Frooition offer a great and robust image hosting service that neatly integrates with the many eBay design services they offer.

Frooition’s product image hosting service is available to Frooition pro design customers as an additional service. Prices start from just $7.50 / £5.00.

There are many product image hosting options available to the eBay seller, so why pick one over another? What are the important features to have and what questions should you ask?

Frooition’s image hosting solution has the following features and benefits over other image hosting solutions:

Images are stored forever
Image management tool
Direct integration into the Frooition design management tool
Use up to 20 hi-res images
Automatically creates thumbnails
Images are optimised for size and load speed
Solution designed for eBay – includes image size verification
No bandwidth restrictions
Specifically designed for commercial use on eBay
Resilient, cloud based hosting.
Ability to bulk upload a whole folder of images

Images stored forever

Unlike other image hosting solutions Frooition will never remove an image unless you choose to delete it yourself.

A lot of free hosting solutions will only host your image for a limited amount of time, that’s fine for a one off listing but will cause problems if you relist or use good till cancelled listings.

Customers are a lot less likely to commit to purchase when they can’t see the product you are selling!

Image Management Tool

Frooition’s image hosting solution also includes an image management tool that enables you to organise your images in folders, if you rename a folder or move an image in the tool it won’t affect your live listings – unlike a simple FTP hosting solution.

You can also search for images to make the listing process even quicker. On traditional FTP solutions you would need to remember that DSC0154a_small.jpg is the picture of the iPhone case that you are listing, with Frooition you see a thumbnail view of each image in a structured format.

Ability to bulk upload a whole folder of images

With Frooition you aren’t limited to uploading 1 image at a time, leaving you staring at a loading screen. Instead you can grab a whole folder of images and let them upload in bulk while you carry on with more important tasks!

Direct Integration into the Frooition listing management tool

The Frooition image manager is in-built into the listing management tool, this means that when you create an eBay listing you simply click “add a picture” and it jumps straight to the image management tool to select an image or upload a new image.

Using a separate system you would need to upload the image, view the image, grab the URL from your browser’s address bar copy, and then paste into your listing tool.

The Frooition image hosting solution could save you up to 30 seconds per image, that’s a heck of a lot over 10 listings with 20 images each!

Use up to 20 hi-res images

Frooition designs enable you to list with up to 20 hi resolution images. The system creates individual thumbnails and a product image gallery that lets you add up to 20 images to your listing without making the listing stretch for miles.

The design solution also enables you to enlarge images even further to get a full size view of the product with a pop out box effect!

In a standard listing with 3^rd party image hosting users would only be able to list the images in full size making a large, un-friendly listing, or worse have to squash and distort the images in order to fit them into the listing.

Automatically creates thumbnails

Frooition image hosting automatically creates perfect thumbnails images, it intelligently detects if an image is landscape or portrait and scales it accordingly without distortion or stretching. The thumbnails are much smaller in size than the full resolution images which means customers aren’t left waiting for images to constantly load.

If your image hosting solution doesn’t create small thumbnail images and instead squashes full size images you will end up with distorted images that take a long time to load.

Example:

Images are optimised for size and load speed

When you upload a product image to Frooition it creates an optimum sized image and compresses it to make it load in the fastest possible time without ruining the image. It also allows you to store more images on your hosting as each image takes up less space!

Typical example:

Before uploading to Frooition – image size = 231kb

After Uploading to Frooition – image size= 60kb

Compression Rate = 74%

Solution designed for eBay – includes image size verification

The Frooition image hosting has been specifically designed for use with eBay listings, it even has inbuilt verification to ensure the images is a permissible size for use on eBay.

Using a third party hosting solution you could upload all your product pictures and then come to list to find that all your images are not suitable for eBay!

No bandwidth restrictions

Frooition’s image hosting solution does not have any bandwidth caps or restrictions; if you have 10,000 visits to your listing your images will still be visible!

With certain image hosting solutions you may find that they have restrictions in place for bandwidth, this means that after a set number of views your images will stop displaying, this is a huge problem on eBay as you typically make the sale towards the end of the listings life, meaning that hundreds of people have viewed your product images before the sale is made.

If your product images stop displaying in the last 24 hours of an auction it will seriously reduce the likely hood of a sale occurring!

Specifically designed for commercial use on eBay

Frooition’s image hosting is created for commercial use on eBay; there are no restrictions against using the images on auction sites for the purpose of making a sale.

However certain free image hosting solutions expressly state that you cannot use the image hosting for commercial use or on auction sites (such as eBay).

If you get caught breaching an image hosting service’s terms and conditions they can pull your account which would delete all of your product images and destroy your live listings – causing you major problems!

Resilient, cloud based hosting

Frooition’s image hosting service (and eBay design solutions) are hosted on Amazon’s cloud based servers, this means that if your product images are actually hosted on multiple servers, if one server has problems the other servers will step in to take the load seamlessly, if the load increases the service dynamically adds more servers; massively reducing the risk of downtime.

In summary

There are also many pitfalls to be aware of when choosing an image hosting service such as: