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.

It happened to me too: when video persuades NOT to buy

A few days ago I dropped my iPhone 3GS getting off my car. Just slipped away from my pocket and… woozah. The screen was totally cracked. Luckily I had some tape around to to wrap the thing, and surprisingly, still use it. Now a few days have passed and a friend of mine told me you can get it fixed for about $60. Another one said to look for a screen repair kit for about half the price. That’s when things get interesting.

Can I do this myself? Amazon has this repair kit at $15-20 with fairly good customer ratings. But it’s hard to tell how easy or hard it is to perform the repair. A video would be great. So I keep searching.

Then I find this site, which puts it all in one page - the actual replacement glass, as well as each of the tools you need to execute the screen change yourself. But most important, a video, because I want to know before buying if I can do this myself.

The video is a little slow to start but you get the idea pretty quick. You need tools, you need to be ultra careful, and you need a ton of time. Probably the most discouraging experience I’ve ever had - I just cannot do this. And video persuaded me NOT to buy a product.

If we take a step back, perhaps the most interesting question is “Should a video bringing down conversion rates for a product be taken offline?“. The simple answer is YES, for the obvious reasons. Imagine yourself walking into a meeting where your boss asks you “how’s product X doing in conversions”, and you reply “not well since we added the video”. Not the best scenario.

But if the video is well executed, it probably is worth discouraging non-qualified buyers who will inevitably fail trying to repair their iPhone themselves. Failing costs money (returns) and future sales (negative marketing) - success on the other hand is contagious. That’s how I heard about the kit in the first place.

Dude, where’s my video?

“A bread machine. We gave him a bread machine for his birthday. Him and his wife have no time to buy fresh bread every day, so it’s perfect for them.”

As my father-in-law was saying these words on a beautiful Sunday morning, a thousand questions were going through my mind. How is that possible (making bread at home)? How does it work? How long does it take. How big is this thing? Do you need to know anything about cooking? etc etc. So then I started by quest for answers. What is a bread machine??

Naturally, the process starts with a Google Search for “bread machine”. Lots of results, let’s pick the target.com link. There on Target, multiple choices - each of these machines features 4 or 5 product photos, a short product description that’s not really explaining how things work.

Most valuable are user reviews - but they all talk about how great or bad the product is, but do not provide answers to common sense questions. Dude, where’s my video? Isn’t this the perfect example of an innovative product that needs a little more context than a bunch of photos, copy and some text reviews?

I visited a few other sites and could not find any videos. Perhaps refining my Google query would help, let’s try “Bread machine video”. MUCH better.

The first link is to YouTube, there you can find all the information I was looking for. Look at the quality of the playlist on the right side of the YouTube page:

Found all the info I needed… on YouTube. A few thoughts on this experience:

1) YouTube 1- eRetailers 0. I would have expected the major retail sites to feature product videos, since most of this content is created by manufacturers or content sites like cooking.com. Why is this content only on YouTube? Does not make any sense to have it so far away from the purchase point.

2) Who said you should not syndicate content to YouTube? Users are being educated to find the videos they are looking for on YouTube by Google. Take a look at how Google is pushing links to YouTube videos. Also see how good a job YouTube does putting these all into a nice playlist.

3) Why do I need to append my initial query with “video” to start seeing videos in the Google SERP? This is a challenge to all the theories stating that video gives a huge boost to pages with video in search engine rankings. The videos exist, but you have to type exactly the right query to see them.

Video Commerce eTail West ‘09: Candid Thoughts

eTail was a nice conference last week in Phoenix, AZ. I spent two days there, talking to retailers and partners about the video commerce industry, among other things. Couple of candid observations -

1. The video commerce sessions were (a) on the last day of the event, (b) overlapping which each other (the David Widzig ShopNBC session, and the panel of video commerce experts with McKay Thomas, Peter Cobb and Jimmy Healey), YET packed with retailers.

2. Video commerce is HOT. Everybody has plans to go video in the next 18-months. Even the businesses that are hunkering down in this economy recognize the need to “go video”

3. Had a great time networking with other video experts at the VCC networking event. Met with Vendaria and a few others players in the industry.

4. Heard numerous stories of video commerce associated with social media marketing, which gets me really excited at a personal level. Possibilities are infinite, and we’re just scratching the surface of what can be done when these two are intelligently combined.

Google Video No Longer Accepting Uploads - But still up as video destination

On Wednesday, Google announced that Google Video uploads were no longer going to be supported. This is no surprise to anyone, since Google Video is vastly overshadowed by YouTube, which now attracts close to 70 Million users every month. 

Most e-commerce sites were not directly uploading videos to Google Video anyway. Video Sitemaps, which are easy to create (see example) are the easiest way to get content on Google Video, and there is no reason to believe Google will pull back from these too.

Video sitemaps are simple XML files, which are structurally similar to regular search Sitemaps. After submitting a sitemap via the Google Webmasters interface, it can take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks to get the videos indexed in Google Video. Once on-site, the videos are presented to the user with the original thumbnails and can be played either on the Google Video site or on the uploader’s site - which can be a nice source of free traffic for the content provide, even after this announcement.

Enough Bandwidth for Video Commerce? Yes, but.

As savvy Internet Marketers, are we shooting ourselves in the foot with rich media applications running on our key pages? Is there enough bandwidth out there to support our vision of Video becoming an essential ingredient of ecommerce?

A few weeks back I got a visit from a couple of friends from Uruguay. As dedicated engineers (some would say “geeks”), they connected to their laptops to my local WiFi network to check up on a few things back home. As they were doing this, I was seeing their amazed faces staring at the ping times to Google or Yahoo. 20-25 milliseconds. Sometimes less. Far less than the 200-250ms back there in Montevideo, a fairly Hi-Tech city.

If you’re reading this blog, you are probably part of this American or European Marketing Elite that’s on broadband at home and super-broadband at work. Like you, my YouTube videos play fine without interruption and I don’t mind the extra JavaScript glitz because it comes out instantly for me. But as smart marketers, is it safe to assume that the vast majority of our users are on broadband? Certainly not. Consider this Gartner study, dated July 2008, which estimated the broadband penetration at 55% in the US this year, leaping to only 78% by 2012. Yes, only 78% by 2012.

That’s got to be surprising. I personally never really challenged the assumption that there would be enough broadband for video. In the context of MySpace, and of course YouTube, who would think that so few people had access to fast Internet connections. Looking at the various Video Ad Spend stats (source: eMarketer) we still see a healthy user-base for video viewers (120M+ in the US alone), and solid growth moving forward.

Fine. Then what? Enough broadband for video commerce or not? The answer to this simple question depends on three independent factors: target audience, shopping habits and video delivery process.

1. Target audience. If your commerce site targets an affluent segment of the population, it is safe to assume your user population will be on broadband at home. After all, broadband is almost always sold at a premium over modem connections, and we can therefore expect to find a correlation between household income and Internet connection speed. If you are targeting the college crowd, you probably don’t need to worry about download speed either. This correlation of course isn’t perfect and you should dig out more into your target audience.

2. Online Shopping Habits. In the past recent years a number of very serious studies have concluded that a majority of purchases online were done from the work place, during lunch hours. If you work for a larger company, you may be the victim of drastic anti-YouTube, file-sharing or even shopping policies at work - and you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that the work place is where most people get their shopping and social networking activities done. A gross generalization of my point here would be to say that it doesn’t matter if people have DSL or not at home, as long as they have a job.

3. Video Delivery Process. Finally we’re getting to the most important point in this entire discussion - one that I’m adamant about: how you deliver video. I will share more thoughts on future posts about this, but in the context of this post, how you present video content to your users is going to be hugely important. Let me explain: if I’m on a bad day or simply in a rush to buy something online, and I go to the right product page on the right site, but with a video that’s autoplaying and slowing down the transaction, I’m probably not going to be happy. Video players these days are true bandwidth hogs, they take all the bandwidth that’s available for streaming the content. This competes with the bandwidth that’s required for other page components like navigation, banners, product images, etc.

Instead, I would prefer to be given the choice to play or not play the video, and as long as you don’t slow down the page too much loading a Flash player, I really won’t be that affected by it if I’m on a modem connection or not.

Conclusion. Unless your site sells to a target demographic that has no real options for broadband access, I would not consider bandwidth to be a real issue for deciding to go video or not. Rather, I would pay attention to delivering the video in a way that’s non-intrusive to the user. A delivery method that puts her/him in control of the experience with your site.