AI Images for eCommerce: Professional Photos in Minutes

Images are one of the most important aspects of designing your online store well.

It's usually the first point of contact when entering your website. Before reading descriptions or viewing prices, the first thing the user does is look at images of your products.

Therefore, images are one of the aspects that play a crucial role in converting visitors into customers.

Taking good photos of your products can sometimes be difficult, expensive, and very tiring, especially if you have a very extensive catalog.

Thanks to AI, we can now have very good quality photos, in very little time and very cheap to produce, all you need is:

1. Mobile images of your product

2. ChatGPT

3. Canva

With these three elements, you can create professional images in minutes from your home, without having to send your products to a photographer and wait several days for the results.

Small disclaimer: Obviously, photos taken by a photographer in a professional studio will always be better, but we understand that not all brands can afford that luxury, so this is a great option if you're just starting out with your online store.

AI-powered image use cases in eCommerce

Before getting into how to generate images with artificial intelligence, I want us to look at some of the use cases it can be used for, as it's not just useful for our product pages, but can also be used for social media, ads, banners, and more.

1. Product images on Shopify

You can ask him to do it in different settings, with solid colors in the background, to create it like a studio photo... Whatever you can think of.

These images have not been altered with any editing tools or similar. They were all taken as is from ChatGPT.

2. Banners and promotional visuals in Canva

If we add a tool like Canva and a little creativity, we can create banners for the website.

Apart from the product images themselves, you can give it reference to images that you want to recreate and even

Examples: launches, sales, offers…

3. Visual content for social media

For social media, we can also leverage artificial intelligence to generate images that match our brand.

As in the other cases, give it some decent images taken with your mobile + image reference and you'll have incredible results in a matter of seconds.

As you can see, with artificial intelligence, you can generate lifestyle-style images for your social media without having to hire a photographer or influencer and wait several days to receive the material.

You just need some good reference photos and a good prompt to get the desired result.

4. Images for online ads on Facebook or Instagram

Just like for social media, you can test these AI-generated creatives in your advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, or any other traffic source where you're advertising.

It will depend on the goal you're looking for, but you'll need to use Canva or another photo editing tool to add text, icons, arrows, etc.

Here are some examples of social media ads:

Most used AI tools for generating images

What tools do you need to be able to generate images like these?

With ChatGPT you can generate all these images in its free version (although quite limited) and in its plus version ($20 per month) which many of you will already be paying for.

Other tools you can try are: Midjourney, Leopardo AI… among others – I haven't personally tried them but I have seen that you can get good results with them.

If you just want to generate hyper-realistic backgrounds for your images, I recommend Photoroom. Its “AI backgrounds” section is very good. You can generate thousands of backgrounds in a matter of minutes with predefined templates. You don’t have to set any prompts or anything. Simply upload a photo of your product and you can start generating new backgrounds that look great.

In this first example, only a shadow and a very soft gray background have been added.

As you can see, the image already improves quite a bit with these two small changes.

In this second photo, a kitchen background has been added.

To be able to edit images and add more layers, without directly uploading the content that the AI ​​​​gives you, you can use:

Canva: A versatile photo editor with thousands of templates you can adapt to your brand.

Photoshop: A little more difficult to use if you're new or don't have much experience with these types of tools.

Recommended setup time and workflow

It won't take you long to start creating quality images with these tools.

If you've never done it before, start tinkering and trying things out to see what results you get.

In just a couple of hours, you'll be able to create professional images for your online store.

I recommend compiling your product images. After this initial compilation, find reference photos that you want to replicate. They don't have to be 100% exact to what you're looking for, but this will give the AI ​​a good idea of ​​what you want.

From there, start generating the images one by one, first uploading the reference image and indicating that you will later provide the image of the product you want to place.

Make sure to add all the details you need in the prompt, such as removing elements, adding them, sizes, etc.

If your product has labels with letters, it may not replicate it very well (especially if the image is not very high quality), so you will have to use Photoshop or another photo editing tool to get the image to 100%.

Conclusion

As you've seen, you no longer need to have a photography studio or invest large amounts of money to get images that really sell.

Thanks to artificial intelligence and tools like Canva, you can now generate high-quality visual content from home, with very few resources and in very little time.

This not only allows you to better present your products, but also gives you creative freedom to experiment, test, and optimize your visuals across different channels: from your product listing to your ads or social media.

The key is to have good references and spend some time playing with prompts and editing. The more you practice, the better results you'll get.

So, if you haven't started using AI in your online store yet, now's the time to do so.