A Shopify store copied my product photos

What Shopify will and will not act on

Shopify operates as a service provider under § 512 and has a designated agent and a published process. A valid notice gets content removed or the store disabled, because keeping the safe harbour depends on acting.

• ✓Will act on: your photographs, your written product descriptions, your original page copy, your theme design if it was custom-built for you and copied wholesale.
• ✓Will not act on: a store selling similar products, a similar shop name, a similar colour scheme, or prices matching yours.
• ✓Not copyright at all: use of your brand name or logo. That is trademark, reported separately, and filing it as copyright damages your credibility.

Theme design is worth a note. A standard paid theme used by both of you is not infringement — you both licensed it. A bespoke theme built for you and lifted file-for-file is a different matter.

What to send

The six statutory elements, addressed to Shopify’s designated agent, identifying the specific product URLs rather than the store as a whole. Include the direct image URLs where photographs are the issue — the reviewer should not have to hunt for what you mean.

The sentence that does the most work is a precise comparison: “The image at [their image URL] is a downscaled copy of the original photograph published at [your URL] on [date].” A reviewer can verify that in under a minute, which is the point.

Build the document with the free notice generator. It assembles all six parts in your browser and sends nothing to us.

If the store simply moves

Dropshipping operations rebuild quickly. A store that is disabled today can reappear next week on a new domain with the same photographs, and that is genuinely demoralising to deal with one notice at a time.

Two things help. First, a record: repeat-infringer policies mean a pattern of upheld complaints against the same operator matters more than any single notice. Second, monitoring rather than reacting — knowing within days that your images are up somewhere new, rather than finding out months later.

We re-check every removal at day seven and day thirty for exactly this reason, and if content comes back your invoice is voided automatically.

Working out what was actually taken

Before writing anything, build a list. A store that copied one photograph has usually copied more, and finding out after the first notice has gone is how a single case turns into four.

1. 1

   Walk their catalogue

   Open every product page and compare against yours. Tedious, and it is the step that determines whether this is one notice or a batch.

2. 2

   Collect direct image URLs

   Right-click, copy image address. Store image URLs are often on a CDN subdomain and that exact address is what a reviewer will check.

3. 3

   Check the text too

   Stores that lift photographs almost always lift the descriptions with them, because both come from the same scrape. Text is the easier half to prove.

4. 4

   Note the resolution

   Theirs will almost always be a downscaled copy of yours. Recording both sizes turns your claim into something verifiable in seconds.

Filing one notice covering every URL on a single store is both faster and more effective than a drip of separate complaints. It also reads differently to the reviewer: a dozen matching assets is a pattern, and a pattern gets a different kind of attention than an isolated image.

Dropshippers, and why this keeps happening

A large share of Shopify copying is dropshipping operations building a storefront from other people’s assets because they have no product to photograph. The pattern is recognisable: a store launched recently, a catalogue assembled from several unrelated brands, generic policy pages, and prices that undercut everyone.

The good news is that these stores rarely defend themselves. There is no attachment to the content and often no human monitoring the email. A clean notice to the platform usually ends it without an argument.

The bad news is that the same operator can rebuild in an afternoon. This is why the record matters more than the individual removal: repeat-infringer policies are a condition of the safe harbour, so a documented pattern against one operator carries institutional weight that a single complaint never will.