Amazon.com no longer to display customer's product photos

[Stephen Tashi]

Amazon.com (USA) is quietly deleting all customer contributed product photos from its website. The deletion is scheduled to be complete by Aug. 31. If you browse the site you'll notice the option to upload customer images is gone from most of the pages. (Meanwhile, Amazon has announced that sellers of products are permitted to submit even more photos.)

 

[dipole]

Why?

 

[Stephen Tashi]

A message from Amazon tech support being quoted on discussion boards on the Amazon website is:

Further to your inquiry, on July 15, 2013, we discontinued the customer-uploaded image feature. Customer images will no longer show on Amazon product pages. This isn't a decision we came to lightly. While customer-uploaded images has a small, dedicated group of active users, it hasn't been broadly embraced by our customers. Shutting down this feature will allow us to focus on building a better overall Amazon experience for you.

If you have uploaded images to a product page in the past, they will continue to be available until August 31, 2013 for you to view from your customer gallery:

Is that the real reason? I don't know.

 

[phinds]

Why?

I don't know why but I'll bet dollars to donuts that is has NOTHING to do with "... building a better overall Amazon experience for you."

Probably some sort of legal liability thing. User uploads might show products being used improperly, something like that.

 

[dipole]

Well, I don't think it's that big of a deal to be honest. If you want to be mad at Amazon, you can easily find much more questionable choices they've made than this.

 

[Evo]

A message from Amazon tech support being quoted on discussion boards on the Amazon website is:
Is that the real reason? I don't know.

The customer uploaded images have been great, IMO, they are widespread and have helped me to understand the products, something the manufacturer failed to do. I'm sure it's some legal liability thing that Amazon doesn't want to deal with, I can't blame them, but it will make online purchasing decisions on high end products much more difficult. I have been convinced to buy expensive products based on the additional customer photos. If there aren't sufficient product photos, I'll buy at a retail outlet. Not taking chances that a product isn't what I expected. Books, meh, don't need pictures unless it's a book where the pictures in the book are of importance.