David Balan

Are traditional 3D studio renders and photo shoots becoming obsolete for e-commerce brands?

Been wrestling with this one internally for months and figured I'd throw it out here since I know a lot of you are running catalogs at scale too.

The numbers are hard to ignore. A traditional shoot runs 500 to 2,000 per product once you factor in the studio, the photographer, retouching, and the back and forth on revisions. And that's before you count the lead time. Two to three weeks is normal if you're doing this properly with a real team. Generated imagery can produce a usable shot in seconds, and the cost per image is a rounding error by comparison.

As AI generated product visuals get closer to indistinguishable from real photography, we're starting to hear a different kind of complaint from shoppers. Not that the image looks fake, but that the product looks slightly different once it arrives.