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.

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?

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.

Most Etailers Have Poor Decision Making Processes

It never ceases to amaze me how despite the extensive online availability of massively powerful tools for improving conversions and sales, the vast majority of marketers & e-tailers still rely, almost exclusively, on “gut-instinct” (their own, or that of others) as the only system for making the decisions that manage their business. In my humble opinion this may well be the main cause such a vast percentage of online businesses fail, despite the relatively low overhead cost that going online offers when compared to a brick-and-mortar business.

Great Technology is Friendly - it works without forcing YOU to understand it

From my experiences only few online retailers bother to study the statistics of their website traffic closely, and even fewer do so effectively – i.e. know what indicators are the most important for their business and how their day-to-day operations influence them.

This is a particularly sad state of affairs because the ineptitude can’t be traced back to a root cause that makes sense, for example a desire to avoid expenditure on software or resources. Some of the most powerful tools available for gathering statistics and acting on them effectively are available online for FREE.

Are You Optimizing Yet?

One example of an extremely powerful tool, that far too few people are using, is Google’s “Website Optimizer” service, which allows etailers to test how various combinations of changes to their website content will affect conversions, in order to choose the most effective one. Website Optimizer lets etailers choose what parts of a page they’d like to test – headlines, images, design styles, etc., and then runs an online experiment directing a portion of the site’s traffic to each variation in order to determine which content users respond to best.

Why Not?

Over the years I’ve studied this failing rather extensively as it represents what to me is a very intriguing paradox:
On the one hand the very fact a person succeeds at opening a business would seem to indicate a certain level of competence and diligence, however on the other hand that very same person is often unwilling or unable to carry that effort through by providing it with all the opportunities it requires for success. This despite the fact that this person often acknowledges freely their awareness that their ineffectiveness means they’re “Leaving money on the table” and losing their business as a result. The most obvious question to ask would be WHY???

Why Not Indeed…

After spending a fair deal of time pondering this I’ve come to the conclusion that the fault is NOT exclusively that of the entrepreneurs, a degree of blame must be laid at the feet of the developers and engineers that provide these incredible marketing tools.

Most Powerful Online Marketing Tools Are Too Complicated To Use

A well known paradigm of technology development is that all too often engineers develop products without consulting enough, or even at all, with their target audience. At the end of the process they end up with a product that is intuitive and easy enough for THEM to use, but NOT so for anybody else…

I think this may well be the case with many of the marketing tools available online today. Although they’re powerful and effective, and at times even free, they’re engineer-friendly design makes them simply unusable by the vast majority of the population. The fact someone is a great marketer, a driven sales person, and an industrious entrepreneur, is no guarantee that one has the skill sets required to operate a bit of software designed with an engineering audience in mind. Some might say that the exact opposite might be true (think why so few engineers become effective business owners…).

What could be done otherwise

One of the reasons so many people love Apple’s products, despite their technological limitations, poorer features and complete reliance on Apple’s closed marketplace, is because these products don’t require you to learn how to make them work. They simply work for you.

Apple’s products are designed around the core understanding that:

People don’t care about technology. They care about what technology can DO FOR THEM.

Why We’ve Opted For Automation

This truth can be extended just as easily to the world of ecommerce – At the end of the day when presented with the question:

“Do YOU want to increase your revenues by becoming an expert at operating our software, or do you want US to increase your revenues for you?”

9 business owners out of 10 will prefer to simply have their revenues increased (& the 10th is likely to be a “Power User” type with a strong affinity for technology…). This is precisely why we at Treepodia opted to automate as much of our service as possible, and are constantly pursuing new methods for increasing this automation.

We believe wholeheartedly that we serve you better by not burdening you with technobabble you don’t really care about ,and focusing you on what you do care about instead:

Your business results and bottom line revenue.

Now you tell me:
Assuming we GUARANTEE your ROI,
don’t you actually prefer it that way?…

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/firepile/438134633

On his popular “DigitalBuzzBlog“, Aden Hepburn recently published a post commenting on the latest video from the gang at Socialnomics:

“Social Media ROI is the hardest job in town”

In the post, largely based on a post published on Socialnomics’s own blog, Aden claims that:

“Everyone knows that trying to measure Social Media ROI is the hardest job in town. It’s so diverse in every application that there is no single (or simple) way to measure all the outputs into a single report, let alone track sales indirectly from the effects of their social presence.”

Granted, a single dashboard for measuring the effects of your Social Media efforts, isn’t something I’ve come across yet. However there are a number tools that can give you a pretty good idea, especially when used together.

Introducing Better Google Analytics

For those of you using Firefox there’s a free and funky solution I’ve been using for a while and highly recommend: The “Better Google Analytics” GreaseMonkey scripts by Erik Vold.

Better Goolge Analytics add, amongst other nifty features, a set of social media related data to your standard Google Analytics dashboard. Since Better Google Analytics is a GreaseMonkey script all you have to do is install the addon and your good to go – simple, quick and zero risk.

Do you Youtube insight?

Another tip is the splendid “Youtube Insight” dashboard accessible with any Youtube account.
Once you have enough volume, Youtube Insight provides great demographic data regarding the people who’ve viewed your videos. If most of the views for your video come from embedded views on your video you can also easily cross reference the Insight data with the any other stats you collect.

Tubemogul for video analytics

My last tip is also related to video:
Tubemogul, an excellent video syndication platform, has a nice analytics panel for following cross domain video campaigns that they make available to free accounts as well. You’re welcome to learn more about what they do from the following video presentation I found on their homepage:

Measuring Social Media ROI – Not easy, but not impossible either

Indeed a 1-stop-shop for tracing and proving Social Media ROI is, as of now, still unavailable. But, if you’re prepared to invest a little extra time, you can piece together a pretty complete picture from the fragments that are available.

Does Microsoft have a LookingGlass up its sleeve?

As a final note, for those of you who remember, in September the web was all a-buzz about Microsoft’s LookingGlass which will supposedly finally answer the market’s need for a one-stop Social Media analytics panel. I Guess we’ll all just have to wait and see…

Epilogue

Funnily enough, an hour after publishing this post I found an excellent post by David Berkowitz that lists no less than 100 ways to measure social media. A day later I ran into a great post by Urs Gattiker of SocialMediaToday, that did an excellent job of analyzing why Social Media ROI analysis often fails and suggested a few point for planning strategy that helps avoid these pitfalls.

image credit: annia316

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.), doing well with social media key performance indicators in the process.

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