How to Export WooCommerce Products with Images (The Easy Way)

In the realm of online shopping, customers buy with their eyes first!

Yes, product photos are the heartbeat of eCommerce, pulsating with the power to mesmerize, captivate, and convert browsers into buyers with just a single glance.

Don’t take our word for it; check out these statistics –

• Products with high-quality images have a 94% higher conversion rate compared to those with low-quality photos.
• Nearly 93% of online customers consider product images to be the most important factor when deciding to buy.
• Around 78% of online shoppers prefer products that have clear and engaging images.
• Approximately 63% of consumers prioritize good images over product descriptions when making purchasing decisions.

Therefore, when you decide to export your WooCommerce products for any reason, you must ensure you export WooCommerce products with images accurately.

✅ This article will guide you to export and import WooCommerce products with images. In addition, we will also find out why and when you will need to export products with images.

Let’s begin.

Let’s begin.

Why do you need to Export WooCommerce Products with Images?

There are several reasons why you might need to export WooCommerce products with images:

Backup and Restore

Having a backup of your product data, including images, ensures you can restore your store if something goes wrong, such as a server crash or data loss. This acts as a safety net for you and minimizes downtime.

Migration to a New Store

If you’re migrating your WooCommerce store to a new platform or domain, exporting your products with images allows you to easily import them into the new system. This saves time and ensures your product information and visuals are transferred smoothly.

Reach New Audiences Through Product Feed Marketing

By exporting your product data with high-quality images, you can easily create product feeds for popular marketplaces and comparison shopping engines (CSEs) like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. These platforms allow you to reach a wider audience of potential customers who are actively searching for products like yours.

Migration to a New Server

When migrating your WooCommerce store to a new server, exporting your products with images allows for a seamless import process on the new platform. This ensures all your product information and visuals are transferred smoothly.

Data Sharing and Collaboration

Export WooCommerce products with images and variations facilitates collaboration with suppliers, vendors, or marketing teams who need access to product details for various purposes.

Multi-Store Management

If you manage multiple WooCommerce stores, exporting products with images from a central location allows you to import them easily into each store. This creates a consistent product catalog across all your stores and simplifies inventory management.

How to export WooCommerce products with images

Now that we have learned the why’s, it comes down to the How’s.

The good news is, exporting WooCommerce products with images is a surprisingly easy process!

We’ll explore two methods you can use to achieve this: utilizing a dedicated plugin or leveraging the built-in export functionality of WooCommerce itself.

Additionally, we will walk you through how to create product feed export files with images to list and promote your WooCommerce products on multiple channels.

We must mention that all of these methods will create spreadsheet-structured data files that contain links to your product images. When you upload/import the file to any other system, the receiving application will fetch the images from the links.

In simple words, they will download and upload your images from your media server through the links.

How to Export Products with Images Using WordPress and WooCommerce Built-In Options

WooCommerce has a built-in importer exporter through which you can export your products along with your images efficiently. This method doesn’t require any additional plugins, making it a great option for those who prefer a simpler approach.

Here’s how to get started. Go to the Products>>All Products menu from your WordPress admin panel.

At the top of the page are dedicated buttons for importing and exporting WooCommerce products with images.

Click on the Export button.

This will take you to the following export products with images in the WooCommerce window.

It provides three options for filtering your products.

1. Column filtering

When exporting WooCommerce products to CSV, you’re typically given the option to choose which columns to include in the file. These columns can vary based on your WooCommerce version and installed plugins.

Common options include ID, type, SKU, status, description, price, reviews, and more. Depending on your setup, you might have additional or customized columns available for selection.

2. Product types filters

When exporting WooCommerce products, you’ll see a dropdown to choose which product types to include. Options like Simple Product, Variable Product, Grouped Product, External/Affiliate Product, Downloadable Product, and Virtual Product may appear based on your setup and plugins. These types categorize your products for easier management and organization.

3. Category Filtering

This drop-down allows you to export products based on specific categories. The categories listed here will vary depending on the categories you’ve set up in your WooCommerce store.

Additionally, you can include your custom meta fields if your product pages have any additional custom attributes.

If you simply want to download all your products with images, keep the options as they are and click the Generate CSV button.

It will create an export WooCommerce products with images CSV file.

Here’s how the images are included here –

As you can see, if there is more than one image for a product, they are included in the same line, separated by a comma.

Importing the CSV file to a new WooCommerce site

If you import this file to another WordPress WooCommerce site, the receiving Woo site will download the images from your current server using the links and upload them to its media server.

Let us walk you through the process of importing the export WooCommerce products with images CSV files.

Here’s a new WooCommerce store with no products.

Now, click the Import button. Select the file you downloaded and click continue.

In the next step, you’ll map the fields from your CSV file to the corresponding fields in your product database. Choose which CSV fields should align with specific product attributes or opt to ignore certain fields during the import process.

This mapping ensures accurate data transfer and seamless integration of your product information. As this is a new store, we won’t make any changes, but you always need to make sure the attributes from the file match your current Woo site attribute fields.

Once you are ready, hit the “Run Importer” button.

The import process will take some time, depending on your file size, number of images, and server speed. Once done, it will display a similar screen.

Click on the View Products button.

As you can see, all product information and images have been imported accurately.

Export WooCommerce Products with Images Using the WordPress Export Tool

WordPress also has built-in import-export tools to migrate your entire website to a new server. Go to Tools >> Export.

From this page, you can export your entire WordPress WooCommerce site. You can select products only to export your product data. You can also export your WooCommerce orders from this page.

It will download an XML export file when you click on download. You can then upload it to an application that supports this structured format or upload it to a different WordPress server.

Important note: We highly discourage this method, especially when exporting product images. Users have experienced numerous issues, such as images not uploading, not exporting all products/ product missing attributes, images being replaced with WooCommerce dummy images, etc.

In my personal test, I found the images missing issue to be true. Also, this tool doesn’t have any filtering options. Therefore, you should opt for the WooCommerce import-export to CSV option or look for a plugin for more advanced filtering.

Export WooCommerce Products with Images Using a Plugin

We will use a plugin called Product Import Export for WooCommerce for this article.

After activating the export WooCommerce products with images plugin, go to its menu and click on Export.

Along with products, you can also choose to export other WooCommerce elements such as coupons, orders, categories, reviews, customers, etc. Next, select your export method.

On the following page, you can filter your products by –

• Total number of products to export        
• Skip the first specified number of products          
• Specific Products             
• Stock Status                      
• Exclude products                             
• Product categories         
• Product tags      
• Product status

On the next page, you can customize and rearrange the column names for your exported data. Whether you’re adjusting default names or using a pre-saved template, you have the flexibility to tailor the column names to your preferences. Simply drag and drop the columns to reorder them as needed, ensuring your output file meets your specific requirements.

When exporting, the server processes a set number of records per iteration within a defined timeout interval. By default, this number is set to 30 records. Adjusting this value allows you to fine-tune the export process to prevent timeouts.

If exports fail due to timeout issues, lowering this number can help resolve the issue. You can also save this template for future use.

After you click the export button on the final page, it will process your export and show a download button when complete.

Click to export WooCommerce products with images to a CSV file.

Exporting WooCommerce Products with Images for Product Feed Marketing

Product feed marketing refers to the process of displaying and selling your WooCommerce products simultaneously on multiple channels. This means you can showcase your products not only on your Woo site but also on giant marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Target, Walmart, etc.

Not only that, you can also list and display your products on price comparison engines such as Google Shopping, Bing Smart Shopping, PriceGrabber, Idealo, etc., as well as social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.

Simply put, you can display your products all over the internet and reach a massive audience. This can significantly boost your traffic, conversions, and reputation.

How?

You need to export WooCommerce products with images in CSV, XML, or any supported format file and upload them on those channels.

These are known as product feed files.

However, we should mention that these channels don’t simply accept your general export CSV file from built-in tools or import-export plugins.

To effectively export WooCommerce products with images for various channels like Amazon, Google Shopping, and others, you’ll first need to prepare your product data in a format compatible with each platform’s requirements.

The standard export CSV files from built-in tools or import/export plugins may not meet the specific formatting requirements of these channels. You may need to enhance your export product feed file by including additional fields, such as product attributes, variations, pricing, and, most importantly, image URLs or paths.

Each channel typically has its own set of guidelines and specifications for product data feed uploads. Therefore, you may need to tailor your export file to meet these requirements precisely.

How to Export WooCommerce Products with Images for Product Feed Marketing

You know by now the built-in tools or basic plugins can’t meet the requirements of the channels. These channels typically do not accept the regular or general exported files these tools generate.

To successfully export WooCommerce products with images, you must familiarize yourself with the guidelines and formatting specifications of the target channels. This involves understanding the requirements of each platform, collecting the required attributes, and creating customized product feed export files that adhere to their standards.

What are attributes in a feed file?

These are different characteristics of your products, such as product IDs, SKUs, titles, descriptions, links to your images, categories, etc. Attributes requirements vary from channel to channel.

For example, here’s a Google Shopping product data export feed file.

The red-marked column headers are the attributes. Here are some necessary attributes you must include in your Google Shopping feed.

• ID
• Title
• Description
• Product URL
• Category
• Image URL
• Stock Availability
• Regular Price
• GTIN/MPN
• Product Condition
• Brand

You need to insert these attributes in a spreadsheet and copy-paste your data underneath them. If any attribute isn’t available (for example, brand, Google Shopping GTIN, ISBN, MPN, etc.) in your WooCommerce product pages, you must add it as a custom field, enter its value, and include it in the feed.

It sounds like a challenging, time-consuming, and laborious task, right?

We have the perfect tool suggestion for you that can do all of these within minutes automatically. It’s a WooCommerce product feed manager plugin called CTX Feed.

This plugin makes it incredibly easy to create feed files and integrate them into channels like Google Shopping. Not only Google Shopping, but the plugin supports over a staggering 130 channels.

You no longer need to learn any guidelines or attribute requirements. CTX Feed allows you to access built-in templates tailored for all major channels. These templates are seamlessly integrated with the guidelines and attributes of each platform, saving you the hassle of manual data entry.

Moreover, you don’t need to copy-paste your data individually as well. CTX Feed automates the process, allowing you to export WooCommerce products with images effortlessly and efficiently in one go.

Plus, the plugin offers automatic updates and URL connection features, streamlining your product feed marketing efforts and making the process entirely automated and effortless.

Creating an Export WooCommerce Products with Images feed file using CTX Feed

CTX Feed is the most popular product feed manager plugin in the WordPress plugin repository.

Let’s create a product data feed with the free version

After you activate the plugin, go to the following page to get started.

Select your location and set a file name and file format. CTX Feed supports CSV, TXT, XML, JSON, TSV, and XLS file formats.

The Template dropdown is the treasure trove. Here, you will find all the channel templates. Let’s pick Google Shopping.

When you select a template, the plugin automatically generates the necessary attributes at the bottom. All you have to do is hit the generate button. Voila, you are done.

CTX Fee will automatically collect your product data along with image links and generate the feed file for you. You can find the feed on the Manage Feed page.

Feel free to explore our blog to discover detailed guides on generating product feed files tailored for various channels, empowering you to enhance and optimize your WooCommerce business effectively.

Wrap up

In conclusion, exporting WooCommerce products with images is a crucial aspect of managing and expanding your online store. By exporting your products with images, you can effectively showcase your merchandise across multiple platforms, reach a wider audience, and boost sales.

Whether you’re looking to integrate with third-party channels, sync inventory, or streamline your operations, exporting WooCommerce products with images ensures consistency and visibility across all your sales channels.

With the right tools and techniques, you can simplify the export process and unlock new opportunities for growth and success in your eCommerce venture.