Professional Photography: How Do I Get It for My Dropshipping Store?
Video transcript: Hey everyone, it’s David with Oberlo, and it’s Q&A time. This week, we’re going to answer the question: How do I get professional photography (or professional-looking photos) for my dropshipping store? This is a great question because your product photos are vital to your success in dropshipping. Why? […]
Video transcript: Hey everyone, it’s David with Oberlo, and it’s Q&A time. This week, we’re going to answer the question: How do I get professional photography (or professional-looking photos) for my dropshipping store?
This is a great question because your product photos are vital to your success in dropshipping. Why? Well, as a dropshipper, you will always be competing with other businesses selling the same products as you, and having unique, professional photographs, is one of the best ways to differentiate your store.
OK. But how do you get high quality photos for your store? Well, there are three main methods:
- Find existing photos online and edit them.
- Have a professional photography service take them for you.
- Take new photos yourself.
Here at Oberlo, we recommend that you order a product sample for yourself and take your own photos. The added benefit here is that you can check the product’s quality and test it out for yourself. Let’s take a quick look at each of these three options.
Finding Professional Photography Online
If you’re using Oberlo with Shopify, it’s extremely easy to add the existing images to your store. You can download these images to edit them, or you can use Shopify’s built-in image editor. This lets you crop or resize the image, change the lighting, tweak the text, whatever. Now, you might be thinking, “That’s great, but how can I remove the watermarks?” Firstly, we wouldn’t recommend that you do that. If an image is watermarked, it’s almost certainly copyrighted, in which case you don’t have the right to use the image at all. But if you reach out and get permission to use the image first, there are ways you can remove the watermark. You could use professional photography editing software like Photoshop, or you could download a program like theinpaint.com, which makes it relatively easy to do. That program costs $19.99. Or you could visit a site like Fiverr or Upwork to find a photo editor to do this for you. Lastly, you might also want to change the image so it has a plain, white background. Again, you can do this with a tool like Photoshop, or a free online alternative like befunky.com.
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Now, if you prefer to create your own unique images, we can choose option two:
Using Professional Photography Services
A quick Google search will give you many of these services, like productphoto.com. This service makes professional photography of products a breeze. You simply ship them your product and they take the pictures for you and edit them and they’ll look great. Plus, you don’t pay anything until you’ve approved your new photos. If you order over 31 photos, the cost is $15 a photo. Or you could visit experts.shopify.com/photographers, to find a service to help you.
If you don’t have the budget for a professional photo service, or if you just want to test out the products for yourself, you can go with option three.
Invest In Your Own Professional Photography
This is the option we recommend. It’s a great way to create images unique to your specific brand. Simply order one of your products and get to work. There are a few big benefits here. First off, it forces you to order your products, which gives you a chance to interact with suppliers, to evaluate the packaging, to gauge shipping times and so on. Your own photos are also nice, because nobody else has them. This makes your website, your product pages, and your advertisements stand out from the crowd. And if you’ve seen some of the default photos that are out there, you know you don’t necessarily want to be part of the crowd.
Finally, having your own photos of products will prevent people from identifying your suppliers. As you may know, reverse image search tools have the ability to tell you where an image you have uploaded came from. So someone could very easily reverse engineer where you are getting your products. Using your own photos gives you that extra bit of secrecy and prevents your competition from scoping out your suppliers.
If you’re ready to try your hand at being a shutterbug, the Oberlo blog has tons of content about how to create compelling product photographs and professional photography. If you have any questions about photos or anything that has to do with dropshipping, let us know in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, happy dropshipping.