

Ask HN: Product images for e-commerce startup - burnout1540

I have a unique idea for an e-commerce startup. I'm still in the very early stages of planning, but I've already hit a major stumbling block: finding product photos for display on my site.<p>My site will need to display thousands of product images and I don't want to infringe on anyone's copyright. I know I could have a photographer take photos of all of the different products, but that may be prohibitively expensive at this point. Is there a site (or better yet, an API) where I can pay a reasonable flat fee for the non-exclusive rights to product images?<p>I know there are a lot of stock photo repositories, but they don't seem to have great photos of specific products. For example, I couldn't find much when searching for an image of an iPod nano. It seems to me that there should be a service out there that provides an API that allows clients to query for a specific product and image style and retrieve a nice stock photo.  Does this exist?  If not, maybe this is a good startup idea?
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gojomo
If your model is compatible with sending traffic to Amazon for final purchase,
you might be able to use their commerce APIs.

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burnout1540
Unfortunately, it's not. I may have some affiliate links to Amazon or others
but, most of the time, the users will be purchasing products directly from my
website. Amazon's affiliate program's TOS says that images cannot be used on a
page unless its principal purpose is driving traffic and sales to Amazon.

TigerDirect's TOS is a little looser, but I'd still rather have control over
the images. I don't like the idea of being dependent on another company for
photos without a contract guaranteeing my access to the images.

