Images and image addresses: what the Converter does

Take Atelier Démo’s stoneware bowl: four photos, plus one photo per glaze colour, published on its Shopify store. Atelier Démo converts its products for WooCommerce and plans to close the Shopify store afterwards.

Addresses, not image files

In a store export, each image is usually a web address. The Converter reads these addresses and copies them into the target platform’s image column. It downloads no image and sends none: everything stays on your computer, and the file written holds only text.

At import time, the new platform downloads each image from its address, according to its official help. The old store, or the site that hosts the images, must therefore stay online, with its images visible, until the import is over. Atelier Démo closes its Shopify store only once the products are imported and checked in WooCommerce.

WooCommerce imports these images into its Media Library; according to its help, some hosts block these requests or return a page instead of an image. BigCommerce asks for a full web address and accepts the JPEG, GIF, WebP and PNG formats. Wix accepts an image address or a Wix media ID.

Platform by platform

Shopify

One row per image, with its position and alt text; a variant’s own image goes in the Variant Image column. A product with more images than variants takes one row per image.

WooCommerce

All of a product’s addresses fit in the Images cell, separated by commas; according to WooCommerce’s help, the first one is the featured image. A comma inside an address is encoded, so that WooCommerce does not cut the address in two. Alt text is not written: according to WooCommerce’s help, its CSV import does not handle it. In a WooCommerce export, an address without a site name is completed with the most frequent site name among the file’s other images.

Wix

One MEDIA row per image, in order, with its alt text. A variant’s own image is not written as a variant image; if it is also among the product’s images, it is written with them. The screen does not report this loss today. The other way round, a Wix export may hold media IDs instead of addresses: see Export from Wix.

BigCommerce

One Image row per image, under the product; the first one is marked as the thumbnail, and a variant’s own image goes in the Variant Image URL column. A BigCommerce export gives its images in one column and its import reads them in another: the Converter reads Internal Image URL (Export) and writes Image URL (Import). To BigCommerce, the Review step reminds you: “Images must be downloaded by BigCommerce at import.”

What the Converter tells you

At the Mapping step, if no column of your file gives images, the WooCommerce fields with no column list says so: “Products will be imported without images.” At the Review step, an image repeated within a product is noted for information: “The same image is used several times.” For an Eloshon Scraper file, the addresses are those of the site that was read: that site, too, must let its images be downloaded during the import.