The Best AI Image Generators for Online Stores

In ecommerce, visuals play a crucial role in grabbing attention and driving sales because they are often the first thing customers notice. In the fiercely competitive landscape of dropshipping, using high-quality, eye-catching images helps foster an immediate connection, helping your products stand out in a crowded marketplace. 67 per cent of product users say images are very important when making purchasing decisions, and other studies have shown that product photos directly aid consumers' understanding of products. Unfortunately, creating professional-grade visuals can be time-consuming and expensive, especially for businesses without a dedicated design team. That’s where AI-powered image generators come in. These tools use artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms to quickly generate AI images that can elevate your product listings, social media posts, and marketing campaigns, all without the need for a camera or graphic design skills. In this blog, we’ll help you find the best AI image generator for your business and show you how they can help you enhance your visuals and effortlessly boost conversions.

What are AI image generators?

AI image generators use advanced machine learning algorithms, particularly those based on neural networks, to create new images from scratch or based on input data. Artificial neural networks are designed to mimic the human brain, particularly when it comes to pattern recognition. They consist of interconnected layers of nodes (neurons) that are used to process large datasets of images and learn to recognise specific features like edges, colours, textures, and shapes.

On the user end, image generators work by taking a text prompt and turning it into AI-generated art. For the most part, these tools are only limited by your imagination. However, with so much generative AI technology on the market, output quality will vary. 

Why they matter for online stores

AI image generators are a game changer for online stores. They offer numerous advantages that can significantly enhance an online store’s marketing, product design, website and even customer experience. Here are some of the benefits an AI image creator can bring to your store.

Cost-effective content creation

AI image generators reduce the need for photoshoots, photo editing, art design, and other professional graphic design services. For stores with a high number of SKUs, this is a significant cost-cutting measure. It also saves resources for small businesses that may not have the budget or expertise to produce high-quality product images. 

Faster time-to-market

AI can create higher-quality images at scale in just a few seconds, allowing ecommerce businesses to launch new products and marketing campaigns more quickly. This is essential for fast-moving industries, such as fashion, where speed is essential to capitalise on trends or seasonal products.

Creative freedom

Generative AI models allow ecommerce stores to explore creative visuals that might not be possible with traditional methods. Image generators can emulate many distinct art styles, place products in unconventional places, and produce effects that would otherwise be timely or costly to replicate. Unique designs and promotional content created by AI can differentiate a brand and attract more attention from customers.

The best AI image generators for ecommerce

Canva

Canva is well-known as a creative powerhouse, empowering users from all walks of life to create all kinds of visual content and marketing materials. Their latest offering includes Magic Media, an AI image generator that can help users create and manipulate images, videos or other content. Magic Media can automatically resize designs to suit different social platforms, remove backgrounds, enhance details, add filters, and make other specific edits to images with ease and efficiency. 

Like the rest of Canva, Magic Media is practical and easy to use. The platform makes short work of time-consuming editing tasks. However, the image generator has users divided. Magic Media shines brightest when using their preset styles, which gives a wonderful artistic flair to images. However, the platform struggles with photorealism. Magic Media also falls short when it comes to editing your image results - unlike other tools where you can make follow-up changes, you cannot make these minute adjustments in Canva without using an entirely new prompt or generating a new image. 

Any images generated in Canva can be used for commercial purposes, as long as you follow their content guidelines and Acceptable Use Policy, both for general content and AI-generated content. 

Overall, Canva and Magic Media are a solid choice for any business in need of day-to-day graphics. However, for businesses in need of photo-realistic, highly detailed graphics at scale, you may want to consider a different model.

Pricing: For Canva Free users, you can test Magic Media’s functionality with 50 text-to-image credits and 5 video credits. Once these have been used, you’ll need to purchase a Canva Pro subscription ($165 per year), Teams subscription ($135 per person per year, with a minimum of 3 people), or an Enterprise plan. For more information, view Canva’s pricing page. 

Dall-E 3

DALL-E 3 is the latest version of OpenAI's image generation model, part of the DALL-E series. Like its predecessors, it uses advanced AI to create realistic images from text descriptions. This latest iteration can understand complex scenes, prompts and object relationships, and can handle more nuanced and detailed prompts. It is also easier to edit parts of generated images - you can simply make follow-up requests via text, making editing flexible and simple. 

Dall-E 3 is fully integrated with ChatGPT-4, allowing you to request images directly in the chat and follow up with additional prompts and outputs. While Dall-E 3 excels with artistic image prompts, reviewers note it struggles with photorealism. Other creators complain the newer model lacks image diversity, meaning there is less variation between outputs.  This makes it an excellent choice for creative brands with an abstract style, but the model may struggle to produce clear and engaging product images or photorealistic marketing.

Pricing: Dall-E has multiple models available at different price points, starting at $0.040 per image. For more accurate pricing information, visit OpenAI’s pricing page.

Midjourney

Created by the San-Francisco based independent research laboratory of the same name, Midjourney is an AI platform that generates detailed, accurate images based on simple text prompts. You can also use their Blend tool to combine multiple images together to create images in a mash-up of styles. According to reviews, Midjourney consistently produces high-quality images but excels at replicating dreamlike, abstract art styles.

Unlike its competitors, Midjourney operates through Discord chat. Users will need a basic understanding of Discord chat and its features. It also means you’ll have easy access to a large community of creators - you can join other Discord channels for support, inspiration and troubleshooting. Unfortunately, while the community may be thriving, the team behind the project is small and offers little to no customer support. 

Midjourney is a popular choice for many creators because it creates detailed, bold and vivid images that rival its more established competitors. Its community focus is a bonus but is much less of a benefit for businesses who may wish to keep their images private. It can also have a high learning curve for users unfamiliar with Discord or prompt engineering. 

Pricing: Midjourney’s Basic Plan starts at $10 per month (or $8 when paying annually). However, companies that make over $1,000,000 USD in gross revenue per year must purchase a Pro or Mega plan ($60 per month and $120 per month respectively). For more information view Midjourney’s pricing page. 

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer is Microsoft’s answer to Canva’s exponential growth, and it provides decent competition. The platform has a similar look and feel to Canva, but there are several key differences. Designer leverages DALL-E and Copilot, allowing users to generate original, high-quality designs using text prompts and refine them easily. This powerful model is wrapped in Microsoft’s user-friendly interface, making it easier for non-technical users to access its comprehensive features. Additionally, the platform allows for many integrations across Microsoft’s products, meaning you can directly incorporate your creations into documents, presentations or emails, helping your workflow run faster and smoother.

In Microsoft Designer, you don’t just write a prompt, but you can also choose from existing examples to inform the generator what you would like to see. You can also specify the size and orientation of the image to suit different platforms. Once your image is generated you can use various editing tools, such as the background remover, to edit specific elements for an eye-catching design. You can also create your own Brand Kit to keep your designs consistent. 

For businesses already ingrained in the Microsoft ecosystem, Microsoft Designer is an excellent choice. Its professional design environment is feature-rich but may pose a steep learning curve for less experienced users.

Pricing: You can use Microsoft Designer for free with any Microsoft account, or you can purchase Copilot Pro for $33 per user, per month for additional benefits. 

Adobe Firefly

Adobe Firefly is a suite of AI-powered creative tools designed to help professionals generate and enhance images, text effects and more. While Adobe has dabbled in AI for quite some time, Firefly is specifically tailored to creative content generation. But don’t worry - it can easily be integrated into Adobe’s other design tools, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, for all your professional design needs. 

Firefly offers text-to-image generation, but it can also add creative effects to text, make edits like generative fill, and create variations of existing content. You can create images from scratch, upload your own reference images, or select them from the Adobe library. In terms of output, Firefly performs exceptionally well with both photorealism and abstract concepts. Users enjoy a high level of creative control over their generated images, both in terms of the software’s understanding of text prompts and the comprehensive menu items.

One of the unique selling points of Firefly is its “ethical” model. Firefly is only trained using public domain content, open-source images and Adobe Stock content. Notionally, these additions make the tool more commercially safe, with a lower risk of accidental copyright infringement. The images you create also come with embedded “content credentials” - unique identifiers that mark your work as AI-generated. This added layer of transparency is a plus for sceptical consumers. 

Pricing: While you can purchase an Adobe Firefly subscription individually for $6.99 per month, professional creators will find it included in their Creative Cloud subscription, which gives access to 20+ Adobe apps (including Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and InDesign) for $87.99 per month. There are also business plans available from $128.99 per month, per license. You can find more information on Adobe’s plans and pricing page. 

Jasper Art

Jasper Art is a feature of Jasper, an AI-powered platform designed primarily for content creation, that enables users to generate custom images from text descriptions. Jasper is widely known for its AI-driven writing assistant, Jasper AI, and Jasper Art builds on this by allowing users to create visual content. As well as being able to generate images from text prompts, Jasper offers a wide range of image styles to steer your output in the right direction, including art/artist styles, keywords, image mediums, image styles and moods. 

A key feature of Jasper’s AI is its ability to absorb a brand’s style. This is apparent in their writing assistant, but extends to their image generator, helping your content to feel more authentic. The app is designed to seamlessly integrate with your business, whether using their handy Chrome extension or assigning tasks and collaborating with teammates directly on the platform. 

For security-conscious users, Jasper claims to use enterprise-grade security features. These features allow you to access and use Jasper Art securely, and the images you produce won’t be used to train models. 

Designed by and for marketers, Jasper is a great choice for businesses with a strong, established brand voice. However, as with many of its competitors, Jasper Art can struggle with finer details and human anatomy, so it may be best suited to general use. 

Pricing: To use Jasper Art to its full capabilities, you’ll need to start with their Pro plan at $69 per month ($59 if billed annually). You can find more information on Jasper AI’s pricing page. 

Features to look for in an AI image generator

Customisation options

One of the benefits of AI image generation is that it allows businesses to create unique and customised images for their marketing campaigns at scale and at speed. When looking for an AI image generator for your business, you’ll want to find a model that allows for flexibility in terms of the content you can produce, while also allowing you to tailor images to fit your branding. 

Quality of generated images

AI image generators vary greatly in terms of output quality. This can also differ depending on the style you want to achieve - some AI models excel at photorealism, while others specialise in more experimental styles. AI models also famously struggle with intricate details, such as human hands. If your brand is detail-oriented, you may need an AI model that specialises in intricate details and can understand more complex prompts. 

Ease of integration with ecommerce platforms

Some AI models can be integrated with your existing creative software. These integrations can simplify your workflow, making it easier and faster to create entire presentations, pitches and marketing materials. 

How to use AI image generators to boost sales

Enhancing product pages

AI image generators let you create dynamic product images, showing your products in various situations without the need for props, backgrounds or a physical studio. They can be adjusted for specific marketing needs, such as holiday campaigns, social media trends or flash sales. By putting products in a wide variety of circumstances, customers can more easily imagine the product in their own lives. This flexibility also helps ecommerce stores keep their content fresh, relevant, and engaging.

Creating engaging social media content

The key to a successful ecommerce social media campaign is consistency. AI image generators can be used to quickly produce custom visuals for Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads. The speed at which unique images and animations can be produced helps businesses to capitalise on trending topics or challenges. You can even use AI to create user-generated content campaigns. For example, Coca-Cola collaborated with Dall-E and ChatGPT for their Create Real Magic campaign, where they encouraged users to create Coke-themed artwork and submit it to their socials.

Personalising customer experiences

You can use generative AI to create dynamic, personalised content for individual customers. You can even create personalised or localised ad content for different demographics or regions. Generating visuals that reflect cultural preferences or regional aesthetics can help create more relevant ads and promotions, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Pros and Cons of using AI image generators

Pros of using AI image generators

Cost-effective 

Traditional graphic design is expensive. Not only do you need to hire an experienced designer, but you also need the right equipment, software and other materials. This can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses on a tight budget. AI image generators enable all businesses to create engaging, creative and artistic marketing materials without blowing up their budgets. 

Faster content creation

Creativity takes time, especially when using traditional artistic methods. In the fast-paced world of ecommerce marketing, time is of the essence. AI-generated images are created almost instantly, allowing for quick iterations and experimentation. AI image generators can save businesses precious hours by not only generating images within minutes but also aiding the editing process, automating tasks, and simplifying the creative process. Finally, as trend cycles grow smaller and smaller, AI generators help businesses stay ahead of the viral marketing curve.

Accessibility

AI image generation lowers the barrier to entry for those without formal design training. Anyone can create professional-looking visuals using simple descriptions, making these tools highly accessible for small businesses, marketers, and content creators alike.

Scalability

AI tools can generate large volumes of images efficiently, making it easy to scale up visual content production for websites, social media, and advertisements. For large businesses or stores looking to grow, this is vital. 

Flexibility

One of the most useful features of AI image generators is their flexibility. These models are able to produce any artwork you can imagine - at least within the platform’s guidelines. Concepts that may have once required specialisation are easier to achieve, and you can even use AI to inspire your own creative work.

Cons of using AI image generators

Consumer attitudes

When it comes to AI, consumer attitudes are mixed. According to a survey conducted by YouGov, just under half of respondents were uncomfortable with AI being used to edit or generate product images. While at least 60 per cent of consumers still trust businesses that use AI, consumers are still greatly concerned about the spread of misinformation, potential job losses, and the ethical implications of training models on other’s artwork. Consumers appreciate companies that are upfront about the use of AI, and even welcome its usage when it comes to the customer service experience. 

Quality control

While AI has improved dramatically in recent years, the technology is still in its infancy. Images produced using AI will vary in quality depending on the prompt, the size and resolution, and the complexity of the image. Additionally, it can be hard to replicate the same level of quality across images, making it difficult to produce consistent quality marketing. 

Copyright issues related to commercial use

Many AI generators are trained on images that are scraped from all corners of the internet, regardless of whether they have permission from the image creator themselves. Some AI models have built-in policies and permissions regarding copyright ownership, but these vary from platform to platform. Depending on who owns the images, your work may also be used to train models. You’ll want to review each model’s unique terms and conditions before generating or reproducing any images commercially.

Data dependency and biases

All AI models are trained using specific pools of data. Depending on the dataset used, this can be very limiting for users. Because they are trained on existing works of art, images produced may seem unoriginal or formulaic. Additionally, AI can develop biases. For example, if an AI model is trained using mainly photographs of men, it may struggle to generate images of women regardless of context. It is important to use AI models trained on a vast dataset, and to keep in mind any potential biases your AI generator may have.

Potential learning curve

Even though AI image generators make it easier for non-designers to create images, there can still be a learning curve. Some platforms use more designer-friendly interfaces for further customisation, which can be daunting for beginners. All AI image generators rely on prompts, but some may require specific prompt engineering to produce the desired image. This can result in a steep learning curve for beginners. However, there are plenty of resources available to help designers at all skill levels create compelling content, no matter the program. 

Summary

In the competitive world of online marketing, high-quality visuals are essential for attracting and converting customers. AI-powered image generators have revolutionised how businesses create product images, allowing you to produce professional, eye-catching visuals without expensive photography or design skills. For dropshipping businesses looking to improve their product presentation and marketing, these AI image generators provide an efficient and affordable solution to create stunning, professional visuals that drive sales.