The accessories that make the biggest difference to product photography are almost all cheap and none of them are exciting. This is the list we would give a brand setting up in-house, in the order we would buy it.
The essentials
A grey card. Costs very little. Shoot one frame of it at the start of a session, set white balance from that frame, and your colour is right for the whole batch. Without it you are guessing, and guessing wrong on colour is what makes customers return products.
Foam board, white and black. The most useful thing in any product studio. White boards bounce light into shadows and often replace a second light entirely. Black boards do the opposite job and it is the one most people never learn: placing black card just outside the frame puts a dark edge down the side of a glossy bottle, which is what makes the bottle read as three dimensional instead of merging into the white background. This one trick fixes most complaints about products looking flat.
A tripod with a solid head. Not for shake. For repeatability. If the camera does not move between products, your whole range sits in the same position in frame, which is what makes a catalogue look like a catalogue.
A rocket blower and a microfibre cloth. Dust is the single biggest time cost in retouching. Two minutes of blowing dust off a black pack saves twenty minutes of cleanup per image. On a hundred image catalogue that is days.
Nitrile gloves. Fingerprints on glossy packaging are invisible to your eye under room light and glaringly obvious under a softbox.
For anything reflective or glass
A large diffusion panel. Shooting through diffusion rather than pointing a softbox at glass is the difference between a clean bottle and a bottle with a bright rectangle stamped on it.
A polarising filter. Cuts reflections on glossy surfaces and deepens colour. Not a cure all, and it costs you light, but on plastic laminate packaging it removes glare that would otherwise be a retouching job.
Museum gel or poster putty. Holds a product upright at the exact angle you want. A bottle that will not stand straight is a very common and very stupid reason for a shoot running long.
Fishing line and A clamps. For floating products and holding things just out of frame. Unglamorous, endlessly useful.
For the background
A roll of white paper. Cheaper than fabric, does not crease, and you cut off the dirty end. The sweep it forms, where the background curves into the base without a corner, is what gives you a seamless white with no horizon line.
Acrylic sheet, white and black. A black acrylic base gives you a clean reflection under the product, which is a premium look that costs almost nothing and takes no editing.
More on choices in backgrounds for product photography.
Props, used carefully
Props belong in lifestyle images, not on the main listing image. On most marketplaces, anything in the main image that is not in the box is a suppression risk, and that includes props that seem harmless.
When you do use them, the rule we work to is that a prop has to answer a question. Scale, how the product is used, or what it goes with. A prop that is only decorative pulls attention off the product and usually makes a listing look cheaper rather than more premium.
What we would skip
Ring lights, which are designed for faces and leave a circular reflection that looks wrong on packaging. Turntables, unless you specifically need 360 spin images. Expensive branded backdrops, when paper works better. Colour gels, unless you are doing creative work rather than listings.
The one people forget
A second copy of the product. Swatch shots destroy the item. Texture shots destroy the item. A pack that has to be opened cannot then be shot sealed. Budget spare units into any shoot that includes an opened or in use frame, because discovering this on the day costs a whole session.
If you would rather not assemble any of this, our Thane studio is already set up for it and works on a courier-in basis.