Putting Video On Your Ecommerce Site, A Webinar Preview

Product-oriented videos help shoppers understand what they are buying, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and boost conversion rates by as much as 30 percent.

Perhaps because of these reasons, ecommerce video is increasingly popular. Forrester Research, for example, estimated that 65 percent of the top 50 Internet retailers are already using product video on their sites. What’s more, perhaps, as many as 40 percent of small-to-midsized merchants intend to add video this year. So having at least some videos on your site may soon be almost a requirement, if your business is going to stay competitive.

Adding Video Is Not Hard

Fortunately, adding product video is not a huge challenge. In its simplest form, it is no more difficult than adding video to a site like YouTube, which a few hundred million people have apparently figured out. It requires a relatively inexpensive digital camcorder, less than $100 in software, and some lighting.

Your product videos need to support your store’s brand, so if you have a slick and sophisticated online shop, you don’t want to publish product videos that look like they were shot in your backyard. This means that in some cases, you’re going to want to hire professional help or use professionally produced video from the manufacturer.

Optimizing Video

But there is more to product video than just making the mini-product movies. How the video is positioned on the page, accompanying text, or even video size can and does have a significant effect on video views and conversions.

For example, >in a study of 7,314 product videos published on 53 different online stores, Invodo, an ecommerce video solution provider, found that videos which were 480 by 720 pixels in size performed nearly 10 percent better than videos which were 250 x 140 pixels in size. If watching product videos does, in fact, increasing conversions, getting ten percent more views can significantly increase your bottom line.

Other factors in product video success range from the total number of clickable offers on a page, how to use meta data, and tone.

Upcoming Video Best Practices Webinar

Next week, Practical eCommerce and Invodo will be broadcasting a webinar specifically aimed at helping small and midsized merchants make the most out of product video. The webinar, “Got Video? Six Tips for Ecommerce Video Success”, is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. EST, Tuesday, February 23, 2010.

Click here to view upcoming and archived Practical eCommerce webinars.>