Google Shopping: Upload Your Content Without Watermarks or Be Banned

You do your photoshoot with a greenscreen in the background/part of the background, then digitally replace the grenscreen with your logo. Since your logo and the product are mixed at the edge pixels, it will look crappy if cropped, whereas you yourself have the greenscreen originals and can change the background whenever and however you like.

Did I say otherwise?

> why would you invest a ton of money into quality photography and then cover it up with a watermark?

To make sure that this quality photography stays as a competitive asset or if used by others, turns into advertising for my store.

> If you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling the competitive point is customer service and price

When you're selling something online, photography is most certainly a differentiator. It is also a substantial barrier to entry for the competition, because quality photography is difficult and expensive.

> Such stores generally use the manufacturer's images anyways.

Manufacturer images, when they exist, are almost always terrible. Having good photos to clearly show off the product and everything included is the difference between a buyer clicking BUY and having them wander off.

I can't speak to Google Shopping, but Amazon requires a high-quality image before you can list a product. So if you spend money on the shot you don't want others stealing it. EXIF data and other non-watermark solutions are easily removed.

Third party sales channels represent a HUGE portion of the market, you can't afford to ignore them as a reseller. Often your only advantage in a third party channel is the quality of your data and images. Your company name is never allowed to feature prominently, and if you think good customer service will convince somebody to pay 20% more for your product than the guy who's breaking MAP policy you are kidding yourself. Good customer feedback is the minimum bar for selling successfully through third party channels, not a differentiator. In many marketplaces, sellers who have bad feedback will simply set up a new account and start over, seeding themselves with good feedback from day one.

What all this adds up to is a lose/lose for honest companies that play by the rules, make no mistake, protecting the images that you've invested capital in to create is very important.

The basic stance would be "that's Google's policy, deal with it", and I undestand it. At the same time, there are so many product with really awful images (for a coat, there would be no view of the inner fabric for instance). If a merchant would take the time to take relevant pictures of the right functionnalities of a product, I'd also understand wanting clients to know they're the one who cared about it. With google shopping's system, the product maker has the burden of providing decent images of it's product, or no one will care to make something better.

The quote is:

'"Brands are the solution, not the problem," Mr. Schmidt said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."'

Notice the absence of the word "big". His statement isn't wrong.

In this new world that worships advertising lingo, Wikipedia is a brand. Archive.org is a brand. Slashdot, HN, iFixit, LWN are all brands. I understand that this is a disgusting thing to say, but do you disagree with the substance of the statement?

In business a photo can often make the difference between a sale or no sale, or more important, which shop the sale goes to. Some businesses, like fashion, are almost entirely "photo" based. Others, like food, cars, etc. rely on it extensively.

Here's an example in which, for arguments sake, we state that all non-photo factors are equal and the best they can be.

Your business spends $100,000 a year to have top quality photos taken for the products you sell and you find the photos lead to a five to ten fold improvement in sales vs. stock or no photos. Now say all your competitors just steal your images and use them for their sites. Your sales drop back to where they were and your advantage is gone. And now you've got to make up the $100,000 to top it all off.

Having a watermark won't stop lesser competitors from sealing your image, but other "on par" competitors will likely not due to potential litigation. If you don't have a watermark everyone steals it with the line, "I didn't know it was something I couldn't use ... my web guys just found it on the internet. I'll talk with them." (or whatever) So now you have to constantly police the internet for competitors using your images, deal with take-downs, and lawyers.

Hope I've cleared things up a bit.

If we publish our home brewed content without watermarks and it is lifted off google and used to compete against us, we have no effective recourse.

Detail:

In our company, one advancement track is from Customer Service to Products. It seems like a good and obvious thing to do, but typically photos and product materials in our space are produced by teams without direct experience helping customers make CPAP equipment work for them. We often find that the stock images and materials available to us are ineffective for internet customers, as they are often designed to target physicians and the owners of traditional brick and mortar CPAP retailers.

We have spent a lot of time and effort to do better. I believe we have. Our product presentations are end CPAP user driven and focused. We view both the images produced and the knowledge that produced them as an earned competitive advantage.

We've had instances where we woke up to find anothercpapco.com copying our product catalog verbatim. I think software patents slow innovation and that the DRM situation in the music industry is bad. Yet, I made the decision to water mark our images in order to prove them stolen.