Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

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

Fasion 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:

Fasion 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 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 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.

Recently I ran across a post titled “Is Your Video A Vehicle Or A Destination?” on the ReelSEO blog, which I frequent regularly as it is, in my opinion, one of the finest resources online for following the video marketing scene. This particular post got me thinking about the lingo around video, and people’s expectations of what video should be able to do for their businesses.

The Viral Video Grail

The premise of the post is, quite rightly, that the buzz around video-for-marketing these days tends to focus on what is commonly described as “viral videos” – videos that due to their amusing, shocking, sexy, or silly nature, tend to spread from one viewer to the next via various sharing mechanisms (email, social media, collaborative bookmarking etc.).

A point worth considering is that “Silly”, “Shocking” or “Sexy” might not be right for your business – The following “Afro Ninja” video from Ebaumsworld has had over 8,000,000 views on YouTube, and while there’s no arguing that it’s a funny 18 second clip, I doubt it’s very useful for selling anything besides slapstick humor…

Is the Viral Video Quest right for your business?

It seems that too much attention many businesses, large and small alike, are giving marketing video is focused on the quest to create THE video, that singular masterpiece of shareable genius that will spread through the net like wildfire through the collaborative efforts of the enthusiastic masses. Little thought is given to the following facts:

1. Just as with any other form of advertising – the campaign is not a goal unto itself. It’s a means to an end. A million hits on Youtube might be great, IF you can harness them to push SALES.
2. These videos are extremely difficult to manufacture and their “viral” component is nearly impossible to predict. The sad truth is that most of the lucky mavericks fortunate enough to have created a video that “went viral” were one shot wonders who were unable to recreate their success.
3. The investment and time spent on attempting to create a viral video will yield a much safer and more predictable ROI when allocated to enriching product listings with video.

Any knight will tell you it's nice to have a steady supply of ale while questing for The Grail

Fame – it’s a good thing.

The thing is, it’s not a goal that suits every business equally – “Too much of a good thing” applies here too…

A small or medium business doesn’t necessarily need millions of video views and is probably ill equipped to deal with the publicity Tsunami that might follow.

What your business needs is to reach targeted audiences and achieve sales conversions in a measurable and consistent fashion. The ability to then recreate this process is infinitely more precious than any singular publicity burst.

In short:

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to some occasional risk taking, and I certainly respect creativity.

If you’ve got a great idea for an easy-to-produce video that you feel has the potential of exploding online and making you rich overnight – give it a shot!
It’s worth it just for the sake of not denying yourself the joy of pursuing your dream. BUT…

Do yourself a favor and don’t focus ALL of your business’ video marketing efforts around this project – especially if you don’t have a huge budget.
The data proving the positive effect simple product videos will have on your bottom-line is readily available online. ReelSEO and others have covered this subject often.

How often have you won the lottery?

Getting your video to go Viral might be like winning the lottery.
Have you won many lotteries lately?
Why not creating content that actually sells while you wait…

Image credit: Zack Sheppard

This morning I read a great guest post on InternetRetailing by Sheila Dahlgren, senior director of marketing at Adobe Scene7.

Sheila explained the virtues of interactive videos and gave a few examples of vendors already using this technology:

…ONLINE dressing room KnickerPicker allows users to select models and lingerie styles, then zoom and spin to see all angles. Consumers choose the model which most closely resembles their body type to view from all angles how different styles of lingerie would look…

…US retailer JCPenney offers customers the ability to view a runway show and interact by grouping clothing styles, fast forwarding and viewing using a 360-spin and a zoom function.

…AN entertaining example of interactive video use can be seen on French mattress retailer Matelsom’s website. Consumers can select two models — people of all different shapes and sizes are available — and see how their chosen mattress performs when their models sit on, jump onto, or lie down on the mattress. This replicates the in-store experience and illustrates what people do (or would like to do!) when considering buying a mattress.

No doubt Interactive Video is cool

It’s obvious this type of interactivity is fun and cool. I’m even pretty sure the metrics are there to prove it gives ROI.

BUT… Interactive Videos are complicated too

Interactive videos are labor intensive custom tailored solutions that require the involvement of specialists. This means they have relatively long time-to-market, little scalability and high costs. As the examples Sheila provided prove they are currently a solution accessible only to the “big boys”.

Is the effort really worth it?

Is the extra effort justifiable?

Considering “traditional” video enhancements for product pages are a proven method for double digit conversions increases, is the additional expense required for interactive video already justified?

Let me elaborate:
This morning I read on InternetRetailer that Shoeline.com reported a 44% increase in conversions on product pages enhanced by video. Sheila herself reports in her post that eBags.com saw 50%-139% increases in conversion rates for video enhanced pages.

These figures are very much in line with what we at Treepodia have been witnessing with our own clientèle (ice.com, diamond.com, eyebuydirect.com, etc.).

My point/question is:

• We know our clients getting these benefits from using our low cost, automated product video solution.
• We guarantee it can cover a vendor’s entire product catalog within 24 hours from initial contact.
• The effort required on the vendor’s part is nothing more than to supply us with their catalog’s XML.

When all this is taken under consideration, can the huge extra costs required for interactive video, in terms of time, money and complexity, be justified by substantially better performance metrics over “regular” or automated product video?
Image credit: http://bit.ly/4e9I3I

Smart Video Gallery

A user-friendly interface that automatically chooses the highest converting videos on your website, and presents them as a video gallery (See it live):

The player from Forzieri.com's "Smart Video Gallery"

3D Video Gallery

An advanced design and functionality of the smart video gallery (See it live):

3D Video Gallery on Askingtv.com

Smart Video Banners

This application converts your videos to smart banners, determines which work better, and then promotes those with the highest performance. Smart video banners can be integrated anywhere on your website as well as external sites.

See a demo

Automatic Cross Sell Videos

These videos increase your average order and can be displayed either in the shopping cart pages or within the product pages themselves. You can provide us with your own cross sell information or, if you prefer, let our system automatically learn and determine your shoppers’ behavior in order to offer them the most effective, highest converting cross sell videos.

See a demo