I’m pretty excited about this month’s showcase because, it features our first South East Asian client, Ramburishop.com - The online shop  for award winning manufacturer natural Thai Spa and skin care products Ramburi. Moreover Ramburi’s videos are our latest player version, which, for the first time, introduces advanced interactivity via a “Share”  button that’s integrated into the player.

Ramburishop.com

Ramburi's MD - Mr. Daniel Frick

Ramburi Thai Spa and Skin-care products

Founded in 2002 on a basis of natural remedy recipes that were common practice in the home and village of Founder Khun Kannipa Shim , Ramburi has grown, under the management of Swiss born Managing Partner Daniel Frick, into an international brand exported to over 20 countries.

It’s a textbook case of synergistic fusion between ancient wisdom and modern management practices – a sustainable business model that demonstrates how eco-friendly practices can be great business…

Why video?

Ramburi was seeking a method to showcase the carefully chosen natural ingredients that compose each of their paraben free lotions and oils, and video was the obvious choice.

Video integration embedded on page with share button in player

The Integration

Full-screen player featuring built-in "Share" button

Ramburi’s online shop is Magento based, and the integration process was used as a test case for our new Magento plugin (more on that coming soon…).

The player features our brand new in-player “Share” button, that further enhances video value to site visitors and owners.

The new player also introduces additional improvements such as – Full-screen viewing (see left, and click image to go to the product page), and an “Add to cart” button (not used in this integration)

Results

I asked Mr. Frick to give me his feelings about the integration – here’s what said:

“…We’re very pleased with the Treepodia videos – The results greatly exceeded our expectations insofar as the quality of the generated videos is concerned. Working with you guys, even while testing your pilot module has been perfectly simple and easy. I think that most importantly the value per the investment is phenomenal!…”

Designed to Boost your Sales

The new player was designed from the ground up to help increase sales and engagement on your ecommerce site.

Call-to-Action directly from your videos!

The player can be customized to display of a variety of “Call-to-Action” buttons.

You can have it show “Add to Cart“, “Related Products“, “Go to Product“, etc.  Enabling your audience to act directly from the video reduces steps to purchase and drives up conversion rates.  

Capitalize on Social Engagement

It’s no secret video is the most popular, shared, and interacted-with form of online media.

Users can Share your videos!

The new Treepodia player is designed to help you capitalize on video’s popularity by enabling your audience to share the video page directly from the player.  Configure your player to enable users to click-to-share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many major video sharing portals as well.

Users may sometimes be reluctant to share a product page, but sharing a video is a much likelier proporsition, and with Google increasingly relying on social indicators to determine pages’ search ranking, the extra shares you’ll be getting can help you get the rankings you need!

Product Videos EVERYWHERE

The new player is fully HTML 5 compatible ensuring you full coverage on all devices.

iPhone and iPad Friendly

With increasing percentages of users opting to surf the web on mobile devices it’s become an imperative that your videos display equally on all devices. Given Apple’s pricing it’s safe to say that Apple device owners are, for the large part, better of economically speaking, and more comfortable with technology in general. In other words, they’re a great demographic to sell to, and with HTML 5 compatible video you’re more likely to…

Play it YOUR Way

One of the requests we’ve heard often from our clients is a desire to customize the video player. We’re glad to announce that the wait is over .

The most customizable product video player ever!

Your new product video player offers customization options that far exceed anything we’ve made available before. Now not only can you select player button, mode of integration, and size, but you can also tweak the player’s interface, color scheme, and even elect to have a”chromeless” player (i.e. show no player or controls at all)

Thank YOU

The new Treepodia player is the result of the dedication and efforts of  the talented boys-n-gals of our development team (…thanks guys!).

BUT

We could have never embarked on the journey that brought this player into being without the ongoing support and priceless feedback provide by YOU – our beloved clients, so for everybody here at Treepodia I’d just like to say THANKS, and keep on rocking… 

August this year will mark 50 years since computer science visionary Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, or “Lick” as he was better known, penned, in an (D)ARPA installation, a series of memos that changed the world.

Lick envisioned a global interconnected computer network through which everyone could access data and programs from anywhere. This isn’t only the first recorded vision for what would later become the Internet, it’s also the first recorded description of computers as not only calculating machines, but as joyful tools of expression, inspiring creativity, and opening a gateway to a new age of globally accessible information.

Online Video – the early years

In 1990 Sir Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web when he created the first Web Server, Browser and Web pages. Three short years later, on June 24th, 1993 a performance by Severe Tire Damage became the first live gig on the Internet. Yes that’s right:

The Web’s 1st video was Streaming-Screaming-ROCK!

"SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE HOUSE BAND OF THE INTERNET"

This was mainly done as a proof of concept “…that technology can be both loud and annoying“.

The story is that one of the bands members just happened to be Mark Weiser,  the chief scientist at Xerox PARC. It was his suggestion that a broadcast of the band’s performance  be used to test Internet based live streaming, a technology that was then undergoing development at the site.

1995

The first ever streaming soundtracks on the internet were featured on Word Magazine, when they launched in 1995. Soon after RealNetworks arranged another one of the earliest Internet audio events – They broadcasted a baseball game between the Yankees and Seattle Mariners

1996-2000 – The Player Wars

Then in the beginning of 1996, Microsoft developed the ActiveMovie media player, that allowed streaming media and included a proprietary streaming format.

In 1997 RealPlayer released their own streaming application.

Despite the technologies availability the predominant 56k dial-up connection speeds of the time made video delivery still too slow for the availability of  players to revolutionize the industry.

In 1999 Apple debuted its own streaming media format - Quicktime 4. It was later adopted on websites along with RealPlayer and Windows Media streaming formats.

2000

The year 2000 sees the earliest form of use of online video for political purposes. JibJab’s choice to use animation for their satire was a stroke of genius. Not only was it a natural and time honored tradition to render satire in animation but also it meant that compromises could be made on the frame-rate, making download and playtimes acceptable even on the slow connections of the time:

2002

The lack of a predominant format required users to download all the respective applications for streaming to their computer – an untidy and wasteful situation that was mostly rectified starting in 2002 with the mass adoption of Adobe Flash as user’s streaming technology of choice.

2004

As per Andrew Baron, 2004 was an important year for online video:

“…US political campaigns often begets online trends and with the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s campaign took the online world by storm not just by chatter, but because micro donations became significant and challenged traditional means of hitting up only the established elite.

Coinciding with the election of 2004 was the prevalence of broadband speeds, and with half of American homes reaching better than dial-up transfer rates, along with all the noise created by the blogs and pundits of the internet, an audience was born, capable and accustomed to online payments (i.e. market potential) and finally able to watch video, on demand by the masses…” (http://dembot.com/post/310798115/a-decade-in-history-of-online-video)

Andrew is probably one of he best qualified people to make this type of statement with any validation. In October that year he established Rocketboom, “the longest running online video show to date” . He’s also widely recognized as being one of the world’s first vloggers.

2005

Valentine’s day of 2005 was the day chosen to establish the company that has since become synonymous with online video. Indeed some resources count the history of Online Video from this point, ignoring everything that preceded it.

In case you still need me to spell it out, Valentine 2005 was Youtube‘s birthday, and in April of the same year their first videos came online. Remember this?

What next?

I’ll continue this history in future posts. Meanwhile if you’d like to learn more about the history of the Web’s first 50 years checkout this:

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Sources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_video
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media#History
3. http://dembot.com/post/310798115/a-decade-in-history-of-online-video
4. http://blog.vidcaster.com/post/7877586117/great-moments-in-online-video-history
5. http://www.sharethrough.com/2011/02/a-brief-history-of-interactive-branded-online-video

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nesster/5046382941

If you’ve been following the buzz in Online Marketing circles these past two weeks you’ll have noticed the big story on everybody’s mind is Google’s gradually increasing reliance and integration of social data into search results. In case you’re wondering what that means in plain English -

Google is now customizing our search results based on data it’s pulling from our personal social circle, and other personal indicators it has about us

Variations in search are nothing but new – we’re probably well aware of the variance in results for queries between google.com and any of Google’s nationally localized sites (i.e. google.co.uk, google.de, etc.), but this new step is something beyond that. Google is now serving each of us with a unique set of results based on what it knows about us PERSONALLY.

A really simple example of how this influences results is below. The screenshot on the left is Google’s search results for my surname, from a browser session where I was signed in. You’ll note my own LinkedIn profile ranks in at #6. On the right hand side I conducted the same search without being signed in. My LinkedIn profile is absent from the results:

Personalized Google search

So What?

Many of the pundits writing about this recent change are taking offence at what they view as a serious offence against their privacy. While I feel it’s not my place to weigh in on the moral aspects of this change, I will say I believe Google doesn’t really have a choice, if it wants to retain it’s position as the leader in RELEVANT search results. There are two main reasons why I think this must be the wave of the future:

#1 – Is that really number 1?

As the web continues to grow exponentially, presenting sites in a simple ranked list format is becoming increasingly irrelevant. It’s a simplistic form of rating that doesn’t really match the complexities of the paradigm.

An easy example is a search for “technology news”. When I ran this search Cnet news came out ranking in at number #1 (from a non-personalized session).

Really?

Is Cnet the “best” site for that query?

Aren’t Techcrunch, engadget, Mashable, CNN’s technology section, etc. etc. etc…. just as deserving?

#2 – Personal IS Relevant

Consider the following situation – Your anniversary is coming up and you’d like to surprise your spouse with a cool date at an Indian restaurant. You have two choices for selecting a restaurant to go to:

• Option #1 – Search your local food directory for a restaurant that might be a good fit
• Option #2 – Ask a foodie friend for a recommendation

Obviously option #2 will yield better fitting results for your date - because your friend knows you. They’ll naturally rule out all the options that you’re less likely to enjoy, leaving you with a selection that matches your choice in decor, budget, location, etc.

This is precisely what Google is tapping into now.

The reality is that the answer to the question “Which is the best Indian restaurant in town“, is entirely subjective, and probably even changes depending on the type of evening you have planned out (going out with a bunch of mates to eat Indian you might choose a different spot than where you’d go for a romantic dinner for two…)

What this means for ecommerce and why product videos matter even more

Online vendors are going to have get used to a web where the old and tried SEO techniques that worked to push them up the SERPs will gradually be replaced (Google’s detractors say “supplanted”).

Increasingly we’ll be all viewing customized and personalized results where for every query the top results will be determined by whatever related content our friends have been sharing, reviewing, commenting and buzzing about. It’s here I believe vendors with video integrated into their sites will truly enjoy an advantage for the simple reason that video content is far more likely to create that type of engagement than boring old text-and-images.

But I’m willing to put this to the test:

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/

Santa's into product videos too...

It’s been nearly half a year since we last featured some Treepodia product video implementations, and that means it’s high time for another (Fourth!)  installation of E-Commerce

“Product Videos on the Wild Wild Web“

Seeing as such a long time has past since the last showcase post I’ve had a lot of installations to choose from. In order to keep things simple and fair I decided that since the holiday season is upon us, I’d simply feature three shops that might just be carrying the gifts you’re seeking for your near and dear ones.

LinenChest.com

Linen Chest - pop up video player integration is great for showing multiple videos on any given URL

Linen Chest was started some 40 years ago by Sylvia Leibner, then a young Quebec mother of 5 boys who was unhappy with the home decoration products available to her and decided to do something about it. Linenchest.com has grown into a company with 20 shops, and over 500 employees. In 1991 founder Mrs. Leibner was honored with a Canadian “Company of the Year Award“.

Integration

Linen Chest has our player set as a launch-able overlay panel allowing them to easily offer more than one video on the page.

SeattleSunglass.com

Treepodia's platform uses existing page content to create video captions

SeattleSunglass.com is the internet presence of brick-and-mortar sunglass shop Seattle Sunglass Co. in the heart of downtown Seattle.

Integration

SeattleSunglass implemented Treepodia product videos as an interchangeable tab that displays either an image or a video for any product, according to browser’s choice

ElectronicExpress.com

When product pages are dry and technical...

Founded in 1983 Electronic Express is a retail chain stocking over two thousand catalog items at their 16 locations near and in Nashville, Tennessee. Electronicexpress.com stands for quality brand electronics at exceptionally low prices, and as such has to constantly think about how to make marketing more cost effective in order to enable greater savings to its customers. As with many similar budget retailers in our client portfolio – automated video was a natural fit…

...Videos are an opportunity to spice-up things up a little!

Thanks for Trusting Us!

I’d like to say THANKS! to all the companies listed above, and to wish them and everyone else that joined us this year:

HAVE A FANTASTIC 2010!

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.

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!