Committed to Ecommerce Video

As I’ve mentioned here before, we feel very privileged and thankful for being the market leader of the Online Product Video sector. It’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly. We invest a fair amount of our time and resources in researching the technology side of things, and perhaps even more, the business impact and ROI product videos have for ecommerce vendors.

Helping Ecommerce Entrepreneurs Prosper in 2012

Over the years, and as a result of the massive amounts of data to which we’ve been given access by our clients, we’ve compiled a series of guidelines that have been proven time and again to increase conversions and sales. It’s our great pleasure to start this new year by sharing these guidelines, with the hope they help ecommerce  entrepreneurs everywhere increase their profitability and product video ROI this year.

So without further ado embedded below and available for download here is:

The Treepodia Product Video Best Practice Guide

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kyz/3115855390/

Over the past few months, and with the support of some of our best clients, we’ve been working on a case study that investigates how video is impacting online sales of jewelry items. I hope you find the following information useful and welcome comments and queries…

Mike@treepodia.com : )

Being a market leader is a big responsibility. Simply put – When you’re a leader you have no one to follow. Educating and developing your niche is primarily up to you!

As the market leader of video-for-ecommerce we take our role very seriously. In fact you’ll very rarely see cat jokes on this blog at all! (well there was that one time…)

The fun part is that you have a broader view of your niche than anyone else…

Here at Treepodia we love sharing our unique viewpoint in order to help with the “educating-and-development-responsibility” bit. This here post is one such example…

Ecommerce, Video and Jewelry sales

History

Treepodia has always been lucky enough to have a special relationship with the online-jewelry-sales industry. Very early on in our operations we caught the attention of Mr. Shmuel Gniwisch, CEO of Ice.com – one of the first companies to turn a jewelry store into an online shopping experience (…way back in 1999!!!).

With the support of Mr. Gniwisch, Ice, and it’s credo on such platforms as Internet Retailer, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (…etc.) we were immediately shot into the spotlight for anyone, and everyone, in the online-jewelry-sales business.

It was an amazing opportunity – Jewelry vendors deal in relatively high-ticket items, and anything that makes their products stand out can help them increase sales. Video was the perfect fit…

We became a big hit with online Jewelry vendors everywhere, and companies in this niche still remain some our best clients.

Why this matters?

Our platform enables our customers to:

• Trace a conversion back to a video
• Enable A/B testing for each product to test the impact video is having on its Conversion Rate

Having many clients in the the jewelry industry means we process millions of jewelry-article video views, and can aggregate the above mentioned data for them into unique insights regarding video’s impact:

8% of Jewelry site visitors choose to view videos

As the following chart demonstrates nearly 8% of all the visitors to jewelry websites elect to view a video when included on the page, indicating a good level of adoption and engagement for the technology.

Product videos boost jewlery site conversions by 247%

Videos’ contribution to an increase in conversions is evident across the board for all categories of jewelry items, however to truly perceive just how dramatic this increase is, I’d like to offer this next chart, which demonstrates the relative increase in conversions video enhanced pages had in comparison with their non-video displaying versions:

Note the first column of the table is the baseline “100%” which indicates no change. The chart immediately makes it evident that even the smaller conversion increases represent a near DOUBLING of sales. For bracelets and pendants the situation is even more dramatic with sales increasing by 2.5-3.7 times what they were for the same products without videos.

On average across all items and all vendors the study proves videos boosted conversions by 247%. Adding product videos to jewelry websites has been found to more-than-double sales!

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Raw Data:

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peng-hui/3120170669

With a huge inventory of over 135,000 individual products, ranging from decorative items to clothing to personal care products, greeting cards and more, DollarDays is the leading online wholesaler helping smaller businesses compete against larger chain stores.

By offering a wide range of high-quality bulk products which can be ordered in small quantities (single-case minimum) at competitive prices, DollarDays enables smaller merchants to in turn offer competitive pricing to their customers without the need to invest in excessive inventory.

Marc Joseph and Kevin Ryan - Dollardays.com

The Need – User Experience and Exposure

With a huge offering of a wide range of products DollarDays’ need was two-fold.

1. First, as an evolved online retailer, the company understood the advantage of having videos for popular products. As Marc Joseph, President of DollarDays said, “With so many products to cover, and an ever-expanding product line, an automated solution was clearly the only option in terms of both sheer logistics and cost.”
2. Second, the company needed to make sure its many products were found. As DollarDays has an eclectic product offering, long-tail search terms are particularly effective in terms of video SEO. Therefore, the added value of properly indexing each product video for Google’s search algorithms and the associated video SEO were of particular concern for DollarDays.

The Solution - Treepodia’s Ecommerce Video Platform and Dynamic Video Sitemap

DollarDays originally opted for the Treepodia Enterprise package to create some 5,000 product videos as well as a Dynamic Video Sitemap to ensure these videos were being fully indexed by Google.

Once the success of this endeavor was realized, DollarDays upped their purchase to the Premium package for full coverage of their entire product line.

The Results – 74% Sales Increase

The addition of product videos had a huge and immediate effect, the most dramatic of which was a 74% increase in sales.

In terms of video SEO the positive effects were also quickly felt as all products were fully indexed by Google within a single day.

Most importantly, product specific long-tail search terms such as “bright pencil pouch” were yielding far higher results on Google, in many cases moving to first place.

Marc Joseph*, founder and president of Dollardays.com, is so pleased he gave us a quote for this case study:

“We’ve been incredibly pleased with the results we’ve received from the Treepodia solutions so much so, in fact, that within a month we’d already decided to expand the Treepodia solutions across our entire product offering. Not only was the ROI quick and concrete, but the implementation was surprisingly simple.”

Need to Download?

Download the case study here:
Dollar Days Boosts Video SEO Case Study

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Marc Joseph – Founder and CEO of Dollardays.com

• With more than 30 years in the retail and wholesale industry, Marc Joseph is the founder of DollarDays International. Joseph’s has helped to build some of America’s most known retail stores including Federated Department Stores, Crown Books, and Bills, a chain of variety stores headquartered in Jackson, Miss. He also helped ignite the dollar store trend as the General Merchandise Manager in Everything’s A Dollar stores chain. Joseph also started another innovative chain for EAD, The $5 & $10 Stores, locating the chain’s stores next to Everything’s A Dollar Stores to ensure traffic and offer price-conscious customers additional retail options. Most recently Joseph started a chain of hair salons in Arizona and built it up to 11 stores before selling them to devote full time to DollarDays.
  Mr. Joseph earned his Bachelor of Administration in Marketing with a Finance Minor from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Phoenix with his wife and four children.

We're all getting lazier - Product videos are great usability...

As a technology fan and a lover of all-things-web I find the growing body of research regarding  the impact the web is having on our intelligence absolutely riveting.

What impact is the web having on our intelligence?

There’s no clear answer to the question. Some pundits claim it’s making us dumber, while others claim it’s making us smarter. There are valid arguments for both claims, but whichever side you happen to take there’s little doubt the Internet and our experiences on the web are changing they way we think, process information and behave.

…And it’s probably making us lazier

Personally I’m unsure which side I’m on insofar as the debate regarding the web’s impact on our intelligence, but I’m definitely sure the web is making us lazier, and I’m not the only one that thinks so.

…And less attentive

Another interesting behavioral trend worth noting is the evident overall decrease in people’s attention spans, as evinced by broadcasters and advertisers alike. As we’re increasingly barraged by ever growing volumes of information and options of content to choose from, we’re clearly becoming less and less patient and satisfied with whatever it is we happen to be viewing/reading/browsing RIGHT NOW.

How does this relate to ecommerce and product videos?

Seeing as this is a video and ecommerce related blog some of you might be wondering how all this relates to our regular content. I promise you all will be revealed in a moment, but first please take a second to answer the following question:

Unless this post happens to be read by a statistically anomalous group of  detail obsessed individuals, I’m pretty sure most of you like myself chose option B, and that’s just the thing – seeing as how we’re all getting slightly lazier and less prone to attend to detail, we’d much prefer ecommerce sites present us the information we need to make a buying choice in the format and medium that makes it EASIEST for us to absorb. It’s good usability on their part, which is increasingly something we EXPECT.

Conclusion

The best marketing efforts don’t satisfy themselves merely with presenting customers with excellent information regarding their offers, they go the extra mile to ensure the information is presented in the way most likely to make the best impression with their audience. In the case of online shopping that means including VIDEOS for their product offerings.

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jorbasa/2476381678/in/photostream

No... Not really...

As we’ve repeatedly stressed here in the past the only way to build a sound, stable, and successful ecommerce business is through a continuous process of improvement based on meticulous, rigorous, and repeated A/B testing. Simply put, you need to adhere to these principles as if your livelihood depended on it (Wait a sec…, it DOES depend on it!):

• Always test your intuitions
• Never take anything for granted
• Test religiously

Here at Treepodia we live by our ability to tweak and test our client’s product videos, yet with monotonous regularity we come up with a little tweak that results in improvements that surprise even us. It’s a humbling experience because we’ve been at this game for a while, and sometimes we forget that what we don’t know, will always exceed what we do. The latest case-in-point was the result of a small tweak we did for the product videos on Toolking.com.

Introducing the Tool King

Started in 1978 as a small retail store in Denver Colorado, by 1983 the company was being recognized as an Inc 500 Company. In 2001 the company launched ToolKing.com, and in 2006 the site was recognized as a  Top 500 Retailer by Internet Retailer and as the top 28th fastest growing e-commerce company in the world.

Product video views increased by 100% thanks to this one small tweak

What we did

The change on Toolking’s videos was really minor. As you can see above all we did was add a nice juicy “Play” icon to the 1st frame of every video so that when visitors come to the page the player is displaying that icon as the video’s thumbnail.

Product video views double!

After an A/B test conducted over thousands of individual page views we found this small, seemingly inconsequential tweak massively increased visitors’ interactions with the player, resulting in more video plays, which in turn increased conversion rates and sales.

How big was the impact? you ask.

Well, overall adding the  icon boosted the ratio of video views per page view from 2.7% to 5.4% , or in other words, generated a 100% increase. Not an improvement anyone is likely to discount…

so if you want to greatly boost the number of views your product views are getting I warmly recommend adding a little triangle icon to the 1st frame of every video you’ve got published…

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Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucdaviscoe/5933842945

Marc Joseph and Kevin Ryan - Dollardays.com

This week it’s my great pleasure to post an interview we ran with Marc Joseph, founder and president of Dollardays.com, and Kevin Ryan, their vice president and general merchandise manager.

1. It would be great if you could share some details about your company’s history, goals and values

DollarDays is celebrating its 10th. Anniversary this year. It was started back in 2001 because we felt the Internet leveled the playing field and was going to be the next channel of distribution for wholesale and closeout products to small and medium sized businesses who had survived and were beginning to thrive against the chains in their areas. DollarDays became a public company in 2008 as America’s Suppliers, Inc. We now have over 2 Million registered businesses and average over 1,000 new businesses joining us each day, attracted by our over 140,000 general merchandise products, which are categories of items you would find in a Macy’s, Target or Wal-Mart. Customers find us because of price, assortment, minimum order is just 1 case of a product, convenience and our customer service provided by our 20 inside sales people.

We strive to be the premiere online supplier for the small guys to compete against the big guys. Our second largest customer base are non profit organizations like churches and schools, who buy products from us to support their causes. We just went through hats, gloves, underwear, toothpaste, blankets, etc., and now are supplying them with backpacks, school supplies, kid’s clothing, health and beauty supplies, etc. We reach out to non-profit organizations because with our buying power, it allows them to stretch their dollars and get more bang for their buck.

2. What initially kindled your the interest in ecommerce video? Where you actively seeking out an “ecommerce video” solution per-se, or was this simply part of the ongoing quest to improve the site and bring up conversions?

A little of both. We had been experimenting with video over the past year knowing that it was going to be an important part of SEO plans and goals. We partnered with a video company to produce several funny videos hoping they would “go viral” but as we quickly learned, this is a one in a million chance to happen. So, we decided to pull back until we found the right method and process for producing videos. When we found Treepodia we knew we had found a value proposition that would give us more bang for our buck by producing thousands of product videos that would rank in product searches, rather than hoping for the one BIG viral video to come along.

3. How did you first hear about Treepodia? What were the factors that led to the decision to choose our solution for your implementation?

Our VP Of Merchandising, Kevin Ryan, found Treepodia’s ad in a web design trade magazine and brought it to the management teams attention. We discussed it as a team and decided it was worth pursuing. Again, we saw Treepodia as a value proposition to get us started down the road to video production and success.

4. What’s the impact ecommerce video has had on your operation so far?

We are still early in the game with Treepodia, but so far we have been impressed with the results we have seen. We are extremely pleased with our video viewing rate, conversion rate and product placement in Google search engines. Early on we immediately started to see our product videos appearing on the first pages of Google searches. This just further helps us create the reinforcement in our product listings.

5. What have your ecommerce video experiences taught you? What would you recommend to smaller/less experienced vendors in this respect?

We have learned over the past year that video is an important part of our current and future merchandising and SEO strategy and that once we found the right partner, it was obvious that we the results are promising and successful. The key part is finding a way to create videos in a automated manner that requires little set up on behalf of the retailer. We all have many other projects and goals to accomplish and having a partner to do this on our behalf, allows us to concentrate on the merchandising, selling and customer service part of our business. The small cost of a service like Treepodia, has proven to be a successful partnership.

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Marc Joseph – Founder and CEO of Dollardays.com

• With more than 30 years in the retail and wholesale industry, Marc Joseph is the founder of DollarDays International. Joseph’s has helped to build some of America’s most known retail stores including Federated Department Stores, Crown Books, and Bills, a chain of variety stores headquartered in Jackson, Miss. He also helped ignite the dollar store trend as the General Merchandise Manager in Everything’s A Dollar stores chain. Joseph also started another innovative chain for EAD, The $5 & $10 Stores, locating the chain’s stores next to Everything’s A Dollar Stores to ensure traffic and offer price-conscious customers additional retail options. Most recently Joseph started a chain of hair salons in Arizona and built it up to 11 stores before selling them to devote full time to DollarDays.
  Mr. Joseph earned his Bachelor of Administration in Marketing with a Finance Minor from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He lives in Phoenix with his wife and four children.

Kevin Ryan – Vice President and General Merchandise Manager of Dollardays.com

• Kevin joined DollarDays in 2006 following a 20-year career in store management and merchandising. Ryan’s training was from 1986 to 1992 as a new store coordinator and store manager with TJ Maxx, and then as area manager for the Broadway Stores responsible for purchasing Christmas goods. From 1992 to 2001, Ryan was first, Customer Service Manager for Robinsons May, and then District Manager for GLIFX. Following this solid grounding in store management, from 2002-2006, Mr. Ryan worked sequentially for Hazelwood’s and Dillard’s, concentrating on the purchasing and merchandising functions.

Treepodia clients are Ecommerce Video Happy Campers

Over the past two weeks I’ve spent more time than I usually do following up and commenting on posts relating to the state of ecommerce video.

Encouragingly it’s becoming increasingly easy to find quality insights and perspectives relating to this space, not to mention the fact that occasionally you run into something really hilarious.

This post is nothing like that

Sorry… You won’t find any deep analysis of industry trends here, and if you’re looking for funky viral videos. I’m happy to oblige, but that isn’t why I have a smug grin on my face either.

Why am I grinning?

The reason I, and everyone else here, is in a particularly good mood today, is because we just got the report from the most comprehensive customer satisfaction survey we’ve ever conducted. After analyzing the individual responses we got back from the hundreds of online vendors using Treepodia. I’m happy to share the following figures:

Treepodia Ecommerce Video customer satisfaction

88% of Treepodia’s clients are pleased with the ease of integration, 93% of Treepodia’s clients are pleased with the quality of their videos and most importantly 95% were happy to report an increase in their conversion rates since implementing Treepodia on their site.

Now I realize that since this was an internal survey conducted by us and published on our company blog, it’s pretty unlikely this data will be syndicated by others, BUT no one here in the office is going to let that rain on our parade today…

: )

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/76099968@N00/557404028/in/photostream

“…Staying ahead is a tough job!”

Product Videos - Your way to say ahead?

In order to maintain their status as the cyberspace leaders of their industry the company is always under pressure to find new and innovative ways to market their products and therefore chose to partner with us in order to start a video marketing campaign.

The desire to move into videos was, according to Brian Mitchell – Paintball-Online.com’s marketing director, driven by his understanding that:

“People don’t want to read five paragraphs to learn about a product.
Listening to a video for 30 seconds tends to be an easier way of doing it.”

Treepodia solves the price paradigm

The challenge seemed to be pricing. Initial inquiries into doing production videos were proposed at prices ranging as high as $10,000 monthly!
Treepodia’s ecommerce video platform pricing provides a comprehensive, rapidly deployed and dynamic solution at a fraction of that cost and came backed with a commitment. Mitchell says:

“Treepodia guaranteed us the program would pay for itself each month.
They said if revenue generated from the videos wasn’t 4 times what we’re paying, the month is FREE.”

“…Video delivers great Return on Investment”

So far Paintball-Online has good reason to be pleased with their videos, because they deliver where it counts the most – at the bottom line:

“Videos bring conversions up: 3.26% of buyers who watched the videos made a purchase. That’s a 26% increase in conversion rates over customers who didn’t watch the video”

Overall the direct impact of Treepodia videos on the number of cash $$$ generated is above 1%.
More than enough to ensure we are meeting our guarantee to generate more than 4 times the cost of the videos in ROI every month…

SEO Benefits of Video:

Ecommerce Videos - Your path to SEO dominance

A further pleasant surprise for the team at Paintball-Online.com was the positive SEO impact Treepodia’s videos delivers: Every video generates between 200-250 visits per day from organic Googling of the company’s top keywords!

How about you?

If you’d like to have similar ROI on your site please contact us today!
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Image Credit: photo.lady2000

Are you ready to make Ecommerce Video your Conversion boost "Hole-in-One"?

Ecommerce is an industry dominated by numbers, and what speaks better to professionals accustomed to looking at numbers than a solid body of statistical evidence…

Ecommerce Video Conversion Rate increase stats across industries

After doing some number crunching on data we collected last quarter it good to have the proof to back out intuition that video works well for vendors who have deployed it on their product pages. Interestingly Video is one of the few strategies that seems to work well regardless of the vertical in which it is deployed.

We’ve seen dramatic increases in conversion rates throughout Q4 of 2010 in popular ecommerce categories as dissimilar as jewelry and sports!

The following chart gives an overview for the conversion rate increases witnessed for shoppers who watched video for some of our most popular verticals:

Ecommerce Video Conversion Rate increases across verticals

Here they are ranked by the order of increase in conversion rates seen:

• Gifts +113%
• Electronics +101%
• Jewelry +85%
• Home & Garden +43%
• Personal Care +14%

The numbers are based on an aggregation of data pulled from online retail sites using the Treepodia ecommerce video platform and the automated videos created by that very system.

With consistent increases in CVR being recorded each quarter, year in and year out, it’s safe to say the increase brought about by online videos is more than a trend. It’s the new reality of online marketing. In other words, Q4’s positive results prove once again that the addition of videos to ecommerce sites is one of the most effective sales tools online retailers can employ.

As one satisfied customer from the sporting goods industry – Lee Brown, Founder and Managing Director of Onlinegolf – had to say:

“…Our customers want to get a feel for what it is they’re buying. That’s where video comes into play. With Treepodia’s video solution we’ve seen an increase in CVR of up to 88% for items featuring video…”

If you want too want to dramatically increase the conversion rates for your ecommerce site sign up for one of our packages and have your entire product catalog covered with high converting ecommerce videos within less than 24 hours.

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Image Credit: Fevisyu

The return on investment for ecommerce videos - Rapid or long term?

As children we’re all taught the famous fable about the race between the turtle and the hare, and the moral of the parable is:

“Slow and steady wins the race”

It’s a turn of phrase with a great message, and the potential for being an effective business model.

With product videos, however, timelines are a bit different - they yield IMMEDIATE ROI

As you can see for yourself, online retailers see an immediate increase in CVR as soon as video is added to their product pages:

Ecommerce and product video's immediate ROI

But the race, as they say, is long. What happens to these improved conversion rates later?

Treepodia auto-optimization guarantees increasing ROI over time

Our ecommerce video solution, while it often shows immediate ROI in terms of increasing your online store’s conversion rates, has greater things in store for you when you decide to stick with it for the long run. The simple fact is that the longer you use our automated video platform, the greater your increase in CVR.

A/B testing guarantees positive results over the long haul

While the statistics garnered from our 200+ clients have proven that the addition of our automated videos generally generates an increase in CVR of between 30% and over 100%, overall the CVR individual customers experience increases gradually over time thanks to the inherent learning abilities of the Treepodia system.

How is that possible you may wonder? Shouldn’t results naturally trickle off over the long haul?

You would think so, but with the combination of continuous A/B testing and the automatic promotion of more successful video versions, over time, the Treepodia platform is able to learn from past shoppers’ behaviors, isolate top performing videos, show them more often, and as such, maximize each video view for the highest conversion rate possible.

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Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera