Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

Introduction

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.

TruffleShuffle.co.uk has done extremely well by incorporating Treepodia's video ecommerce platform

Introducing TruffleShuffle.com

Why They Came to Us

TruffleShuffle’s Managing Director and CEO, Pat Wood, explains that though the company was aware of the growing demand for online video to accompany fashion products, the cost was a huge barrier for them as a small company. However,

“Once we saw Treepodia, we didn’t think there was any point to look at anyone else. They did exactly what we wanted. The technology was perfect and the price was brilliant, so there really was no need to look at anything else.”

What Ecommerce Solutions did We Provide?

What Return on Investment (ROI) did Ecommerce Videos Provide?

Ecommerce Video does amazing things for jewelry

In Q4 of 2010, SilverShake.com saw an incredible 108 percent increase in conversion rates for products with Treepodia video – welcome to another of our series of ecommerce case studies. This time we’re looking into the results of online jewelry website, www.SilverShake.com, having implemented online video with Treepodia in May 2010.

Introducing SilverShake.com

SilverShake.com is an online sterling silver gemstone jewelry store, which prides itself on the variety, quality, value, and availability of its products. With 10 years of history and counting, and over 10,000 jewelry designs available, SilverShake has proven itself to be the go-to place for those seeking high quality jewelry at fair prices.

SilverShake.com

Why they came to us

SilverShake’s marketing director, Kfir Gershonowitz, realized that the best way to show his customers their products from afar (the company is based in Thailand) would be to use online video. Kfir was also aware of the increase conversion rates attributable to online video, as well as the increase in product visibility. He thought they ought to give Treepodia’s platform a try.

What Ecommerce video solutions did we provide?

Using our unique technology we created multiple video versions for each product, which allowed effective automated A/B testing of each video’s performance, so that we could choose which video produced the most optimal conversion rates for each product. SilverShake.com also added the video distributor auto-syndication service and the dynamic video sitemap.

What ROI did Ecommerce videos provide?

As mentioned earlier in this post SilverShake.com saw an incredible 108 percent increase in CVR for products that sported Treepodia videos. Moreover our Video Distributor service increased awareness to the site by automatically publishing all the retailer’s videos to popular video sharing sites. In addition, the Dynamic Video Sitemap has ensured SilverShake’s product videos are constantly indexed by Google, which has proven extremely helpful to the company’s Search Engine Optimization effort.

Juan Martiez recently published a cool post about Paintball-Online.com on Direct Marketing News. Paintball-Online is an e-commerce site that sells + 5,000 types of paintball related items. Apparently Paintball is big business…

“…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

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ll have noticed by now that ever so often I make a point of putting up a post dedicated exclusively to different aspects of ecommerce video ROI.

Today’s post is another one of those however, thanks to the kind cooperation and permission of our client Premiere Games Tables, this story goes beyond the usual aggregated stats, and gives a close and intimate perspective regarding the benefits this particular business reaped from having us add videos to it’s product pages.

Introducing Premiere Game Tables

But first a word of introduction is in order…

Since going live in 2009 Premiere Game Tables has quickly become the leading destination for those looking to create the ultimate game room. The site offers a truly impressive variety of pool, foosball, ping pong, air hockey and poker tables, not to mention a wide variety of dart boards and similar favorites. To cut a long story short – Premiere Game Tables is a one-stop-shop for creating your ultimate game room paradise.

Why did Premier Game Tables come to us?

Premiere Game Tables first approached us after the company’s president, Mr. Kirk Mathews, encountered our solution on another ecommerce site.

For Mathews there were two major reasons that Treepodia seemed like a good idea:

1. As an online-only business selling relatively big ticket items he knew only too well that giving browsers a better of the products would have a positive impact on conversions. Premiere Game Tables has always offered browsers extensive photographic coverage of its products, but Mathews and his team felt the added dimensions of video would bring the product display to a whole knew level.
2. Being online marketing experts, Premiere Game Tables’ managers were also aware of video’s important Search Engine Optimization value.

Eventually what helped seal the deal, according to Mathews, was:

”…The turn-key aspect of creating high-quality videos for our entire product catalog so quickly, using existing images and content was particularly attractive. Also their ability to host data and continually update the videos was a major selling point…”

What Ecommerce Video solutions did we provide?

We began working with Kirk and the Premiere Game Tables team half a year ago, in August of 2010. Initially the site integrated our Smart Video Platform, and shortly afterwards the team opted to add on our Dynamic Video Sitemap service.

What ROI did Ecommerce Videos provide?

Since integrating Treepodia’s automated smart video platform Premiere Game Tables has seen a significant jump in CVR (conversion rates). As the graph above show CVR has gone from 1.2% to 4% when a product video has been watched

Morevoer the addition of our Dynamic Video Sitemap service has ensured that all the site’s videos are indexed by Google leading to a massive increase in targeted SEO traffic. As Mr. Mathews puts it:

“…As soon as the XML video sitemap was created, Google was already indexing our videos. With almost every long-tail product-specific search term being indexed by Google, we’re now showing up on the first page with our highest converting search terms…”

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

For the large part conversion funnels are traditionally thought of has having 4 distinct phases. These are:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Consideration
4. Conversion

Skip after the break to see how video contributes to the performance of the metrics associated with each one of these steps

Video = Your Conversion Funnel Super Booster

Video as an “Awareness” booster

In the Awareness phase our goal is enter our target client’s consciousness. Before Awareness the client simply doesn’t know that we even exist. Metrics we’d normally track to monitor our performance at this phase are:

• Monthly Visits – as an indicator of how many visits we’re getting
• Visitors – as an indicator of how many actual people are coming to our site

Video can be very instrumental in boosting these stats. Here’s how:

1. Syndication – Video content lends itself easily to syndication. The abundance of generic and niche video portals existing on the web represent multiple opportunities for exposure both to the general audience and to narrower well defined ones.
2. Sharing – Video content is easy and fun to share. Giving visitors multiple easy opportunities to socially engage with rich-media content increases the chance that they become syndication agents for us, exposing us to their social network. Remember – every time a user clicks that Facebook “Like” button next to your video it’s immediately exposed to their entire network.
3. SEO 1 – Pages with “High Engagement Content” like videos, sound clips, etc. are reportedly more likely to attain better search rankings as search algorithms are believed to consider them having better content due to the rich engagement they offer visitors.
4. SEO 2 – Thanks to Google’s Universal Search Results display, where videos are guaranteed 1st page exposure, videos have become an opportunity to “cut to the head of the line” simply because less people are likely to have video content eligible for display there.
5. SEO 3 – Youtube is now ranking in as the 2nd most popular search engine. Ignoring video content is ignoring the opportunity to get exposure there.

Video’s contribution to the “Interest” phase

The Interest phase is where our client is drawn in and educated as to our offering. Metrics associated with this phase are usually focused around making qualitative measurements of our traffic:

• How many pages does the average visitor to our site browse through?
• How long is an average visit?

Videos contributions to this phase due to its advantages for presenting content are probably obvious, however its worthwhile listing them just to be sure we’re making the most out of our video content’s potential:

1. Multimedia Presentation – Video usually touches two senses simultaneously (vision and hearing), furthermore when bullet points are included in the video a further level of interaction is introduced as reading triggers different learning centers in the brain from hearing and seeing. The combined effect is a significant increase of the mental imprint made with our prospects, which translates directly into an increase in the “Average Time on Page” metric.
2. Multiple Images – Video offers an opportunity to display multiple angles of the product both physically and experientially. We can show not only what the product looks like from both front and back, but also how the product generates benefits for users in particular scenarios. In fact instead of counting on a single snapshot to captivate our audience we now have the opportunity to tell them a story. Again this goes towards boosting our “Average Time on Page”.
3. Video is easy to Absorb – The effort required to absorb video content is negligible compared to that of reading and browsing through images. Reduced fatigue coupled with more engaging experiences is likely to encourage visitors to dally longer on each page and visit more pages, thus driving up “Page Views Per Visit”.

Considering video? Consider this:

In this phase our prospects have already matured to a point where they’re interested enough in our product to consider making a purchase. A crucial metric at this is “Bounce Rate”, as every bounce represents a lost prospect.

Videos effect on the Consideration phase is similar to the effect it has at the Interest phase, with one important difference: at the consideration phase a prospect is already considered to be at the point where they’re making their purchasing decisions. Ensuring your videos contain exactly the right messaging required to close the deal is an important and profitable enterprise that can only be executed via a process of continuous improvement based on constantly A/B testing different video versions.

Interestingly the mere availability of video content on a product page has been found to boost conversions regardless of whether site visitors bothered to watch the video or not. The reason for this is thought to be grounded on the fact that the presence of video content on the page reflects positively on the vendor, increasing visitor’s trust in the site and encouraging them to do business with it.

The Money Time – VIDEOS IMPACT ON CONVERSIONS

For marketers and salespeople the Conversion is where the beef is. This is where the all the effort invested in the site hopefully finally pays off. Metrics associated with this phase are very directly related to the quality of the sale:

• Conversion Rate (CVR) – How many visitors/visits were we able to convert into sales?
• Average Cart Value – How much money are we making on average from every deal closed?

Video can be instrumental in improving Conversion Rates, and indeed insofar as Treepodia’s platform is concerned there’s a wealth of testimonials for this spanning multiple ecommerce niches. Insofar as the Average Cart Value is concerned videos’ chronological nature lends itself to presenting product specific up-sale opportunities for each and every product.

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Image Credit: Je.T.

Although I’ve often written here about how great our smart Video platform is, how it improves the user experience, increases conversion rates, and generally makes life better for everyone – Every marketing professional knows that in sales, words are only as valuable as the numbers behind them, or in other words:

“The bottom line is only as good as the bottom line”

After you’re done feasting your eyes on the bombshell below you might want to scroll down and check a few figures on how Video is impacting conversion rates for Online Fashion Retailers…

Oh the joys of writing about the Fashion Industry... : ) Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thehearttruth/2173468676

Fashion Industry Retailer’s Video Conversion Figures – Q1 2010

As the table and graphs below show, my assertions about the value of video for retailers are well backed by hard data:

Fashion Industry Retailer's Video Conversion Figures - Q1 2010

• “No Video CVR%”
  % of Unique Visitors to view a product page who could watch a video, but DIDN’T, yet still added the product to their cart.
• “Video CVR %”
  % of Unique Visitors to view a product page who DID watch video and added the product to their cart.

Video's Impact on Conversion Rates

CVR Improvement Due to Video

The most obvious fact one learns from the data is this:

Visitors who watch product pages videos convert more than twice as often then those who don’t.

This data is in line with similar case studies we’ve published in the past showing that presenting video as an option for shoppers improves CVR even when the customers don’t watch them!

Conclusion – Online Retailers Ignoring Video are leaving Money on the Table

Online retailers seeking to increase sales would do well to investigate adding video to their site today.

Some of the key points to think about are:

What’s the most cost effective method of adding video to the site?

What products and offerings should receive video treatment first?

How will the video be integrated into the site’s existing pages?

It’s important to remember that, although a few production videos might be great for retailers that only deal in a very limited number of products, any online retailer that moves tens or hundreds of products will be poorly served with this type of solution. Furthermore production videos have no dynamic aspect – once created they’re impossible to change or edit so if your porduct details change they basically become useless.

If you’re an online retailer with a large inventory interested in covering your entire inventory with dynamic self updating videos quickly and cost efficiently contact us today : )

Despite the fact this a “Company Blog” I usually try to keep our posts focused on tips, hints and news about ecommerce videos and related issues. Since launching the blog about a month ago we’ve listed tips for using video to increase holiday season sales, debated how to measure the ROI of Social Media, listed video slideshow tools anyone can use for free and covered a whole bunch of similar topics. What I’ve avoided doing is blowing our own horn – I prefer having others sing our praises, and over the past week it seems this is exactly what’s happening…

Not adding video to your site is like Burning Money | Image credit: purpleslog

Electronics retailer sees conversions leap with automated videos

A week ago InternetRetailing’s Sarah Clark posted a story about the experiences ElectricShopping has had with ourecommerce video solution. Sarah reports:

“Electric Shopping has added Treepodia’s automated product videos to its site and has seen a growth in conversions of an average of 75% among shoppers who watch the videos compared with those who don’t, with increases peaking at 200% for some products.”

Sarah’s interviewed Electric Shopping’s CEO Rob Levy about his team’s experiences with video prior to using our solution:

“Previously we had videos for a very small percentage of our product catalogue because we simply couldn’t produce them quickly enough. On top of that, we had no way to measure their performance so we had no idea what benefit, if any, they provided our business.”

Rob’s final quote in Sarah’s article is the type of feedback we enjoy hearing the most:

“Because of the A/B testing and performance metrics Treepodia supplies, we can now see how many times someone looks at a particular product page, whether they viewed the video, and whether they purchased — and we definitely see a higher conversion rate among those visitors who watch the videos“

Not a week went by since Sarah published her story and we received permission from another client to list their experiences in our latest press release:

Sales on BedBathStore.com rise 69% with automated product videos

Yesterday our PR Nancy Hill published a press release based on the permission we got from Mike Reichman, COO of BedBathStore.com, to quote their case study as part of our publicity. In the release Reichman speaks of the impact our solution has had on BedBathStore’s sales:

“In just two months after we began using Treepodia’s automated online product video platform, our e-commerce sales of products that include video rose 69%. In addition, customer conversion was up as much as 300% among those who viewed the product videos.”

Reichman goes on to explain that his team elected to use our solution because:

“It was the only alternative we found that could cover hundreds of items quickly and with relatively low cost, and that also provided ongoing measurement and optimization”

Afterword

I don’t use this blog to tell you how wonderful we are because with posts like the ones I quoted above readily available online, I don’t really need to.

The question you need to ask yourself right about now is why you haven’t added videos to your product listings yet, and whether you can really afford to leave the revenue these will provide you unclaimed. Our pay-per-view ecommerce video solution can be up and running on your site by this time tomorrow.

What are you waiting for?

Contact us for details now…

Afterword

A few days after posting this I was notified that Shaun Ryan of SLI Systems did an interview with Treepodia client Lee Brown of Online Golf. During the interview Lee shares that people who view a video on their site are 85% more likely to buy than people who don’t. In Shaun’s words:

This is one of the strongest endorsements for online video I’ve ever seen

The original post on the SLI Systems blog is here: http://www.sli-systems.com/blog/2009/10/viewing-videos-increases-sales.html

I recently read an excellent article titled “Lights, Camera, Action” by Newzgeek‘s David Shamah. Published on Israel’s leading English languge publication, the Jerusalem Post, the article’s basic premise was that:

Thanks to the Internet, everybody and his cousin can now star in his own production, using techniques straight out of the Hollywood playbook

Slide, Animoto and Masher – online slideshow tools

Animoto Online Video Slideshow Solution (image credit: mobology)

David then goes on to introduce a number of the online tools available for people who want to transform their photos into smart-looking videos accompanied by music or narration. David mentions Slide and Animoto, which I was familiar with, and Masher, which I’d never heard of before and found to be still slightly buggy.

What if I don’t like online services?

I think that although David’s suggestions are excellent, some people might find working exclusively with an online service slightly frustrating, especially if/when connectivity and speed are an issue. Personally, if your interested in making your own video slideshows, I’d recommend looking at Picasa, Google’s cool photo editing tool which is backed by a photo sharing service of the same name.

Picasa as a video slideshow tool

Picasa has a built in video tool that has excellent support for stitching photos together into a slideshow, and uploading it onto Youtube. This slideshow I created last month for Semantic Web startup Semantinet was done exclusively with Picasa. Check it out to get an impression of what you can expect:

So what are the pros and cons of using Picasa?

The pros are:

• It’s quick and easy to learn and use
• Ample support is available online via Picasa help forums
• You can connect your Picasa and Youtube uploads to your Gmail account (if you haven’t got a Gmail account yet, now’s the time to get one…)
• It’s completely FREE!

The cons are

• Picasa’s simplicity also means you’re offered rather limited customizing options
• Unlike with Animoto and Slide, you have to supply your own music (a great resource for this is FreeMusicArchive.org).

How scalable are these solutions for ecommerce?

If you’re a smal scale operation with only a few products in your store, and you’re only interested in testing what effect slideshow videos can have on your conversions rates, Picasa is a great tool to use and I’d definitely recommend it. For all other purposes however, Picasa still requires far too much human labor to make it effective. Serious vendors are probably best served by automated video solutions like our own, even for the pilot phase.