VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

We are not on TV!

If you still think that you can use TV commercials on your product pages, watch this old video of Steve Ballmer making a pitch for Windows 1.0 on TV (a while back obviously). Granted, this is an old, corny, funny video - and probably a bad example for a broader observation - don’t design your product videos like TV commercials.

Now enjoy.

Zappos.com: the biggest video retailer in 2010?

Online shoe and fashion accessory retailer Zappos has started to integrate Overlay.tv’s video technology, a simple and user-friendly “clickable” video interface that allows the user to interact with the content, widely referred to as video widgets.

Here a few impressive statistics on Zappos’ online video use:

• In 2010 Zappos plans to offer some 50,000 product videos on their website which will make it the biggest video retailer on the web!
• Zappos’ existing video content on product pages has been able to increase sales (compared to product sites without video) by between 6 to 30%!
• The Las Vegas-based online retailer currently counts with 6 video studios to produce their own content and is planning to run 4 more studios by the end of 2010.

That’s makes them the innovation champion in video retailing 2009-2010, and that’s why

Do you heart Zappos, too?

Good video marketing reads for the Halloween Weekend

There are three great papers that were published recently, all of them good reads for everyone who works in video marketing and or in online marketing. And the good news: apart from being really useful, all of them are available online for free.

If your weekend is busy and you only have time to read one of them then go for “Creating E-Commerce Videos that Sell” by Justin Foster, co-founder of Liveclicker and Founder of Video Commerce Consortium . It’s a great paper for everybody how wants to understand the potential of video content in e-commerce; especially interesting were the sections on “Understanding Motivation, Simplicity, and Triggers” and the “Product Video ROI Calculator”.

The second paper I recommend is part of a series of best practice papers published by Adobe Scene7 called “Experience: What’s Best, What’s Next - A Point of View on Building Rich Online Experiences”. The author is Doug Mack (Vice President & General Manager of Consumer & Hosted Solutions at Adobe). Believe me, I have no intention whatsoever to promote Adobe or its RM solution Scene7. But it’s simply interesting and everybody involved in the multidisciplinary art of video marketing can learn something useful from the 7 principles explained. Principle 2 “Movement has Meaning” explains why adding video, animation and voice is so important for a good user experience online, including real cases of videos displayed in fashion e-retailing sites that helped increase performance.

The third is actually a presentation and has no direct connection with video marketing but it dives deeply into the immediate future of the Internet, showing upcoming trends relevant to any Internet marketer. The Top 5 Internet Trends were published by Richard MacManus, Founder&Editor of ReadWriteWeb. You will find valuable information on Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web & Augmented Reality and the Internet of Things.

Video finally integrates with AdWords and YouTube becomes e-commerce enabled.

Last week, Google announced the international (Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands) roll-out of the integration of YouTube Promoted Videos with Google’s AdWords platform. Any AdWords advertiser who has video content can now start promoting videos directly from the AdWords UI, creating a “One-stop-shop” for marketers, as Google says in its blog.

This is good news for small and medium sized businesses with video content to promote their services, especially if they have been using AdWords sucessfully to drive traffic to their site already.   It will also help to make content stand out in a place that many e-marketers still call “too crowded”.  It’s no no wonder, - 20 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute!

For all the YouTube skeptics, let’s not forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine with 107 Million unique visitors and an average of 65 views per visitor each month. If you have product videos you may very well want to consider how to leverage your content by using all e-commerce tools YouTube now offers.

Europe’s fashion e-retailers jump on the video catwalk

BuyVip is a Europe-based online fashion retailer with virtual outlets in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria and Italy. Access to the catalog and shopping is restricted to registered members only, supported by a member-gets-member scheme that gives discounts to recruiters and new users. I personally haven’t bought from them or any other e-fashion outlet so far since I do prefer brick-and-mortar shopping when it comes to cloth, shoes and accessories but I took a closer look at their catalogue because just recently they have introduced a video-based catalogue. And that did catch my interest.

BuyVIP has upgraded their statical photos catalogue using 10 or less second videos that show a model walking around with the respective piece of cloth. The idea is super-simple! It really hit me when I gave it a second thought: in terms of resources and setting, there is actually no big difference between organizing a photo shooting or a video shooting, especially when the location is a controlled studio environment. Models, studio, lights, camera and a good photographer and/or video professional. Postproduction is probably a bit more time intensive in the case of video editing but the impact and the user experience do change big time. Here two examples of female and male line; to see the video you need to register, though.

In terms of production I think BuyVIP has choosen the right strategy: focus on the product and keep the rest as simple as possible. Nevertheless, I think that the integration into the product site, especially the sharing or bookmarking options could have been much more state-of-the-art. There is only a “e-mail to a friend” option but that’s it.

At BuyVIP currently, not all brands that feature video models; that could mean that the video project is still in a test phase or the roll-out has different phases; but maybe only the top selling or paying brands do actually get their one video catwalk.

Another good European example of how to use video on the product site is the UK-based online fashion store Aseo. As far as I could see, all articles in the cloth section have their own short video. The execution is as simple as the BuyVIP clips but the on-site user experience is way better, offering complementary content around the video, like a size-guide, other accessories to complete your look and a share option with all the most common social network and content sharing sites, from Digg to Facebook.

You might wonder if the share options really matter in terms of lead generation or conversion, sending traffic back to the site. There is little published data about the impact in real business but I would follow the advise of Peter Cobb from eBags - Xavier had a great post + video about them a few weeks ago - where he mentions the importance of video content for social network sites and that being present on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Digg actually did have a positive impact on the brand in general.

It would be interesting to get some real data about the impact of shared content on the traffic to and conversion on site. Can anybody share some info on that?

Video Commerce Chronicles Episode 5: Peter Cobb Video Commerce full presentation at eTail West ‘09

eBags Video Program presentation by Peter Cobb, Co-Founder and SVP. Peter covers a broad range of topics during this 30 minute presentation at eTail West ‘09. Enjoy the video and the slides right below.

Full Video

Slides transcript

1. Peter Cobb February 2009 Co-founder and SVP of Marketing, eBags

2. The eBags Video Program
* Started March 2007
* One full-time video producer
* 210 videos
* 85% self produced, 15% from suppliers
* Partnered with Silicon Valley startup Liveclicker for technological aspects

3. Video Everywhere

4. Benefits of Video
* Increased onsite conversions
* Higher customer satisfaction
* SEO
* Presence on social networks
* Enhance marketing programs (email, affiliates)
* Low-cost way to grab technological edge
* Brands love it

5. Conversion Lift on product pages Group A – No Video Group B – With Video # Product pages 25,000 25,000 served Conversion rate 6.63% 10.00% (did not view video) Conversion rate 6.63% 15.84% (viewed video) Conversion rate 50.1% increase N/A (did not view video) Conversion rate N/A 138.9% increase (viewed video)

6. SEO/Customer Satisfaction
* Prominent SEO placement
* Liquidated inventory of key product
* Boosted conversion rates

7. Presence on social networks
* Facebook
* Twitter
* MySpace
* Digg
* StumbleUpon
* YouTube
* Blogs
* Google Video
* Etc.

8. Number of video plays
* 100,603 video plays (since May 5 2008)
* Average 260/day, accelerating to 780/day
* Distribution across all channels: onsite, SEO, affiliate, email, social networks.

9. Video Center on eBags
* Since July 24th 2008 81,423 unique visitors 111,325 page views

10. Video on Brand pages
* Since Sep 17th 2008 1,138,517 banner impressions 5,543 video views

11. Video on product pages
Since Jan 16th 2008 102,998 banner impressions 3,699 video views

12. Video on YouTube
Tracked since October 12th 2008 9,337 unique visitors

13. With affiliates
Since Mid November 2008 w/Liveclicker 15,775 views, increasing • Commission Junction • LinkShare

14. Affiliate product review example
* Article eBags Video + Merchandising

15. Content analysis
* Demos and testimonial most “engaging” (people viewing at least 10-seconds)
* Promotion/Interview show lower engagement

16. Engagement detail
* Product demos are most engaging. These videos also show most views on Youtube

17. Affiliates: branding videos best
* Notice the low level of engagement on affiliate site

18. A few examples (1)
* What people will like more art than science…

19. A few examples (2)

20. What we’re working on
* Next-generation player with integrated merchandising
* Social Media development
* Email integration

21. Key Take Aways
* Getting Started
* Video Production Doesn’t Have To Be Complex
* “Video Everywhere” is the correct strategy
* Making it a process
* Find the right balance of content
* Work with suppliers to acquire video assets Solving the technical limitations
* Partner with the right company and get going

22. Thank you

eCommerce Video Production Tips from the Pros: eBags

Note from VideoRetailer.org: Last fall, I asked Scott Roon and Jason Carncross to share a few video commerce production tips. This is the incredibly creative duo that’s behind eBags.com’s video product and delivery. Some of their most popular videos are the eBags MacroLoader demo, and most recently, the eBags Web Busters video.I put the camera on a tripod and left these guys present it, their way.

Scott Roon: Hey, what’s happening? I’m Scott, new Media Producer at Ebags.

Jason Carncross: I’m Jason. I’m a Senior Web Designer at Ebags.

Scott: He’s more qualified than I am. Anyway, web video is kind of new, right? I mean, I guess. We’re doing commerce web video, but it’s not what you think. Okay, it’s Ecommerce. Alright, and I guess we’re talking about kind of some of the easiest way to get started, I suppose. Basically, I’m just trying to teach them everything I learned in college. How much time do we got? [Scott looks at his watch] Okay. Sound, first and foremost. Right?

Jason: Yeah. You got to have sound.

Scott: Super important.

Jason: Sound, you can jitter video all you want. You can drop frames. You can have black and white, scratchy…whatever. As soon as you have bad audio, people leave. Kind of have to have great audio.

Scott: I think when we started doing video here, I was pretty adamant on trying to sell them on a thousand dollars worth of audio equipment. I could not stress enough how important it is. When you’re shooting video with someone and somebody’s talking, you don’t want it to sound like old Hamm radio. It’s the least engaging thing ever. People will turn it right away. I do that on Youtube when I’m watching. If you can tell just that the audio is not right, that’s sort of a subliminal thing. The thing that sucks about video and producing video, is that if you’re doing your job right, nobody notices because the end goal is to make it look seamless. And nobody knows. That’s why all video producers are people in LA. It’s because it’s a thankless, thankless job, but that’s the whole point. You know? It’s super smooth. And sound is–immediately, you will recognize bad sound.  I mean, video you can…like you said, you can throw filters if you want. You can do whatever you want. You can fix video, but audio is…

Jason: Another thing that’s bad about audio is If you use the same public domain clip that everyone else is using, then you end up triggering mental relapse from the user about some other site they were just on ten minutes before yours, and that association is bad. If you can do original music at all, even if it’s loop based, but original in edit. That’s better than just pulling something off the shelf, and plugging it in and running with it. Most of the people out there are doing that. You’ll get caught. People will come up and say, “Hey, you know that track in your music, I heard that on TV or I heard that on a commercial. It’s like, “Oh man.”

Scott: I see some of the political ones now, and they use some of the same loops we have. But yeah, you start recognizing. Sound is such a subliminal thing. I mean it’s just..you can’t get away with a lot when it comes to sound. So, do not skimp on sound equipment, since we’re in a lesson here. Do not do that.

Jason: What camera do you use?

Scott: I use prosumer Panasonic DVX 100, for whatever that means to anybody out there. It’s the DVX 100B, which is the third generation of that one. But it was the first prosumer camera, which is half pro half consumer, around three grand, $3,000 that shot 24 frames per second which is a simulated film effect as you know. It simulates value. The eye can recognize the difference between 30 frames per second. If you get farther than 30 frames per second, your eye can’t physically tell. If you slow it down, It’s a trick it plays on the eye to give it more depth. That’s what we use. We haven’t found an HD yet.

Jason: Everything’s been small. We use a 320/240 resolution for all of our videos now. That might change in the future, but for right now that’s what we’re using. Tripod or handheld?

Scott: I love handheld. I’m old school. I came from a music background. It’s at your discretion. I’ve done a lot of behind the scenes tours of companies. It’s a more personal feel for me. Again, that’s if you’ve shot it right, and if you know the technique and all that. But first sit down interview. How about yourself? Do you use…?

Jason: I don’t have any preference. I like smooth dolly shots. I like big budget looking shots. Cranes. Throw a crane in there. It’s just that’s how I shoot. I like more high production look. The problem with shooting high production is if you want to maintain that. You can’t do halfway. You can do minimal cost minimal effort. As soon as you start to get used to high end production. You have to do it right, or someone will call you out. How come you shot it at night? So many elements that you have to control in that world. Unless you’re planning on a big budget, you want to try and make it feel as organic as possible.

Scott: There are certain things you can fake. There are certain things that are difficult to fake. That’s where the TV background is helping. Every corner that I can cut. Not to say that we’re skimping on everything but realistically, it’s a business like everything else. You got to know how to efficiently create something. On any given day, you shoot three things a week. It better not be super expensive. Especially, if you can’t really measure success. I mean you can…but…

Jason: What is your philosophy on edits? I know you have some interesting cut through shots.

Scott: I’m a little aggressive when it comes to edits. I hate dissolves. It’s just my personal thing. They are forced, cheesy, and contrived–Disney movie.

Jason: I agree.

Scott: I think the hardest part has been brevity. Creating rich content that moves–gets in, gets out shows people what you want. A lot of that comes from knowing your consumer. I directly take recommendations off of of our testimonials. I need to know the size of it. I get shots of the presentator relative to the size. I make sure I get good shots. A lot of it is listening to what people want.

Jason: I know the answer to this one, but I’m going to ask for their sake–single cam or multicam shoot?

Scott: In theory, what do I want? Or what do I do? I shoot single cam because it’s just me. It’s really hard to do this with two cameras and talk to someobody. I shoot single camera. I’ve found a couple tricks to get around it and to make it look a little better. Everytime, the first thing that I ask everybody is for lifestyle images, still images anything I can use to enrich a one camera shoot. I want two. It’d be nice. But then I need someone else. It becomes more production. That’s one of those corners, I want to try and cut. I hate using that term by the way. It seems so cheap, when I say “cut corners.” But “maximize efficiency.”

Jason: What about your b-roll, How do you keep track of the straps you have to pick up?

Scott: I do the interview first. Generally, time permitting. I shoot the interview first, and keep a mental note of where it is. That’s kind of the beauty of being the pre-production, the production, and the editer. At the end of the day, the one thing that’s terrible is, I have no else to blame. The one thing that’s good is that I know everything i need in order to create. After i do an interview, i know specifically, what shots I’m going to need when i get back to the editing room.

Jason: One more question.

Scott: I don’t know when this turned into a..

Jason: Because you are a better speaker than I am. Is there something that you would call the Ebags style? How do you come up with it? As far as the edit…can you look at two different videos that you shot and edited and say, “Yeah that was done by the same person?”

Scott: Wow, I really try not to though is the thing. Again, if I’m doing my job right it makes it look like we have 7 different producers and a bunch of different people doing this, different editors and different styles. I’m trying to take as diverse of a look as I can.

Jason: You don’t need a response. I don’t know. I just figured it was a good question.

Scott: I figured you were leading me into something where you were going to make fun of me for something.

Jason: If you’d like me to, I could…

Scott: I try and do it as professional looking as possible, but as engaging as possible. A lot of it comes from the Youtube. I surf Youtube not at work obviously, all the time. I’m always looking for the ways people portray just the stupid things that they do, and the products that they they love, and the things they love, and the the people they are. If i can pull all of that together into one cohesive style, then I have effectively escaped this question.

Jason: Ever think of running for office?

ShopNBC’s Video Commerce Endeavor Is Inspiring

When Justin Foster from the Video Commerce Consortium talked about ShopNBC’s video commerce experiments at Streaming Media West last fall, many of us were impressed by the vision and commitment from a company that’s been competing for years against the Home Shopping Network and QVC, but somewhat trailing behind. True, HSN and QVC still retain the lead in terms for marketshare and brand awareness, but ShopNBC.tv has taken a clear lead in the nascent video commerce space with a site that’s designed as an entirely new channel.

It’s not hard to find ShopNBC.tv. Personally, I’m seeing the ads popping all over the place on the internet, like this prominent and wide banner on WebWorkerDaily, one of my favorite blogs.

The site itself has been carefully built as a new destination site, using Flash as the presentation layer. After landing on it, you are immediately taken into the video experience, since it’s streaming the TV content live, without needing to install or activate anything. Yes my friends, the homepage is boldly featuring live video content, which is sort of a powerful statement: this is video, this is ShopNBC.tv.

The navigation on the site is innovative too. Unlike many ecommerce destinations nowadays, which feature countless links to site sections, departments, brands, etc, ShopNBC.tv is betting on a simplified shopping experience with simple yet intuitive rollover menus that allow you to shop by category, brand or host. The search is also elegantly designed and consistent with other elements on this page. Also impressive the fact that the video never stops playing, all navigational content is overlayed right on the page without any interruption.

Interesting also what happens when the user is ready to buy a product - as the click button is redirecting the user to the ultra-elaborate ShopNBC.com, and the most seamless fashion.

On the critical side, the biggest concern would be the extensive use of Flash, which limits SEO visibility and linking (everything happens under the same URL). Another limitation, which I am sure will be overcome soon, is the lack of social media features which would enable sharing across blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.Nevertheless, what an amazing shopping experience. ShopNBC.tv will no doubt be the benchmark for many video retailers moving forward:

1. ShopNBC.tv was designed as a new destination site, with its own identity and user experience.

2. ShopNBC.tv is a true video shopping site. Video is the center of the shopping experience, and ShopNBC.tv doesn’t make any excuses about it.

3. ShopNBC.tv is the innovator to follow. We are not aware of any similar project in the industry that marries video and commerce so well.

YouTube entering the Video Commerce era

YouTube has unveiled some ambitious plans to further monetize their massive user base by contextually inserting commerce links on their video pages. Amazon and Apple are early partners, with more to follow on the gaming, music and movie distribution verticals. What does this mean for the nascent video commerce space?

1. YouTube is serious about video commerce. Reading off the original blog post “I clicked to buy and I liked it”

Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.

We can read “this is the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube”. This shows that YouTube is committed to this project and hopes to create a new business line that will nicely complement their current ad revenue streams.

2. YouTube is starting with digital products. What next? Partnering with Amazon and Apple makes a ton of sense because these types of products are most directly related to the masses of content you see on YouTube. Think songs, movies, games, software products, and other soft products that are just the perfect fit right now. However, with so many hard products currently been marketed on YouTube (anything from shoes, to musical instruments, to electric cables, to cars, etc), I am convinced YouTube is also thinking longer term about how they can get a piece of the e-commerce action and deliver the equivalent of the eBay stores to their users. In other words, I predict that within the next 3 years YouTube will provide merchant tools for small and medium sized businesses to sell their products online using video.

3. Another big jab at eBay. Google has been slowly gaining on eBay and it’s not a coincidence to see Amazon as one early partner in this initiative. It is all too clear that YouTube and Google are trying to lure merchants from eBay and deliver a compelling package that includes video, and I’m sure a payment system (Google checkout) down the road.

4. A fantastic boost for video commerce. By entering the space so early and with so much commitment, YouTube and Google are validating the video commerce space in a big way. Expect video adoption to accelerate in the retail space and benefit from this new momentum.

Video “mandatory going forward” says Alison Jeske from drugstore.com

Alison van Diggelen from Womens’ Radio did an interesting interview of Alison Jeske, Director of product management at drugstore.com about e-commerce and video, amongst other things. The full podcast, which is part of a the “Fresh Dialogues” series is about 6min 30secs, here are some excerpts:

From Fresh Dialogues by Alison van Diggelen -

Alison van Diggelen: What is it about online video that’s making it so attractive these days? […] Can you expand a little bit on that and the kind of feedback you are getting from your customers?

Alison Jeske from drugstore.com: Definitely when people see products in action they get very excited about it. In the prestige beauty world we get to see exciting new designers like Vena Cava showcased in fashion week, we get to see Oscar Blandi doing “How can I get that second day hair look”, we have Tina Turnbow (our fabulous make-up artist that we work with) showing people how to take a day look to a night look. Those things on the prestige beauty site get our customers really excited. On the drugstore.com side, it’s very new for us. We have just been introducing some funnier videos showcasing toys and games for the holiday, so we’re definitely getting some wordings and interesting feedback from our customers on the drugstore.com side.

AVD: So you’re getting a lot of feedback from your customers?

AJ: It’s early launch, early indications are real positive but on the drugstore.com we’ve had videos for about 2 weeks now, and it’s still real early. We’re measuring impressions we’re getting from the customers and definitely some of the feedback. It’s early to tell on order impact and conversion but it looks promising.

AVD:That’s very exciting. Can you give an idea for how long these video clips are? Are we talking like 30 seconds, or longer than that? AJ: Typically longer than that. We try to keep our clips to around 1 to 2 minutes but some of the ones we have from Fashion Week on our Beauty.com site can go between 3 and 4 minutes. You want it to be interesting enough to tell someone a story but not too long to where we lose people. So we try to balance that and that’s something we’re testing.

AVD: Do you feel you’re really on the cutting-edge of this, taking videos to the market?

AJ: I think we’re definitely in the early adopters – I think there is a lot of people doing it really well out there – eBags is a great example, REI is doing video. The real mavericks in this that have doing it for quite a while are QVC and the Home Shopping Network , they really kind of started translating their TV shows into the different medium. We’re excited to see where this can take us.

AVD: What are your expectations for this? Do you see being your main focus getting video streaming online?

AJ: We see this as mandatory going forward. Customers are demanding it, and we want to offer all the different ways to help a customer make a choice about a product that they want. We see this as a requirement to stay in the game.

AVD: What key message are you bringing today to the Video Commerce panel (you have a panel of four talking about the big picture)?

AJ: I think some of the key messages are that we still need to measure success. We’re excited about this opportunity but we still have to measure, and we’re still near the early stages. The other thing about video is that it’s that next evolution of going from product reviews where customers can describe right how they feel about a certain product and why they like it. Video brings reviews up to another level where we’re getting to the next evolution in the product partisan life-cycle.

Read more and listen to the podcast…