Posts Tagged ‘Spain’
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?
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