[GotNothing]

You're "investing a ton of money" into getting a high quality image, only to then turn around and slap a watermark on it, which more than likely has now downgraded the quality of the image.

To fully deter your competitors from using it, you have to place the watermark in the center of the image/over the product so that they can't easily crop it out.

Now from the potential customers perspective they want to look at those quality images you took and visualize having that product, however now they have to look past/around your watermark which kind of puts a downer in their customer experience.

TLDR: So you've spent tons of money on photos to slap a watermark on top of them and hinder customer experience?

[pessimizer]

As a person who has purchased things, I couldn't care less if there were a (mostly transparent) watermark on the picture of the thing, and I appreciate high quality photographs.