Why great product photos are key to Black Friday success

With record spending expected yet again on Black Friday this year, commerce brands need to think big going into the holiday shopping season. As you know, Black Friday is the biggest shopping surge of the year, and competition has never been tougher. To stand out, you need a secret weapon in your e-commerce arsenal: AI product photography.

You’ve also heard all the usual advice: go deep with discounts, make sure your e-commerce store runs smoothly, plan your campaigns early, and promote across every channel. That’s all valid, but this year is different. The same tactics won’t work. So what do you do?

To attract attention on Black Friday, e-commerce brands need to prioritize high-quality product photography. While others fight over discounts and ad spend, brands with better visuals earn more clicks, trust, and sales. Photoroom, the AI-powered product photography platform built for commerce makes it easy to create e-commerce images, lifestyle photos, and ad creatives at scale, quickly and affordably.

Why Black Friday sales are harder than ever

Every brand wants a record-breaking Black Friday. But the reality is that winning this sales season has never been harder.

Consumers are spending less overall due to economic uncertainty and tariff threats, putting overall strain on sellers and shrinking profit margins. It’s also harder—and more expensive— than ever to acquire new customers. The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is up 40% since last year, ad costs are soaring and engagement rates are shrinking.

At the same time, shopping behavior has shifted. 

Roughly 69% of Black Friday purchases are expected to happen on mobile, where visual decisions happen in seconds. LLM-driven shopping has also entered the fray, which means brands need to entirely rethink how they optimize their product listings—with photographs expected to play a key role.

The instinctive response to these challenges is to discount more heavily to stay competitive. But this only shrinks margins further. With brands already losing $29 per new customer, competing on price alone is unsustainable.

Consumers are scrolling through hundreds of deals. They want to easily find the items that are different and most suitable to them. And in 2025, product photos are how you’re going to help them do that.

In this environment, the brands that win are those that think and act differently. This year, high-quality product visuals, produced at scale using Photoroom, are the secret weapon to help you do that.

Why you need AI product photography this Black Friday

AI product photography is one of the most effective ways for brands to increase conversion rates, build trust with consumers, and protect profit margins when ad costs are at their peak during Black Friday. 

That’s because they:

• Drive buying decisions. 75% of shoppers rely heavily on photos when evaluating a product, making it the top consideration factor for online shoppers. But while photos are important, producing them eats into already tight profit margins. AI product photography tools are both a cheaper and more effective solution that help you balance cost and quality.

• Build trust and drive conversions. 88% of consumers say trust is the key factor in purchase decisions from a brand. Listings with multiple, high-quality images convert better than those fewer and lower quality visuals, according to Shopify. AI product photography tools let you deliver this volume of images, without having to hire extra designers or photographers.

• Reduce costly returns. A significant portion of e-commerce returns happen because the product looks different in person than it did online. Often, this is because of poor or incomplete product imagery. With Photoroom, e-commerce brands can stage their product photos in real-world settings, ensuring that shoppers understand how the item will look when they take it out of the package. 

High-quality and professionally staged product photographs are non-negotiable on Black Friday. But producing them for an entire product catalogue—with hundreds or thousands of SKUs—is expensive and extremely time consuming. 

Photoroom helps you balance all of this with a suite of AI-powered editing, staging, and branding tools that let you create hundreds of product images in minutes, without the need for outside designers or photographers. 

Why traditional photography fails on Black Friday

Traditional product photography wasn’t built for the speed or scale of Black Friday. While it delivers great results, its cost and complexity make it unsuitable for fast paced e-commerce.

Studio shoots are expensive and slow to scale, potentially costing thousands per shoot, and taking weeks to complete new productions. 

In a mission-critical sales period defined by speed, traditional photography is simply:

• Too slow. Planning, shooting, and editing can take one to three weeks—far too long for the rapid Black Friday turnaround

• Too costly. Costs per image simply don’t work for brands that have thousands of SKUs in their catalogues. 

• Too rigid. Reshoots are needed for each new background or campaign update, which is too prohibitive in when brands need to rapidly update and deploy images across potentially dozens of sales channels. 

During Black Friday, time-to-market is everything. When creative production takes weeks instead of hours, and costs eat into your already thin profit margins, you need some help to balance your competing priorities. AI product photography helps you bridge these two worlds, giving you high-converting product photos, quickly, at a fraction of the cost of traditional photography. 

Photoroom makes this possible with our suite of AI-driven photography tools that let you do everything from touch up an image to stage it in entirely new settings in just a few clicks.

How AI product photography tools change the game 

AI product photography has become a true competitive advantage. These tools solve the biggest challenges of traditional photography, while making high-quality product images accessible to every business. 

Instead of taking weeks to plan, shoot, and edit product photos, an AI product photography platform like Photoroom lets you generate and refine hundreds of visuals in minutes. That means product catalogues, ad creative, social content, and marketplace-ready product images can all be created or updated at once, without the logistical chaos of coordinating studios, models, and reshoots.

Here’s how AI helps brands prepare for Black Friday:

• Accelerate production by batch-editing hundreds of product photos in minutes, not weeks

• Maintain a consistent branded look across SKUs, campaigns, and sales channels

• Create and adapt lifestyle shots, seasonal backgrounds, and campaign-ready images for any sales and marketing channel in minutes

• Empower teams of any size with affordable, intuitive tools that simplify creative workflows

• Reduce photography costs by producing dozens of image variations at once, without the need for manual image manipulation or reshoots 

E-commerce brands are being squeezed from all angles. AI photography is the solution. Photoroom, for example, gives brands the freedom to test, iterate, and launch Black Friday campaigns faster, and at an exponentially lower cost than traditional photography.

Photoroom: the secret weapon for Black Friday

Used by millions of ecommerce sellers, Photoroom is the fastest way to turn plain product shots into Black Friday–ready visuals. It’s purpose-built for peak sales periods like Black Friday, and helps address the many challenges e-commerce brands face today—like creating high-quality product visuals at scale, without eating into profit margins by having to pay photographers and designers. 

Photorooms extensive suite of AI photography tools includes: 

New features:

• Virtual Model. Generate realistic model shots for fashion and apparel products—no models, studios, or reshoots required—so your collections stay fresh and ready to sell.

• Product Staging. Create lifestyle and seasonal compositions that help shoppers better understand how your products will work in real life. 

• AI Product Beautifier. Instantly enhance lighting, color, and sharpness for your product photos, without the need to load them into dedicated image editing software.

The Classics:

• Background Remover. Remove backgrounds and instantly replace them with solid white backdrops for e-commerce marketplaces, or pre-created lifestyle imagery for ad campaigns and e-commerce websites. 

• Background Generator: Once backgrounds are removed, replace them with realistic lifestyle or abstract backgrounds, created using Generative AI. Background images can be created automatically based on your product image, or using manual text prompts.

• Swap Backgrounds. Quickly replace your existing product photo background with your own image, or one from our library of high-quality stock images.

• White Background. Instantly add plain white backgrounds to product photos to get them ready for your e-commerce store, or for upload to marketplaces like Amazon.

• AI Shadows. Add realistic shadows and reflections to add depth to your product photos and mimic the realism of a live photoshoot.

• Resize and Expand. Adapt images instantly for every ad format, social platform, and marketplace requirement without losing quality or composition.

Businesses that need to do all of this across dozens or even hundreds of product photos at once, there’s Photoroom’s Batch Mode. With this, you can process hundreds of SKUs at once, ensuring your Black Friday catalog is refreshed and on-brand in minutes instead of weeks.

Let’s look at a few sample workflows to get product listing images ready for Black Friday with Photoroom. 

Staging your product 

• Open the Photoroom app

• Open the Product Staging feature

• Add your product image 

• Click “Generate”

• Photoroom automatically stages your product image against a new background

• Select an image you like, click “Use this image”

• Open the new image in the editor to make additional changes

• Add a shadow, resize, and export

Showcasing apparel on virtual models

• Open the Photoroom app

• Open AI Virtual Models

• Upload your flat lay apparel image

• Choose a model from the dropdown menu

• Click “Generate”

• Select an image you like, click “Use this image”

• Open the new image in the editor to make additional changes

• Add a shadow, resize, and export 

Both of these workflows took less than three minutes in total. And, all of this can be done for dozens of photos at once using Batch Mode.

Traditional vs. AI photography: Why AI is the right choice for Black Friday

AI product photography is the most logical choice for e-commerce brands who need to create high-quality visuals at scale leading up to Black Friday, without spending thousands of dollars on graphic designs and photographers. 

Here’s how AI stacks up against traditional photography and editing.

Photoroom gives you all the benefits and quality of traditional product photo shoots, but with the significant added benefit of being able to create, edit, and standardize hundreds of images at once. And you can do it all yourself, without having to hire outside help. 

How to drive more Black Friday Sales with AI ad creatives

Your goal leading up to Black Friday is to create product images that differentiate your brand, increase conversions, and reduce returns. That’s the secret sauce to a successful, and profitable, Black Friday. 

Here’s how to do that with AI product photos: 

• Test several photo variations in your ads to pinpoint the images that deliver the best return. Use batch editing to create dozens of images that you can test at once. 

• Differentiate by adding lifestyle or seasonal backgrounds that match your campaign theme. Use AI image and background generators to create unique and eye-catching scenes.

• Brand your images consistently across every sales channel with reusable templates and brand kits. Upload your brand’s fonts, colors, and logos and apply them in bulk across your product image catalogue. 

• Prioritize your best-selling products first by refreshing their visuals before expanding to the full catalogue. Group your product images into high, medium, and low priority buckets, and batch process them to hit the highest-impact ones first. 

• Optimize every image for the devices and platforms that you’re targeting. Resize images to meet Amazon or Ebay specifications, create desktop and mobile versions, or repurposes photos for use on your social channels. 

• Expand your creative library by generating multiple lifestyle and angle variations for future campaigns and AI search prompts.

Great product photography is now available to every e-commerce brand, regardless of their size, number of employees, and budget. With Photoroom’s AI-powered product photography, anyone can create and edit incredible images for use across e-commerce stores, marketplaces, social media, and Black Friday ad campaigns. 

Make product photos your competitive advantage to drive more Black Friday sales

The old playbook for Black Friday is changing. Customer acquisition and ad costs are too high, and margins are too thin to rely on deep discounts to sell products. You need a new secret weapon to drive sales without eating into profit margins. And this year, that secret weapon is better visuals. 

Photoroom is an AI-powered product photography platform that’s built for peak sales windows like Black Friday. It lets you flex your creative muscles and experiment with new compositions, staging, and backgrounds to see what converts best, without having to hire designers or photographers to do the work. And with batch mode, you can scale your vision and output dozens—or hundreds—of standardized and on-brand visuals for use across all of your Black Friday sales channels.