When you begin building an ecommerce website for your business, one of the most frustrating issues can be finding good images to represent your products. If you have a small manageable amount of inventory, then taking your own pictures may be an option. However, if you’re like most store owners, you probably have thousands of skus, so taking your own product images just isn’t in the cards. If that is the case, where do you begin? In this article we offer a few simple tips to aid in the process of finding, editing and uploading product images.
If you’re like most store owners, you probably have thousands of skus
Tip One – Finding Images
- Manufacturer Websites– Look for images on the websites of the manufacturers who make your products. This is often the best place to find images. Your manufacturers need to advertise their specific products in various catalogs, on their website and in ads, so they have a strong incentive to keep professional and up to date product images.
- Distributors– Check with your distributor. Often times, your distributor will not keep a digitally published product catalog, but they will have a database of product images that they maintain for internal purposes. They will most likely be willing to share the images and product information they have available with their customers.
*Warning- never use images from Google Images Searches, Amazon, Chewy or any other ecommerce website or search engine results page. Images are intellectual property and you can get fined big bucks if you get caught using an unauthorized image.
Tip Two – Editing Images
In order for your new ecommerce website to look professional, your images will need to be sized to the same proportional height and width. In addition, it is a good idea to make sure that all your images have the same background color. If you don’t have a designer on staff, here are some handy tools for getting the job done.
- Gimp– Gimp is a free image editing tool you can use to convert images into different formats like .jpg, .pdf and .png. Also, this tool makes it easy to crop and resize images. You can download this right to your laptop or desktop.
- Canva– Canva is a tool that will let you upload your own images, buy images and combine multiple images or apply background colors. It is a very user friendly tool and can help you style pre-existing images to meet your needs or buy stock photos for use on your website.
- Web Developer– Your web developer can implement padding and margin to lay out your product images on the page. If your images aren’t perfect ask your developer for some help in creating a nice layout to house your images and compensate for any issues.
Tip Three – Uploading Images
- Adding Image By URL – Many platforms now offer the option to add an image by url. This is a great option to help speed up your work when the image doesn’t require any editing. In order to do this-
- Find the image you would like to use on the manufacturers website.
- Right click on the image
- Select “Open image in new tab”
- Copy the website address for the page that only has the image on it
- Paste that address into the Add image by url space
- Uploading Images– It is a good idea to keep all your images stored in one folder or set of subfolders in order to keep them organized. If you have the storage space, keep these images on your desktop in order to take care of drag and drop features offered by platforms like WordPress. Something as simple as this could save you hours of uploading time due to open and closing out various tabs.
Tip Four – Optimizing Images
- Alternate Text– All the images on your website should have alternate text or alt tags associated with them. This is important for a few different reasons.
- If your image doesn’t load alt text ensures that people, see text instead of a blank page.
- Visually impaired visitors use screen readers which will read the text and tell the impaired visitor what the image represents.
- Search Engines can’t read images but they can read text. Alt text helps your images show up in Google image results.
- Reduce the File Size– Many photo editing tools offer a “save for the web” option. This is because images need to be as small as reasonably possible for websites. Large images take a long time to load and cause websites to load slowly. Websites that take a long time to load loose visitors. So take advantage of “save for the web” options and reduce the file size of your images!