When you’re managing an ecommerce store — particularly one with a large or constantly evolving product catalogue — it’s surprisingly easy for small issues to slip through the cracks. Products may be added via supplier feeds, bulk CSV imports, or by multiple team members working in parallel. Over time, these processes can introduce inconsistencies.
One of the most common — and most harmful — of these issues is live products that have no images.
If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How can I find live Shopify products that don’t have images?”, this guide will walk you through both the manual approach and a far more efficient automated alternative.
Why Products With No Image Are A Big Problem
In ecommerce, your customers rely entirely on what they can see on screen. They can’t pick products up, inspect them closely, or try them out — your product imagery does all of that heavy lifting. Clear, high-quality images play a critical role in building trust, answering questions, and encouraging customers to buy.
1. No (or very low) sales
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: would you purchase a product if you couldn’t see what it looked like?
In most cases, products without images simply don’t convert. Even if a customer does go ahead and place an order, the lack of visual context increases the likelihood of disappointment, confusion, and returns — all of which create unnecessary strain on customer support and hurt overall profitability.
2. Missed opportunities from Image Search
For many ecommerce businesses, Google Image Search is an underrated but powerful source of organic traffic. This is especially true for visually led categories such as fashion, homeware, furniture, and lifestyle products, where customers often browse images before committing to a click.
Because many stores neglect image optimisation entirely, this can be a genuine opportunity for smaller or growing brands to gain visibility in a less competitive search environment. Products without images can’t appear in image search at all — meaning missed traffic and missed sales.
3. Site Quality Signals
Product pages with no images tend to perform poorly across the board. They attract fewer clicks, convert at a lower rate, and experience higher bounce rates. When users leave your site quickly and continue their search elsewhere, search engines interpret this as a sign that your page isn’t meeting user expectations.
Over time, these negative engagement signals can contribute to lower search rankings, reduced visibility, and a steady decline in organic traffic.
In short: identifying and fixing products with no images should be a high-priority task for every ecommerce team.
How to Find Shopify Products With No Images
The Hard Way: Manually Using Shopify’s Product Export
Shopify doesn’t currently provide a built-in filter to easily surface products without images, so the most common workaround is manual:
- Export your entire product catalogue as a CSV.
- Open the file in Excel or Google Sheets.
- Find the
Image Srccolumn — if the product has an image this field will contain the image URL. - Apply a filter to show only rows where this field is blank.
- Review the list and update the products in Shopify.
Pitfalls of this method:
- You need to remember to do this regularly.
- You won’t know if there are any products missing an image until you have gone through the whole process.
- You don’t know which products to prioritise to make the biggest impact on revenue.
For larger or fast-growing stores with thousands of SKUs, this quickly becomes a time-consuming and inefficient task.
The Easy Way: Automatically Find Products With No Images With Cleargro
Rather than exporting spreadsheets and manually checking your catalogue, Cleargro continuously monitors your Shopify inventory and alerts you as soon as it finds a live product with no image.
Here’s how it works:
- Cleargro integrates directly with your Shopify store
- Your product data is scanned automatically on a daily basis
- The moment it detects a product with no images, it notifies you or your team
- No exports, no spreadsheets, no manual checks
You’ll know immediately when something needs attention—before it affects sales, traffic, or customer experience.
Sounds great, tell me more…
Every ecommerce store has hidden opportunities to increase sales through smarter inventory optimisation. The challenge is uncovering those opportunities and knowing which ones will actually move the needle.
Cleargro solves that.
Cleargro is a platform which integrates with your ecommerce store and continuously analyses your product data to identify issues and opportunities that impact visibility, conversion rate, and revenue. Each opportunity is prioritised based on potential business impact, helping teams focus their time on what matters most.
Identifying Shopify products with no images is just one of many insights Cleargro provides. To see the full range of opportunities we monitor, visit our Opportunities page.
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