Ask HN: Product images for e-commerce startup

I have a unique idea for an e-commerce startup. I'm still in the very early stages of planning, but I've already hit a major stumbling block: finding product photos for display on my site.

My site will need to display thousands of product images and I don't want to infringe on anyone's copyright. I know I could have a photographer take photos of all of the different products, but that may be prohibitively expensive at this point. Is there a site (or better yet, an API) where I can pay a reasonable flat fee for the non-exclusive rights to product images?

I know there are a lot of stock photo repositories, but they don't seem to have great photos of specific products. For example, I couldn't find much when searching for an image of an iPod nano. It seems to me that there should be a service out there that provides an API that allows clients to query for a specific product and image style and retrieve a nice stock photo. Does this exist? If not, maybe this is a good startup idea?