They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to eCommerce, the images you use in your shop are worth more than just words.
Good product photos will make you stand out on search engines and from your competitors. In the long run, every eCommerce entrepreneur needs to know how to improve his dropshipping product images for the overall success of his business.
In this article, we will be covering the importance of images for your eCommerce store, how to get pictures for your dropshipping products, and tips and tricks for better product images.
The Importance of Product Images For Your eCommerce Store
Product images are an essential part of customer experience, which play a crucial role in their decision making.
Buyers enjoy a good visualization of what they are about to purchase. Also, your product images need to have the correct attributes to help your site rank higher organically on Google’ Search Results, ultimately generating more free traffic to your store.
Also, don’t forget that we are living in the peak of a social-media era. Online shoppers love to share their experiences.
Happy customers can share your product, thus bringing more attention and awareness to your brand. As a result, you will start building your customer base and start growing your online business.
Most dropshippers make the same mistake of underestimating the power of improving dropshipping product images and the impact it has on their business. Or, lack the knowledge of their importance.
How To Get Pictures For Your Dropshipping Products?
There are several ways to get pictures for your product pages. Use a combination of these methods to make your store unique, and stand out from your competitors.
1. Get Pictures Directly From The Suppliers
Whether you are working with a private dropshipping supplier or websites like AliExpress, Banggood, Walmart, HomeDepot, etc., grab all of the product images that are available for your product.
Some suppliers have additional photos inside of their product descriptions.
If you’re using AliExpress, chrome extensions like AliSave chrome extension can come in handy for grabbing photos. Since right-clicking is disabled on AliExpress, AliSave takes out all of the time from having to save images one by one manually.
2. Customer Reviews From Suppliers
Customer reviews help build a higher trust rating between your potential customers and your online store. And, Most buying and selling platforms support customer reviews on their products.
They also upload photos of their products on their reviews. These images bring authenticity to the quality of the product and your store.
Therefore, you should grab the customers’ images from your supplier pages and use them on yours.
Your store will have more images that none of your competitors thought to use. If you’re dropshipping from platforms like AliExpress, Amazon, or eBay, you can use the Opinew app to automatically import customer product reviews from those platforms to your Shopify store.
3. Ask Your Supplier For Unique Pictures
While many may not know this, many suppliers have more product photos than what’s available on their product pages.
Reach out to them to ask if they have any more pictures for a specific product. improving your dropshipping product images will get you one more step ahead of everyone else.
4. Grab Pictures From Other Competitors
In general, you should always know what your competitors are doing. When it comes to product photos – if they have something that you don’t, upload them to your store, too.
But, don’t use only competitor photos, since you are not looking for a copy-pasted store. Use them in addition to the other methods mentioned.
5. Pictures From Your Customer Reviews
Your customers can also leave their own reviews on your products after purchasing them. Like copying pictures from customer reviews, as mentioned above, you can also do the same on your customer reviews.
Having your own customer testimonials is a powerful tool to attract new customers, as it builds strong trust between the potential buyer and your brand. Customer testimonials also work very well for creating ads for the product.
Many apps can collect customer reviews. For example, the Photo Reviews & Testimonials app allows your customers to upload photos along with their reviews and testimonials.
Plus, your reviews show on Google Search, you can reply to customer reviews, and more. Use Shopify’s App Store to explore additional apps like this one.
6. Order A Sample Product
If you want to stay truly unique and stand out with your product photos, order a sample product from your supplier. Then you will have the ability to create photos that no one else has except for you. Catch more angles, add new backgrounds.
Additionally, you can take it one step further and create a product unboxing video and show the product in action. If you have a sample product, your visualization opportunities are almost endless for showcasing your product to your potential customers.
We encourage you to do this for the product that already proved to work for you.
Tips For Improving Dropshipping Product Images
So, now you have enough images for your product. The next step is to improve your dropshipping product images as much as possible. By optimizing the images, you will provide better customer experience, overall page load speed, and page ranking on search engines. Therefore, each step is essential to take full advantage of optimization effectiveness.
1. Remove Image Background
Some websites add decorations like buttons, borders, text, and other non-product related add-ons. It is better to remove these from your product image since they do not really help to improve it. In fact, it can even create an opposite effect from its original intention.
Remove any unnecessary decorations from your image. If it has a ‘noisy’ background or any background that is not white and clear, you are not showcasing the item properly. There are free online websites that can remove the backgrounds for you at no cost, for example, PhotoScissors.
2. Add A Zoom Effect On Your Pictures
Showcase your product’s pictures by using a zooming effect when the viewer hovers his mouse over your product image.
It is like having a magnifying glass and also works on tablets and mobile devices on some apps.
User-friendly features like these increase the customer’s experience when product browsing on your store.
Apps like Cool Image Magnifier Zoom can take care of the zooming effect on your store. As always, we recommend exploring and discovering more apps on Shopify’s App Store, since there are so many more options and features to choose from.
3. Name Your Image Files
Just like knowing how to use keyword-rich text, image filenames are also crucial to rank higher on search engines.
Search engines crawl your website’s image filenames to show relevant results to the user, that’s why we should focus on improving product images by strategically naming them when it comes to SEO, not just your page’s titles, headers, and descriptions.
Therefore, make sure to rename all of your image filenames to be relevant to their product. For example, if the product is a Christmas Party Decoration, but the filename is “20200618_115.jpg”, then change the filename to “Christmas Party Decoration.jpg”. Rinse and repeat for all of your product images.
4. Optimize Image Alt Text
An additional image optimization technique is editing the image’s Alt (Alternative) Text. Alt text is a text displayed when the image cannot load for any reason, giving the viewer an understanding of what is supposed to be there.
Also, alt text is used to read the words aloud to the visually impaired by using assistive technology.
It helps boost the SEO score on your website and is a must on all of your product photos. Check out Shopify’s help center on adding alt text to media to learn how to implement it in your store.
5. Image Angles
Having just one angle of the photo, in most cases, won’t be enough. In other cases, you may have different angles – choose which angle best showcases the product as your main product image.
But if there is only one angle available, use the methods given above showing how to get pictures for your dropshipping products to add more product images to your store.
Sometimes, the smallest differences like seeing the product from a different angle can trigger the viewer to buy.
Therefore, you should improve your dropshipping product images and keep a sharp eye on the best image that shows the product in its most complimenting form, and add as many additional angles as possible.
6. Reduce The Image File Size
Every image has its own file size. The bigger the image size, the less user-friendly the customer’s experience will be. That is because large image sizes gradually decrease the page loading speed. No one likes to wait more than two seconds for the whole page to load up.
Some images are more “raw” than others. They come in unnecessary high quality and resolutions, which increase the image’s file size.
Opening them with image programs like Paint, and resaving them can gradually decrease the image’s file size, thus increasing the page’s load speed.
You don’t have to worry about image file sizes when you are using AutoDS to dropship on Shopify since the system automatically resizes the images for optimal page loading speed. However, if you’re manually dropshipping, you will need to resize your image files separately.
Importing Products Using AutoDS
When it comes to image processing, AutoDS takes care of minimizing image file sizes while importing products to your store.
Product images stay in the highest quality possible while the system decompresses them for high-speed page loading when visitors are on your Shopify store.
Furthermore, there are a few options available to enhance your product images. You can rotate, flip, copy, add, remove, and set any image as the main image.
Importing products through AutoDS helps automate and optimize the process as much as possible, saving you time and ensuring that the viewers have a fast, responsive, and user-friendly experience in your shop.
How To Get Free Images For Your Store Design / Ads?
Since we are on the subject of the power of images in your shop, let’s go over some recommended websites where you can search and download free photos to use on your store design or your ads.
The purpose of these images is to help design your store’s layout (banners, category pictures, etc.) and your ads.
Many paid image websites are easy to find, but before turning to them, make sure that you went through the free images archives first.
1. Stocksnap.io
Stocksnap has tons of high-quality images with more added every week. None of the images have copyright restrictions. Search for photos by category or by typing in the open search field. You can also check the trending category to see what’s hot.
2. Pexels
Pexels offer a vast selection of high-quality images for your website and videos for your free use. You have the option to explore what’s hot or search for your specific field. Pexels even holds challenges and leaderboards for their most fanatic photographers (the community).
3. Burst By Shopify
Burst is a free photo website that is powered by Shopify. Besides having a growing library of free photos, they also help generate trending business ideas according to your niche. This is a good option for anyone getting started with their shop.
In Conclusion
Focusing on image importance has a strong effect on the customer’s buying behavior, and everyone running an online store should recognize and take advantage of them. If you want to stand out with your store’s images, rank higher on search engines, and stay two steps ahead of your competitors, simply follow the steps given in this article.
Do not underestimate the power that images have on your eCommerce business. Whether they are pictures for products, site banners, or ads, using the right image in front of the right customer will cause him to push to action. Implement these steps and don’t be afraid to test several options until you find what works for you.
And if you are just starting out, we encourage you to check our article about starting your first eCommerce shop.
