Amazon main image bans promo text: where the Black Friday banner goes

Not on the main image. Amazon's 2026 product photography page says the main image uses a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255), the product fills 85-100% of the frame, and you should avoid text, graphics, logos, watermarks or promotional messaging on it. Keep a Black Friday banner on the assets where promotion is allowed, such as a video you control, and leave the main image untouched.

What the page says (read 2026-10-05)

The page is a seller-forum post in Seller Central. It lists the rules below for the main image and describes secondary images as free to show use, context, detail, angles and size comparisons. It does not say anything about AI-generated or 3D-rendered images, so do not read a policy into its silence.

A split that keeps the listing safe

Treat the listing's still images and the sale video as two separate deliverables. The still set stays clean all year. The sale video carries the seasonal message and changes with the price.

Sume's timeline compose puts one still on screen over one video. With the overlay operation you set position (top, center or bottom), width_ratio (0.05 to 1) and margin_ratio (0 to 0.45). The still stays up for the whole clip, and the output length comes from the video. The job is a flat $0.02, and the video can be at most 300 seconds. Because the banner is a separate PNG, you swap it on Black Friday morning without touching the footage or the listing images.

import json, os, urllib.request

body = {
    "operation": "overlay",
    "image": {"url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/bf-banner.png"},
    "video": {"url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/hero.mp4"},
    "layout": {"position": "bottom", "width_ratio": 0.9, "margin_ratio": 0.05},
}
req = urllib.request.Request(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/compose", json.dumps(body).encode(),
    {"Authorization": "Bearer " + os.environ["SUME_API_KEY"],
     "Content-Type": "application/json", "Idempotency-Key": "bf26-hero-banner-v1"})
print(json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(req)))

Checklist before upload

• The still images in the listing contain no banner, badge or price.
• The banner exists only inside the video overlay, in a separate PNG that you can replace.
• Run a frame check on the finished MP4 to confirm the banner is readable on a phone-width crop.
• Confirm in Seller Central which placements accept video and what rules apply to it. This post does not cover video policy.

Limits

Compose needs the image to probe as a still and the video to probe as video, and both must be your workspace's media.sume.com artifacts, so import them first. A still image that is a white-background packshot is a good overlay source only if you want it on screen. The overlay does not change the main-image rules on Amazon, and a forum summary is not the final word. Verify the current requirements in Seller Central for your category.