Label Emmaüs, a French solidarity-driven secondhand marketplace, integrated Photoroom's Remove Background API to enhance product images across its seller network automatically. The integration increased conversion rates by 56% in fashion and 34% in home products, with additional lifts in high-tech (+12%) and leisure (+8%) categories.
Life before Photoroom
Sellers relied on basic tools like Open Camera
Inconsistent product images across diverse sellers
Poor image quality reduced buyer trust
No scalable way to standardize listing photos
Life with Photoroom
56% conversion increase in fashion
34% conversion increase in home products
12% conversion increase in high-tech
8% conversion increase in leisure
Product image processing automated across all sellers
Buyers describe the site as "cleaner and more professional"
"When the API option was presented, we immediately saw the potential impact it could have on our platform. Photoroom has changed how we handle image processing, helping us compete with larger marketplaces."
— Kenza De Barros, eMerchandising and Marketing Manager, Label Emmaüs
Label Emmaüs is not a typical resale platform. Created in 2016 by the Emmaüs Movement, it's an online marketplace where every purchase funds job training and employment for people in vulnerable situations. More than 400 Emmaüs groups across 40+ countries contribute to the platform, selling everything from secondhand fashion to home goods, electronics, and leisure items.
That social mission shapes how the platform operates. Unlike marketplaces where a central team photographs inventory, Label Emmaüs depends on hundreds of individual sellers to provide product images. This model prevents high studio overhead, allowing the marketplace to scale inventory at zero cost. But it also poses a challenge: How do you get different sellers, each with different equipment, skills, and time commitment, to deliver product photos that meet marketplace standards?
Hundreds of sellers, no way to standardize product photos
Before Photoroom, sellers used basic manual tools like Open Camera to photograph and edit their listings. The process was slow, the results were uneven, and many sellers didn't have the time or technical skill to produce professional-looking images.
For any e‑commerce marketplace, such inconsistency directly affects buyer confidence. When product photos vary wildly from listing to listing, the entire catalog feels less trustworthy, regardless of the quality of the items themselves. Label Emmaüs was competing for attention against larger platforms with far more polished visual experiences, while relying on sellers with far fewer resources.
The platform recommended Photoroom's mobile app to sellers, along with other editing tools, but adoption stayed low. Some sellers found the time to use them; many didn't. The core problem wasn't that better tools didn't exist. It was that asking each seller in over 40 countries to edit their own photos individually would never produce a consistent catalog.
Automating image processing in the sellers’ upload flow
The shift came when the Label Emmaüs and Photoroom teams connected directly, and the conversation moved from app recommendations to the Remove Background API. Instead of asking each seller to edit their own images, the team could automate image processing in the seller upload flow by integrating the Photoroom API as an invisible backend layer.
Label Emmaüs' team completed the Photoroom integration quickly, with minimal technical resources. Now live, the API removes backgrounds and applies a clean, consistent edit to product images across the entire catalog. Sellers upload photos the way they always have; the platform handles the editing.
Processing images at the platform level, rather than training hundreds of sellers on image editing or hoping they'd adopt new tools, has changed how Label Emmaüs’ team manages buyers’ expectations with sellers’ capacity.
The team can now standardize visual quality centrally so that every listing, regardless of which seller uploaded it, meets the same visual standard, without adding any steps to the seller's workflow.
Fashion product images with consistent image backgrounds. Source: Label Emmaüs.
Up to 56% conversion lift and a more professional marketplace
After integrating Photoroom's Remove Background API, Label Emmaüs saw measurable conversion and engagement improvements across its key product categories:
Fashion products: 56% increase in conversion rates, 30% increase in interactions.
Home products: 34% increase in conversion rates, 34% increase in interactions.
High-tech products: 12% increase in conversion rates, 21% increase in interactions.
Leisure products: 8% increase in conversion rates.
Beyond the numbers, buyers noticed the difference in visual appearance. Customers described the website as feeling cleaner and more professional, reinforcing trust in both the products and the platform. For a marketplace where buyers can't physically inspect items before purchasing, that perception of quality is directly tied to whether someone adds an item to their cart or scrolls past it.
Standardized home product images on Label Emmaüs’ marketplace. Source: Label Emmaus
A marketplace that competes on its own terms
With consistent, professional product images across every category, Label Emmaüs now competes visually with mainstream marketplaces, without asking sellers to change how they work or compromising on its mission of solidarity-driven commerce.
For marketplace teams considering a similar integration, Label Emmaüs’ e-merchandising and marketing manager, Kenza De Barros, offers clear advice:
"Go for it. The time savings, efficiency, and resource management make it the perfect solution for businesses looking to improve their product images and customer experience."
— Kenza De Barros, eMerchandising and Marketing Manager, Label Emmaüs
Photoroom is the AI product photography platform that enables marketplaces to standardize product images across their seller networks without requiring individual sellers to change their workflow. For Label Emmaüs, that meant a 56% increase in conversion for fashion products, a 34% lift in home products, and a marketplace that buyers now describe as cleaner and more professional.
