For the vast majority of products successful online sales are heavily correlated to the quality of the images and video on the site.

It follows that successful and efficient management of your website’s product images can be a major contributor to your site’s success. As we’ve listed here before, it’s definitely a critical factor in determining the quality of your product videos.

It used to be Image Management was exculsively the realm of photographers and graphic designers, however with more tools being made available for free and online use, this is no longer the case.

Today any ecommerce professional so desiring can efficiently, manage, edit and work collaboratively, with his or her website’s product images, using only free tools, and more specifically Google’s Picasa and Picasa Web Albums service.

The underlying logic for selecting Picasa is this:

It’s Free, excellent, and hooks up to a reliable backup…

Picasa is "built-in backup"

Managing and arranging images

Picasa Web tools is a full featured photo management solution backed by a powerful and FREE software suite, both owned and maintained by Google.

There are a bunch of things you can do with your photos using only Picasa’s web interface:

• Organize and label photos and albums
• Set sharing rules and notifications
• Provide geo-location for images
• Edit images
• Collaborate with others

Picasa is great for product image gallery management

Collaborative work

Picasa’s full integration with all of Google’s other products, and the availability of Commenting for the images on the web, makes collaboration easy and intuitive:

Editing images

There are many types of tasks you might want to accomplish with your images, but it’s safe to bet Resizing and Cropping are going to be at the top of the list…

Resize/crop:

Identifying site image size
Start by identifying what size you need to crop/resize your photos to.

If you’re not sure go to any product page, right-click on the main product image, and save-as. Now check your downloaded image’s properties to identify it’s size. Alternatively if you’re browsing with Chrome you can simply right-click and select Inspect element to reveal the product image size via the Metrics tab:

Identifying image size with Chrome

Entering resize values
When resizing match your site’s smallest value (width or height) to that of the edited image:

Resizing product images with Picasa

Cropping
Set your crop area by dragging or setting constraints for shape and size:

Cropping images with Picnic

Whatever edit’s you make don’t forget to Apply and Save your work before closing down Picnic

Uploading to your site

An important tip to remember for keeping your photos in order, is to associate all the images for a particular product or category in a single folder. This works well when you want to batch download photos for work on your local machine:

The ability to download entire albums at a time is a HUGE time saver

…and just as well when you want  to upload/update the photos on your site (see below).

Naming and locating images 
For extra SEO value it’s well worth your while to give all your product images meaningful names (i.e. avoid file names like prod-123.jpg, instead go for descriptive names like professional-makeup-remover.jpg). Finding image folders to accomplish tasks like this is easy via Picasa’s desktop solution:

Locate your product album by right clicking the album name in your desktop version of Picasa, and selecting Locate on Disk

Tracking product photos is easy

Easy upload
Uploading and updating images to your website’s backend is now simply a matter of following these steps:

1. Access your product’s Image Management console via your shop’s backend (shown here: Magento – details on how to manage Magento product pages can be found here)
2. Browse to find the correct image folder
3. Select the images you want upload
4. Click Open
5. Click Upload and save your changes

Updating product photos is easy when they're kept in order

Cool Bonus!

It also enables you to take advantage of Picasa’s video creator to make videos for your products and upload them to Youtube:

Picasa enables you to make product videos for Youtube pubilcation

More on that here:

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/

Let’s examine that for a moment and understand how that can affect the effectiveness of your product videos and conversions:

Case A – Product Video is presented as an overlay

Product Video - Player launched as an Overlay

Say you had 100 people coming onto your site, of those 100 only about 70 will click on any link on your homepage.

Since I’m in an optimistic mood today let’s say you’re lucky and they clicked on an actual product you’re touting on your homepage – one of your best promoted items.

Now on the product page, they all choose to click to display the video overlay. Drop the 30% and we’re already down to less than half or your original audience – 49 users (100*0.7*0.7).

Since your video is an overlay users are now required to click  once more to return to the page. We’re now at 34 users (100*0.7*0.7*0.7), and we haven’t even clicked the add-to-cart button…

Case B – Product Video is presented on page

Product Video - Player is embedded On-page

We start this scenario with the same 100 people coming to your site. Again we’ll take the optimistic approach that the majority of them chose to view one of your homepage-promoted products, so again reaching the product page we have 70 potential buyers, however now things to look slightly different…

In this scenario the video player is integrated into the actual design of the page, so clicking to play it doesn’t launch a new overlay but simply starts the video player – we don’t need to treat this click as one that costs us users.  Moreover since no overlay was launched, no click is required to return to the product page.

In this scenario we’re still at 70 users AFTER the video was watched – just over double where we were in the example above!

 

Automatically generated videos are essentially reliant on two major factors:

1. The Video Template
2. The Product Data Feed

Both factors can be tweaked and adjusted, and every adjustment will have some degree of impact on the video’s conversion rate

Tweaking The Video Template

A customized video template is “the skin” given to the information contained in the website’s feed. Creating the right video template by ensuring the look & feel of the videos match the client’s overall site style (as well as the general industry), is a critical factor in terms of success.

Product video templates should match the brand

Ideally a video template should match the brand’s guidelines and values as closely as possible, and integrate seamlessly with the website’s design. From a visual perspective all the following should be taken into consideration when creating the video template:

• Company logo
• Tagline
• Atmosphere images
• Existing video assets

Providing good design assets is all it takes to get your video template to match your brand

Well branded video templates increase buyer confidence and encourage more sales.

A video template can be tweaked and made to match the brand values not only visually, but also from the auditory aspect as well. Video templates can be customized as follows:

• What music will your soundtrack have?
• What sex is your narrator?
• What language and accent will you use?

Note that although normally the initial choices regarding video templates are made based on a vendors gut feeling of what will work for his audience, but truly leveraging a website’s video template for maximum conversions requires accurate A/B testing of different template variations.

Optimizing Your Product Video’s Data Feed

Automated product videos are generated from your website’s product catalog data feed, hence the quality of the generated videos, and the positive impact they have on customer engagement and conversion, depends heavily on the feed’s quality. A good data feed will include as many of the following as possible:

• Several different high resolution images of the product
• Descriptive statements including product specifications and classifications
• Catch phrases and marketing statements about the company
• Special offers
• Price
• Customer ratings and reviews
• Existing video footage

A few small tweaks to your website’s feed, based on the aforementioned recommendations, can quickly improve the performance and conversion rates for your automated videos.

Are Your Site's Videos Hidden From Google?

If you have video content on your site & you’re not actively exposing it to the Google, you might find your video investment is not doing all it can for you.

Exposing your videos to the major search engines is an effective, almost immediate way to boost your SEO efforts. That’s because all of the search engines place a higher value on pages with video content, and grant video results a guaranteed slot at the top of search results. Your video content is an opportunity to “cut to the head of the line” of the search results because usually the amount of video results competing for your keywords is only a fraction of what exists in total.

Why you should actively submit your video content

While it’s true Google crawls your site on a regular basis, that doesn’t mean your video content is being picked up in an efficient manner. You need to do your part to stay ahead.

How to test if your video content is picked up by Google

To determine how you’re site’s doing today, you can easily assess your current video indexing status in Google Video by typing: “site:MySiteName.com” (replace with your site’s URL)  into the search box (see the example in the image at the top of this post). If the number of results you receive is less than the number of videos on your site, you have your answer – some of your content is not being picked up by the search engine.

Luckily for you we have a solution for you:

Treepodia’s Dynamic Video Sitemap Service

Our Dynamic Video Sitemap is automatically generated for all your product videos, so that you can effectively feed descriptive information about your video content, such as video title, description, location, duration and more, to the major search engines, which in turn makes it easier for end-users to find what they’re looking for and come to your site to get it

Like the videos we create, the Dynamic Video Sitemap is also updated automatically so that all new video content, including new products and updates of your existing videos, is always transparent to the search engines. Read on after the break to learn just how effective our Dynamic Video Sitemap is.

Onlinegolf.co.uk Google Video presence after submission by our Dynamic Video Sitemap

Our Dynamic Video Sitemap is a fantastically effective service, as witnessed by our client OnlineGolf:

Within 24 hours of implementing the Dynamic Video Sitemap they went from zero video results in Google Video to 1,560 video results (i.e. their entire product catalog).

Thanks to our Dynamic Video Sitemap Online Golf leaped from zero Google Video visibility to full coverage of their 1,560 product catalog videos in 24 hours

Want Google to find your videos too?

Contact us and we’ll make this happen.

Even in this down economy ecommerce as a whole has continued to rise over the past year. Online retail behemoth Amazon reported revenue of $15 billion, up from $12.5 billion for the same period a year ago according to the Knowledge@Wharton article “Fit for the Holidays: Amazon is Shaping Up and Shipping Out.”:

“Even though the U.S. Census Bureau notes ecommerce accounts for only 3.6% of total retail sales in the country — up from 1% in 2001 — online purchases grew 2.2% in the second quarter of this year, while total retail sales fell 0.4%.

“What’s startling is not the magnitude of ecommerce sales relative to overall retail sales, but the growth rate,” says Marshall Fisher, professor of operations and information management at Wharton.”

Frankly I’m amazed online purchases still only account for just 3.6% of all retail sales. On the other hand that’s great news because as an industry it means we have a lot of growing to do…

Santa driving Vespa's sales

Ecommerce sites expected to reach $45 Billion online this holiday season

According to Forrester Research, this holiday season American online retail sales are expected to reach $45 billion – an 8% increase from last year.

“Much of the growth can be attributed to improvements in the online shopping experience in recent years. In fact, ecommerce has come of age to such an extent that the lines between online and offline shopping are blurring.”

Why product videos are helping increase online revenues

Product videos are considered an important contributor to this growth and to the blurring of the distinction between online and offline shopping. Retailers are using video to enhance online shopping experiences by adding new engagement dimensions that help shoppers get a more tangible feeling for the products their looking for, which increases their sense of security and comfort about the item, moving them to make purchases more often.

By virtue of being mixed media videos simulataneously address the needs of different types of consumers:

• Voice-over narration attracts auditory learners, who absorb information best when hearing it.
• Visual cues such as bullet point slides work well with visual learners, who absorb information best when seeing and reading it.

Over the past two years we’ve seen all our clients, regardless of industry, consistently increase their ecommerce conversion rates significantly by adding video presentations to their product pages.

How to get the most out of your ecommerce videos this holiday season:

What follows are a few ideas we thought about over here at Treepodia that’ll help you increase your conversion rates and drive more sales this holiday season. Please feel free to add you own ideas, tips and pointers in the comment section of the article.

1. Focus – Use video to promote your holiday season’s top sellers

Limiting your focus to the seasons biggest sellers will ensure you make the most out of your video investment in the time frame available. You can add videos for other products when the holiday hubbub is over.

2. Fun – Dress your videos up for the holidays

You can create a more engaging, fun and seasonal shopping experience for your customers by giving your videos that special holiday flair:

• Adding the sound of jingling bells
• Showing a wreath-like trim around the edges
• Having a little elf present your product’s benefits.

3. Promote your promotion

Make sure you use all video’s interaction dimensions to convey your message. State your item’s promotion in the video’s narration and sign off with a slide about it at the end.

4. Happy Holidays Everyone!

Everybody likes receiving seasonal greetings. Take the opportunity, like me, to thank your visitors and add a personal holiday greeting message to your video : )

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.

Don’t mind me,
I’m just walking back and forth on your screen…

Don't mind me, I'm just walking back and forth on your screen...

Problems of Scale

There is a catch however: to maximize effectiveness you need to invest in creating a unique video of your model walking and talking while demoing EVERY item in your catalog. This is fine if you have a store that only sells a few items, but becomes highly impractical for any store that sells tens, hundreds, or thousands of items. The solution isn’t “scalable”.

Another scale related issue is the ratio between your model’s size and your product’s size. If your selling handheld items which are significantly smaller than a human being, your product would show up near invisible in comparison to your model’s body. Definitely a case in favor of having a talking head instead of a full body.

What to do? What to do?

I recently heard a pod cast by Jennifer’s PracticalEcommerce.com associate Kerry Murdock, who conducted with Faculte.com’s CEO Maher Hakim.

Maher advocates approaches that I tend to believe are more effective than the spokesperson model:

“Don’t spend a lot of money on producing the video… you can create really nice video by stitching together some photos & then putting in some music and audio and narration on top of that. It looks and feels like a video to the end user”

This is precisely what our ecommerce video solution does in an entirely automated fashion: In a nutshell we create product videos directly from an etailer’s XML, with little or no human involvement at all (narration still requires it). The automation of the process enables us to cover/handle an ecommerce’s entire catalog with video within 24 hours. Our low production costs also mean we can offer our solution on a Pay-Per-View basis that guarantees vendors see ROI for their videos.

Furthermore, we don’t simply create a single video for each product, but a few, for which we then run automated A/B testing for to measure optimal conversions – perpetually dropping the less effective versions.

We’ve learned with our own clients, that boosting product listings with video this way increases conversion rates by anything from 35% (for eyebuydirect.com) to over 300% (for certain product pages within Forzieri.com‘s site).