Solid Commerce sends images to the marketplaces when you create new listings through our platform. You can also view your images in our user interface and on pick lists and packing slips.
This article reviews our image requirements and best practices for naming images.
What we'll cover:
- Image Requirements
- Hosting Your Images
- Best Practices for Naming Images and Folders
- Adding Images to Products
- Related Articles
Image Requirements
Solid Commerce doesn't have any image size, quality, or file name requirements. However, you want to ensure your images meet the requirements of the marketplaces you will be listing to.
Solid Commerce's only requirement is that you host your images online. You do not load images directly into your Solid Commerce account. You provide us with the image URLs.
Hosting Your Images
Your Webstore
If you have a webstore, you are probably already uploading your images to it when you create your listings. This makes webstores an easy hosting solution.
One thing to consider is that some marketplaces may not rehost your images. For example, if you only post one image on an eBay listing, eBay stores the original URL for the image instead of hosting the image themselves. Each time someone views your listing on eBay, your webstore's bandwidth may be taxed.
In general, bandwidth overages don't seem to be a problem for most of our clients, but it is important to consider your webstore's bandwidth policies and fees.
An FTP Site
Hosting your images on an FTP site is the most trouble-free option. We offer a great FTP service for a small monthly fee. To learn more about it, please see Enabling and Using Your Solid Commerce FTP Account.
Image Hosting Sites
We don't recommend using an image hosting site to store your images. We can accept the URLs, but image hosting sites are designed to view and share images, not transfer files. This can cause some issues.
On occasion, Photobucket has been slow to respond to eBay when creating new listings. eBay ends up returning an error that the image has been deleted or moved, even though the URL is valid. Some of our clients still use Photobucket with good results, but it there is no guarantee it will work.
As another example, Imgur made a policy change that negatively affected some of our clients. Imgur no longer allows images to be posted to websites that sell products. This change was beyond our clients' control or ours.
Best Practices for Naming Images and Folders
We recommend assigning your SKUs as your image file names.
Not only will your images have consistent names, you'll be able to use simple formulas in spreadsheets to automatically populate your image URLs.
- For more information about determining your image URLs, see Adding Images to Products.
If you have multiple images for a product, you can add -1, -2, ... to the end of the SKUs.
EXAMPLE: You have a product with the SKU: ABC-123. For your Main Image, you could use: ABC-123-1.jpg. Your first Alternate Image could be: ABC-123-2.jpg.
We also recommend not using spaces in your file names, or the names of any folders on the site that hosts your images. Spaces get converted to %20 in your image URLs.
- Systems like eBay cannot recognize the %20 placeholders.
- Instead of spaces, use underscores (_) or hyphens (-).
NOTE: We recommend using either all lowercase, or all uppercase, extensions on your image file names. This creates consistent URLs. It also prevents issues if your images are hosted on case-sensitive FTP sites, such as ours.
- With our FTP site (and other case-sensitive FTPs), if your URL contains .JPG, but your file name contains .jpg, you could have an issue with your image.
Adding Images to Products
Once you have some hosted images, you're ready to add them to Solid Commerce. Adding Images to Products shows you how.
Related Articles
- Adding Images to Products
- Enabling and Using Your Solid Commerce FTP Account
- Creating Products Using a Spreadsheet
- Creating a Product Through the User Interface
- Uploading With the Excel Tool - Quick Guide
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