In a shop, somebody picks the thing up. Feels the weight. Checks the stitching. Holds it next to their hand to see how big it is.
Online they get pictures. That is the entire sensory experience of your product. So the photos are not supporting material. They are the product, as far as the customer is concerned.
The shots you actually need
The clean one. Product on a plain background, well lit, no distraction. This is the thumbnail everybody sees first.
The scale one. Somebody holding it, or it sitting next to something familiar. This single shot prevents more returns than any amount of description text, because people are bad at reading dimensions and good at looking at a hand.
The detail one. Close on the texture, the stitching, the finish. This is the shot that does the job of picking it up.
And the in use one. The thing in a real space doing its real job. This is what makes somebody imagine owning it.
Consistency matters more than quality
Twenty products shot the same way, same light, same background, same angle, looks like a real store. Twenty products shot in twenty different lighting situations looks like a garage sale, even if a few individual shots are gorgeous.
So pick a setup and use it for everything. When you add a product in eight months, use the same setup again. That is the whole trick.
You do not need a studio
A window with indirect light. A white sheet or a piece of poster board. A phone from the last four years. That is genuinely enough for most products.
What actually ruins photos is direct overhead light, mixed light sources, and busy backgrounds. Fix those three and your phone is fine.
And shoot everything in one session. Same time of day, same spot, same everything. That is how you get consistency without thinking about it.
Then optimize them
Great photos that take nine seconds to load are not great photos. Resize before upload, convert to WebP, keep each one small.
A store is the worst place to have heavy images, because a category page loads twenty of them at once. That page is where people decide whether to keep browsing.