editable design file rather than being flattened into your only copy of the image.
Marketplace overlay and language expectations at a glance
| Channel | Text on main image | Text on gallery images | Local language expected in images |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon (all locales) | Not allowed | Allowed | Strongly preferred for JP, DE, FR, IT, ES |
| Google Shopping feed | Not allowed in image_link | Allowed in additional_image_link | Preferred; overlays should never carry price |
| Shopee | Not allowed on cover | Allowed | Yes for ID, TH, VN; English fine in SG/MY |
| Lazada | Not allowed on cover | Allowed | Yes for ID, TH, VN; English fine in SG/MY |
| Rakuten Ichiba | Cleaner is safer | Expected and heavily used | Japanese effectively mandatory |
| Coupang | Clean product shot | Expected, long detail stack | Korean effectively mandatory |
| Etsy / eBay | Discouraged | Allowed | Optional; buyer base skews English |
Treat the language column as commercial guidance rather than policy. The overlay columns are policy, and breaching them costs you a suppressed listing or a disapproved feed item.
Rule three: units, sizing and currency belong in editable layers
Three details cause a disproportionate share of cross-border returns:
- Measurements. Centimetres for most of Asia and Europe, inches for the United States. A dimension graphic showing only one system halves its usefulness. Showing both, small and side by side, is the cheapest fix in this entire article.
- Apparel and shoe sizing. UK, EU, US, JP and KR scales diverge enough that a size chart image built for one market actively misleads another. If you sell footwear internationally, the size chart is a per-market asset, not a global one.
- Currency and price. Never put a price in an image. It ages badly, it breaks feed policy, and it makes a single exchange-rate move look like a bait-and-switch.
Keep every overlay as a text layer in the source file. Flattening a price or a Bahasa Indonesia headline into a JPEG and deleting the working file is how sellers end up rebuilding a hundred graphics by hand.
Rule four: lifestyle imagery carries cultural signals
A lifestyle photo shot in a Scandinavian apartment sells credibility in Northern Europe and reads as aspirational but unrelatable in Manila or Jakarta. Some quick heuristics that hold up across categories:
- Interiors, tableware and window light imply a climate and a housing type. Match them loosely to the destination.
- Seasonality inverts across the equator. A knitwear campaign image dated to a Northern Hemisphere winter lands in the middle of an Australian summer.
- Model representation matters commercially, not only ethically. Shoppers assess fit and suitability partly by whether the person in the frame resembles them.
- When in doubt, crop tighter. Hands, a torso, a close product interaction: these are the most portable lifestyle assets you can shoot, and they cost nothing extra to capture during a normal session.
Building the workflow
A practical structure for a multi-market catalogue:
- Shoot once, at the highest resolution your camera allows. Amazon wants 1,600 px or more on the longest side for zoom to activate; most Asian marketplaces want 1,000 x 1,000 px square. Shooting for the largest requirement means you only ever downscale.
- Produce one clean, text-free hero per product. This file goes everywhere unchanged.
- Produce a master gallery template with all text on editable layers. Duplicate and translate per market rather than redesigning.
- Export per channel to the exact dimensions and aspect ratios each one demands. Batch tools such as PixelPrep handle the square-versus-portrait conversions and file-size ceilings in one pass, so localisation work stays in the design step instead of leaking into manual resizing.
- Name files with a market suffix. A product-sku-gallery-02-id.jpg convention prevents the most common cross-border error of all: uploading the Thai gallery to the Vietnamese listing.
Your cross-border image checklist
- Main image is clean: no text, no logo, no badge, no watermark, white background.
- All promotional and explanatory text lives on secondary images only.
- No price or discount appears anywhere in any image file.
- Overlay text is translated for JP, KR, TH, VN and ID; English is acceptable for SG, MY, AU and the UK.
- Dimension graphics show both centimetres and inches.
- Size charts are per-market, not global.
- Plug type, voltage and any printed packaging language match the destination market.
- Lifestyle shots are cropped tight enough to travel, or reshot per region.
- Source files are kept layered and editable, with market suffixes in filenames.
- Every export is checked against that channel's dimension, aspect ratio and file-size limits before upload.
Localisation is usually framed as a translation problem. For e-commerce it is mostly an asset-management problem: keep the hero universal, keep the overlays editable, and the cost of opening a new market drops from a photoshoot to an afternoon.