Why the same product photo appears in twenty different shops
You find a candle you like. You look for a better price and the same photograph comes back under four other shop names, each with a different story about the person who makes it. All four are real storefronts. The photograph came from one place.
Where the picture comes from
Suppliers hand out photo packs. Sign up, get access to a catalog, and the images come with it, already lit and cropped and ready to list. Nobody in the chain photographs anything. Twenty sellers list the same product from the same folder on the same day, and the only thing that differs is the shop name above it.
The titles come from the same place. That is why they read the way they do, twenty-two words of keywords with no sentence in them, identical down to the comma across shops that have never heard of each other.
Why it matters to you
A shared photograph is not proof of anything on its own. Licensed stock exists, and one seller running two storefronts is allowed. What it tells you is that the picture is not a picture of your item. It is a picture of a product line, taken once, before anybody made yours.
So the finish, the color and the weight in that photograph are the supplier's best example. The thing in the box is whatever came off the line that week. When buyers say it looked nothing like the photo, this is usually why, and nobody involved had to lie for it to happen.
How to check in ten seconds
Right click the main image and search it. Look at how many shops come back and whether their names have anything to do with each other. Then read the reviews with photographs attached, which show the thing rather than the product line.
We fingerprint every listing photograph we read and look for the same picture under a different shop, and we compare listing titles word for word across every shop in the archive. The pairs we have confirmed are here, with our own copy of each listing, because they come down quickly once somebody points at them.