Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

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

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.

No... Not really...

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

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

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

Introducing the Tool King

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

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

What we did

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

Product video views double!

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

How big was the impact? you ask.

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

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

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

Treepodia enhanced products on Israeli Daily Deals site Cliqa

Earlier this week our ecommerce video platform went live on Israeli daily deals site “Cliqa“. In the press release our CEO, Tal Rubencyzk, gave the following statement

“Treepodia is glad to combine its technology for the first time within the daily deal industry. We are sure that the collaboration between Treepodia and Cliqa will give it’s users a joyful and unique experience.”

The excitement beyond the niceties

This is a very exciting move for us, and we hope to see more local daily deal sites following suite soon. I think we have a good reason to be optimistic that this is going to happen soon. Here’s why:

Why Video is a BIG DEAL for Daily Deal sites

Unlike Search or Social Networking where, for the meantime, a dominant player has cornered the market (Google and Facebook respectively), the Daily-Deal landscape is still much more fragmented and in many countries different players are still vying for a dominant position and seeking out to incorporate features that will give them a clear edge over their competitors. Or in the words of Oded Barel, owner of Cliqa:

“The whole area of daily deals and group buying, which has grown and developed drastically in Israel during the last year, is filled with rivalry between the different competitors in the market. The service offered by Cliqa together with Treepodia of video clips describing daily deals and transforming information to an interactive experience, is a unique service which does not exist in this area in Israel nor in the global market.”

Deals become more engaging when presented in a video

Daily Deals your Bread and Butter?

We’re currently seeking more Daily Deal sites to partner with so if you’re involved in this competitive and exciting sector of the online economy please contact us to learn how our dynamic and automated video platform can help you rise above the competition too.

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