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How Retail Sites Can Make the Most of Video
APRIL 29, 2011
Establishing best practices for a growing ecommerce asset
Ecommerce video has been a fast-growing feature on online retail sites over the past year. Retailers are quickly finding that adding product video to their sites increases conversions, but ecommerce video is still maturing as they continue to discover best practices.
“Merchants that have invested in video do not seem to be turning back,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Video in Ecommerce: Success Strategies Come into Focus.” “Customers demand it and stores are moving to meet the challenge.”
Nearly three-quarters of US retailers featured video on their sites in Q4 2010, according to the e-tailing group’s “13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study,” published in February 2011. This percentage was up significantly from the 55% of retailers who reported using video on their sites a year earlier.
Similarly, the e-tailing group’s “10th Annual Merchant Survey” found that 75% of retailers rated video as a valuable merchandising feature in Q1 2011, up from 68% in Q1 2010 and 58% in Q1 2009.
As some ecommerce video programs begin to scale up, the volume of clips on retail sites is evolving from experimental levels to large-scale coverage. But there are still some technical kinks to be worked out for many sites.
Video SEO, for example, is essential to increasing visibility, but has a long way to go. Even retailers that say they follow accepted guidelines for maximizing their search presence are having inconsistent results getting their clips indexed.
SundaySky, a software provider that specializes in repurposing digital content into automated videos, analyzed videos on Google and found that 46% of the top 50 retailers had no clips at all on the search engine. Another 24% had fewer than 10 clips and an additional 12% had between 11 and 100.
But making ecommerce video work can have big benefits for retailers.
“Merchants are finding that conversion rate increases and other business benefits justify their investments in video,” said Verna. “Meanwhile, survey data and qualitative feedback indicate that consumers appreciate the role of video in enhancing online and mobile commerce.”
