Glossary · Fashion
Colourway
A colourway is one of the colour combinations a product is made in, such as a trainer in black and white or in red and navy, and each one usually needs its own accurate photos and swatch.
Colourway is a fashion and footwear term that has spread to homeware, bags and electronics accessories. On marketplaces each colourway usually becomes a colour variant, with its own images and, on Amazon, its own swatch image (the SWCH slot) that shoppers click to switch colours.
The rules all come back to accuracy. TikTok Shop's listing quality guide asks sellers to avoid one base photo turned into several colours with editing software, and its AIGC rules say generated images must not change the product's colour. Etsy says the item must not look different from what the buyer receives. Amazon keeps text and pricing off swatch images and allows greyscale files only for grey or silver products. TikTok Shop requires images to be in colour.
The common mistake is recolouring one photo to stand in for colourways that were never photographed. Dyes, leathers and plastics take colour differently, so a recoloured image can show a shade the real item does not have, and multi-material products often end up with trims, stitching or soles recoloured that should not be. Exporting in a wide-gamut colour space rather than sRGB shifts colours further once a platform ignores the profile.
Check each colourway image against the physical item in daylight, and keep the swatch a close crop of the real material.
PicBarn's recolour tab changes a product's colour to match a real colourway you sell; for TikTok Shop, photograph each real colourway where you can.
See also
- Amazon image variant codes (MAIN, PT01, SWCH…)Amazon image variant codes are the labels, such as MAIN, PT01 and SWCH, that tell Amazon which slot an uploaded image fills: the main image, an additional image or a colour swatch.
- Listing quality tier (TikTok Shop)TikTok Shop's listing quality tier is the grade the platform gives a product detail page, and for images its "Good" tier calls for at least five high-resolution images with no promotional stickers.
- sRGBsRGB is the standard RGB colour space for screens and the web, proposed by HP and Microsoft in 1996, and the safest colour space for product photos uploaded to any marketplace.
- InpaintingInpainting is an image-editing technique that fills or replaces a selected region of a picture so it blends with the pixels around it, used to remove objects, fix text or change part of a scene.
Sources
- TikTok Shop Seller University: Product Detail Pages and Listing Quality
- TikTok Shop Seller University: AIGC for listing images
- Etsy Help: How do Etsy's listing image requirements apply to my listings
- Amazon Seller Central: Product image requirements
- Amazon Seller Central: Image technical file requirements
- TikTok Shop Seller University: Product Listing Policy
Related
- Recolor image online — change the colour of anything in a photoRecolor an image with AI: name the part (a shirt, a lid, a bag, the background), pick the new colour, and get the same photo in that colour. Texture, folds, shadows and printed text stay. 2 credits per image.
- TikTok Shop product image requirements (1:1 and 3:4) and how to meet themTikTok Shop’s image rules from its own seller pages: square 1:1, at least 600 × 600 px, up to nine images, a front-view main image on pure white with no text or renderings, what the 3:4 tolerance really means, the AI-image rules, and a pre-upload routine.