As defined by Instamojo, video commerce uses video content to promote and sell products and services on the internet.
What is the importance of video commerce?
It’s hugely important for retailers as allows them to go into more depth about the product, as well as give the shopper an experience of it, and ultimately the brand. In this article, we go through the elements of video commerce that are the key drivers in e-commerce growth today.
For context, consider how important TV advertising has been to drive awareness and consideration of products and brands. Video has the ability to demonstrate a product in a detailed and entertaining way to the customer. Why wouldn’t you put video both on the home page of the site (to introduce the brand) and in product pages (to communicate product benefits)? When using video commerce on a website, conversion rates improve significantly, anywhere between 50% and 100%.
Video commerce has become an important factor in e-commerce strategy and, as a result, there is a huge amount of activity to support improved conversion through video. It brings some important benefits to e-commerce:
- Depth – A video conveys lot of information quickly to the consumer, much faster than reading and more depth than a single image
- Responsive – Videos produce consistently higher click through rates – people love a moving picture
- Easy to produce – with the use of high resolution cameras on smart phones, people inherently know how to shoot and edit a film (as a result bringing down the cost of professional video production)
- Increased dwell time – by the mere fact that your video is 15 seconds, 30 seconds or minutes long, people stay longer on your site. Importantly, the themes introduced in the video can be explored by the shopper on the website post-viewing, further increasing brand awareness
- Higher propensity to purchase – People who view a video have a far greater propensity to convert.
- Google results – One of the most popular search results in Google are video searches. If you have video in your site, you will come up in more search results, have better rankings, and therefore increased traffic
- Video is social – Good, well produced videos have people featured in them, explaining your product. People relate to this, get reassured and will probably share their findings (see next point)
- More shareable – People share videos. We see it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin all the time. If it’s entertaining, it will be shared. Why wouldn’t you offer up an entertaining video demonstrating your product?
So, it is clear that video commerce moves far beyond simply producing a video. It integrates product benefits, brand development, and the resulting customer’s e-commerce journey into a shopping experience.
What is a shoppable video?
A shoppable video demonstrates or features a product in the video and then, importantly, links to the product directly from the video. Shoppers can either purchase the product directly in that experience, or are linked to the product page on the e-commerce site. In some cases, the product is linked directly to the shopping cart for instant purchase.
The process of setting up shoppable video is straightforward. Products are tagged in the video, and links can be referenced from those tags. In some instances, there is image recognition which does the tagging automatically.
Shoppable video has taken off – YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are heavy proponents of this tech. It’s a seamless experience where brands who bring commerce and content closer together drive conversion at the most immediate point of consideration. By setting up shopping experiences that meet the viewers in real-time, as well as giving retailers the potential to unlock actionable user insight and empower their brand to connect with shoppers, creates increasingly more meaningful interactions between the retailer and the consumer.
Live and non-live video shopping
The next distinction surrounds prerecorded, or non-live, video commerce and live video shopping.
Non-live video is recorded, tagged, and integrated into user experiences, be that on a website, social or video platform. This is a scalable tactic that can be deployed to the masses. The biggest disadvantage: it assumes what the audience actually want.
Live video shopping, or livestream shopping, entails audience interaction. Live presenters can understand their customers’s reactions to the video in real-time. If it’s one-to-one, the presenter only needs to ask what the shopper wants to know and see to then respond directly to their needs. As a result, conversion rates goes through the roof. In a one-to-many scenario, presenters can pose questions and get responses by polls, direct messages, tweets – or can even gauge the response based on how many people leave.
You can see that the shopping experience merges into the entertainment space. The more entertaining the presenter, the more responsive they are to the audience, and the greater the propensity to purchase.
What is a video commerce platform?
The next phase in the future of retail is the rise of the video commerce platform. A video commerce platform, or a video commerce app, provides the technology wrapper around making video shoppable. There are several components to a video commerce platform:
- Discovery – Helps both the shopper and the retailer discover needs of the shopper. Once this has been identified, needs can be responded to via the delivery function
- Video delivery – Videos need to be recorded and viewed
- Product identification – Perhaps key to the video commerce platform is the ability to tag products in the video. Once they are tagged, you can either immerse or convert from the identified or tagged products
- Immersion – Immersion directs shoppers to more information on the product or the brand. This can be executed by sending them links, text, imagery, more videos, augmented reality, calculators and more to help make that decision
- Conversion – This links the customer to their shopping baskets, ready for them to purchase in a seamless experience
Video commerce is a rich area of opportunity for e-commerce and retail, combining engagement and interactivity for an immersive shopping experience. Smart retailers are taking advantage of this new trend.
Confer With is a full featured video commerce platform, containing features that enhance the shopping experience for the customer. Consumers would describe it a live video shopping platform. Learn how the Confer With video commerce platform works and how you can use it to engage with customers today.
