The Silent War for a White Background in Ecommerce
Photo by Madison Inouye from Pexels
If you’ve shopped online recently, like most of us have, you probably have only subconsciously noticed how pervasive white backgrounds are on items to be purchased. I noticed it myself when I was browsing on Amazon the other day. The white background of products was everywhere. I can definitely see how it’s appealing — it’s clear, consistent, and product-focused messaging — but I didn’t realize that it’s actually required by most e-commerce vendors.
It made me begin thinking about how recent changes in technology have created a silent, invisible war over white backgrounds. For many vendors, the ability to put products on a white background is part of their lifeblood. How stringent are the restrictions on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms? Can you just use a white sheet? Does that impact your sales?
I spent an afternoon diving into e-commerce subreddits, color psychology posts, and the odd spot of online shopping to realize the startling truth: a thing as simple as a white background is actually a silent and mostly secret war in e-commerce. Entire economies revolve around the ability to provide it. And if you, as a hopeful e-commerce vendor, can’t provide that because it was too expensive or time-consuming, you were out.
As soon as you begin to unravel this thread, you can see how it has a knock-on effect. Mom and pop online shops can’t expand into Amazon, Depop, or eBay unless they can provide a white background. Unless it’s crisp and high-quality, they’ll look cheap compared to their competitors. It’s an obstacle that stops people from opening up their own online stores, which as a pandemic continues and online shopping increases, looks like a more and more appealing prospect.
What would happen if that entire economy was upended and the ability to instantly have a white background on your products was made accessible to everyone?
AI is democratizing the ability to automatically remove backgrounds.
Until recently, if you wanted a white background, you had to set up a fancy shoot. Alternatively, you could take a picture and then pay someone to manually remove the background and put it on a white one. Both options are expensive and time-consuming — a gate-keeper for smaller companies, or those who didn’t have the budget to do this for all their inventory.
A search online revealed that most blog posts written on the subject suggest you need no fewer than seven items to start taking good product images with a white background: a camera, tripod, white background, white bounce cards, table, tape, and the right room, whatever that means. That list is written for a lean startup that doesn’t have a lot of money.
But technology keeps pace with demand. Another quick google led me to websites like Slazzer, where you can send an image through and have the background removed in seconds. Slazzer even has an API to do this automatically, so presumably, big businesses don’t even have to do this one-by-one — they could automate the entire image-loading and background removal process. I tested it myself and found that this AI automatically removed the background on a selfie in 4.7 seconds, and I could place it on a white background with no issues.
Image is a screenshot taken by the author showcasing how Slazzer removed the background of the author’s selfie.
The upshot of this is that the ability to automatically remove backgrounds and leave them as transparent or replace them with white backgrounds is leveling the e-commerce playing field. Just in time, too, as the pandemic along with the rise in the gig economy mean that folks are looking for flexible work they can do from home. Opening an e-commerce shop has never been easier, and this change goes one step further in making a business possible for anyone with a smartphone and products to sell.
The implication of automatically removing backgrounds.
It can be easy to overlook the implications of something as unexciting as automatically removing backgrounds. I had certainly never thought about it, even as I’ve perused probably upwards of thousands of products with white backgrounds online and I’ve even not selected products just because I thought the background looked dingy or cheap.
The consequences can’t be overstated: anyone can be an e-commerce vendor now. You don’t need to leave the safety of your home to set up a shoot; you don’t need to pay a graphic designer to remove the background manually (or worse: spend time doing it yourself.)
Something as subtle as the fact that any picture of any product or model can be turned into a crisp, white-backgrounded image ready to be viewed and purchased by casual e-commerce buyers is set to overturn online shopping. Consider that global online shopping is estimated to be worth $6.5 trillion in 2023; further opening up that enormous market is going to have real implications on both vendors and the buyers.
Most shoppers won’t even be aware of it, but there will be further effects that they will notice. Look at what happened when emails became automated, or when retargeting started happening. The entire online experience shifted ever so slightly, and now I can’t even remember what it was like to shop online without these mainstays.
AI has made it so that anyone can sell anything.
When AI gets involved in sales and marketing, typically it’s in a way that frees up hours of manual labor for marketers to do something more exciting or more ingenious. While there are lots of scary quotes out there about how digitization is replacing the jobs of real workers, the truth is a little more reassuring, if mundane. AI doesn’t steal jobs. It just makes the humdrum aspects of it go away.
As an example, I used to work for a company that specialized in e-commerce personalization, SaaS. The AI we built was intended to replace spreadsheets that would relate product A with product B.
When companies signed up for our service, the biggest change we heard was that when the marketers no longer had to spend time, energy, or budget on manual tasks like product relations, it freed them up to accomplish some fantastic and inventive marketing campaigns. Sales went up and job satisfaction increased.
I expect that being able to automatically remove backgrounds on your e-commerce images will have similar ramifications. If marketers don’t have to work out how best to position products, or set aside time to learn how to remove backgrounds manually themselves, they’ll have more time and creative energy to think of ways to actually sell those products.
Likewise, if I wanted to open an online store today, I wouldn’t have to buy a white sheet and jazzy lighting rigs to ensure the perfect background — just pushing my images through the AI would do so for me, again freeing me up to work on my email marketing campaigns, or my Google ad word campaigns, for example.
The mostly invisible war for a white background has been settled through a tool as simple as an AI background remover. Both established companies and individual e-commerce mom and pop shops have the ability to do so with much less time, energy, and money than previously. I am excited to see how this technology changes the online shopping landscape.
