Three problems account for almost every bad product photograph we are asked to replace, and none of them is the camera.
We replace a lot of product photography for shops in Malé, and almost all of it fails in the same three ways. None of them is about the camera, and two of them cost nothing to fix.
The first is the background. A product photographed against a wall, a table or a piece of cloth has a colour cast on it, and the cast is different in every photograph because the light moved. A listing page of forty products where the whites are forty slightly different whites looks like a shop that does not care, and the customer reads it that way without being able to say why. A clean white background is not a style choice, it is what makes a page of products look like a page rather than a pile.
The second is the crop, and it is the one that actually loses sales. Every online shop and marketplace shows products in a square, and a photograph taken in landscape and then automatically squared by the platform is a photograph with the top and bottom of the product cut off. We deliver every item twice for exactly this reason: a full resolution version at 300 dots per inch for printing, and a square version composed as a square. Those are two different photographs. Being handed one file and told to resize it is the most common thing we hear from shops who used somebody else.
The third is finish, and it is the one that needs a photographer. Matt, glossy, transparent and chrome each need a different lighting arrangement, and a shop's product list is almost always organised by category, which means the lighting has to change every second item. Reorder the list by finish and a four hundred item shoot takes nine days instead of a month. Ask whoever is shooting for you whether they are doing this, because it is the whole difference in the price.
Two smaller things. Photograph the product with the thing that shows its scale, especially anything a customer might imagine as bigger or smaller than it is, because size confusion is the commonest reason for a return. And shoot the product you are actually selling rather than the one in the supplier's catalogue: the supplier's photograph is a different model in a different colour about a third of the time, and a customer who receives something that does not match the picture does not blame the supplier.
A decent product photograph costs about 45 rufiyaa. One return costs the delivery twice and a customer.