How important is the alt text for my product images?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Piper Lily: Hi,
  
  I used Weebly to create my online store but I'm not able to add alt text to the images within the store for whatever reason, it's just not an option with Weebly. I can add alt text to all the other images that are on site but not in store.
  
  My question is how important is the alt text for my product images? When I do those free SEO analyzer site tools, they all come back saying I have 200+ images with no alt text.
  
  Oh and last night I spent 3 hours editing the images in Photoshop CS5.1, adding file information to them, then relinked and uploaded all the new images, but that didn't seem to work because I'm getting the same results with the SEO analyzers. ;
  
  Thanks!
• 
  Azedine Djedid: Honestly I never used Weebly but thats weird. Why didn't use something better than weebly? Did you think about the future of your store if Weebly shut down?
• 
  Piper Lily: I don't think Weebly will be shutting down anytime soon and if that ever did happen, I'd have to readjust. I used them because I'm not a web designer or programmer and their web site builder is very user friendly. This is the first real issue I've had and I only found out because of the SEO analysis. I tried to Google fixes and no one else seems to have brought this issue up, so I'm not sure if it's an issue or not. :]
• 
  Azedine Djedid: You never know. The same happened to people who had tumblr as soon as yahoo bought it few accounts were banned for no reason....etc another story and real one is Facebook Fan page, where most of your fans don't get to see your posts because Facedollars wants us to pay and keep paying to deliver OuR own content to OUR fans. I know its a bit off of the original post sorry.
• 
  Piper Lily: lol no worries. It's all real issues for sure, so discussion is good. But for me right now, it's all trial and error and so far I've learned with Weebly, so I'll stick with them unless I see something better. Cheers!