Got a great question this week: “Hey Fizz, I’ve been shooting all my storefront videos vertical, but I notice you shoot everything horizontal. Why?” It’s a short question with a genuinely long answer, so let’s get into it — because the orientation you pick affects how your video looks in the carousel, whether buyers click it, and what your thumbnail actually does for you.

Table of Contents

The Short Answer

Yes, there’s a preference — and it’s a preference shared by creators, not one Amazon handed down.

Pretty much every creator running the Amazon influencer program at a high level uses horizontal for their anchor videos. Not exclusively. We still squeeze in vertical, especially folks doing a lot of clothing. But the primary, workhorse content is horizontal.

A good video matters more than its orientation at the end of the day. I’d never tell you a great vertical video loses to a bad horizontal one. But if the video quality is equal, I think horizontal connects with the buyer a little better, and there are concrete reasons why.

Why Horizontal Matches How People Actually See Products

Think about a real-world product. A vacuum cleaner, say. If you’re shopping for a vacuum, you want to see it used in the real world — in an actual room, doing an actual job.

Now think about how we see the real world. We see it peripherally. Left to right. When you walk into a room, you take in the width of it. You don’t really scan up and down much. Our vision is horizontal by default.

So when you shoot a vacuum cleaner horizontally, you show the room. The buyer sees the product in context — the space, the floor, the scale of it. Shoot that same vacuum vertically and you get a lot of up and down and almost none of the side to side. You’ve cut the environment out of a video whose whole job was to show the product in an environment.

That’s the core of it. Most Amazon products are environment products, and environments are horizontal.

When Vertical Is the Better Call

Flip the logic around and vertical starts making sense fast.

Clothing works better vertical. Clothing is an up-and-down product — head to toe. And generally you don’t need to see the environment it’s in. Nobody’s evaluating a jacket based on the living room behind it. They just want to see it on a person, top to bottom.

So a decent rule of thumb:

  • Shoot horizontal when the environment is part of the sell — appliances, furniture, tools, kitchen gear, anything used in a room
  • Shoot vertical when the product itself is tall and the surroundings don’t matter — clothing, shoes, accessories, anything worn head to toe
  • When in doubt, go horizontal. It’s the safer default for the majority of what’s on Amazon

The Thumbnail Trick Most Creators Miss

Here’s something that surprises people who scroll my storefront. Everything looks horizontal — but some of those videos are actually vertical. I just put a horizontal thumbnail on them. Click play and you’ll see a vertical video.

That sounds backwards until you think about where your thumbnail actually gets seen.

On mobile, you basically don’t see thumbnails. A shopper scrolls a carousel and your video just starts playing. There’s no deliberate thumbnail-picking moment. On desktop, it’s the opposite — the buyer is sitting there looking at a list of options and choosing one, and desktop displays all of those thumbnails horizontally by default.

So the logic goes like this:

  1. Your thumbnail is essentially only seen on desktop
  2. Desktop shows thumbnails in horizontal form
  3. Therefore, give every video a horizontal thumbnail — even the vertical ones

It costs you nothing and it makes your storefront look dramatically more consistent.

This is the part that really moves the needle, and it’s less about the video and more about the thumbnail orientation.

When you upload a vertical video with a vertical thumbnail and it lands in the carousel where shoppers pick from multiple options, Amazon crops it. It takes the middle of your frame, effectively zooms in on it, and makes that your thumbnail. It messes the whole thing up.

So just by nature of how Amazon formats them, horizontal videos and horizontal thumbnails look better in the carousel. Verticals get skewed by the orientation change to the point where you sometimes can’t even tell what the product is.

Now put yourself in the buyer’s seat. They’re trying to decide which of these videos will help them. They’re going to click the picture that’s the clearest representation of the product. If your thumbnail got mangled into an unrecognizable zoom-in, you don’t get the click. Not because your video was worse — because your thumbnail didn’t survive the formatting.

What the Data Actually Showed

I don’t like guessing, so I ran a data analysis on this a couple of weeks back.

Horizontal videos had a slight edge in carousel rankings, and a slight edge in overall helpful vote count — meaning more people watched and thought the video was helpful.

Now, I want to be straight with you about what that does and doesn’t prove. It could be that horizontal videos are simply more helpful. That’s possible, but I don’t find it very plausible. The more likely explanation is that they’re getting watched more, and they’re getting watched more because they’re represented better in the carousel. The thumbnail wins the click, and the click produces the helpful vote.

Either way, it’s an edge — and it’s a slight one, not a landslide. Don’t scrap a good vertical library over this.

How to Apply This to Your Storefront

Here’s what I’d actually do if I were rebuilding my storefront strategy today:

  1. Make horizontal your anchor format. This is your primary content, the videos you put real effort into.
  2. Use vertical as secondary content where it genuinely fits — clothing, wearables, quick supplementary clips.
  3. Put a horizontal thumbnail on everything, regardless of how the video was shot.
  4. Audit your existing vertical uploads. If Amazon cropped the thumbnail into mush, swap in a horizontal one and see what happens.
  5. Pick better products before you worry about orientation. The best-framed video for a product nobody’s buying still earns nothing.

That last point is where most of the money actually is. Orientation is an optimization; product selection is the whole game. That’s exactly why I built Oink — to find products worth filming in the first place, so the videos you spend an afternoon shooting are the ones with real commission potential behind them.

Final Thoughts

I’m a big believer in a simple idea: if you want to learn to run fast, do what fast runners do. If you want to build muscle, do what bodybuilders do. And if you want to earn what the top Amazon influencers earn, look at what they do first — and predominantly, they focus on horizontal.

Even if the data edge turns out to be small, that’s where the people making real money are pointed. That’s good enough for me.

Want help finding the products worth building those anchor videos around? That’s what Oink for Influencers does. Hope this helps.

I'm an Amazon Influencer since 2023 and blogger since 2021. My goal is to help you succeed in the Amazon Influencer Program.

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