Retailers can help customers take a better look at the products, explain the working of products and provide other useful information by including videos on their ecommerce sites. Benefits like higher conversion rates and lower number of product returns have made online video one of the most rapidly growing forms of content on online retail sites.
The etailing group conducted a survey of 100 leading US retail websites to assess increase in usage of various product page features between fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010. The results of this survey indicate that the increase in videos content on product pages was highest at 18 percent, followed by reviews and guides at 13 percent and 9 percent respectively.
In spite of the increase, retailers still have a long way to go as far as online videos are concerned. SundaySky, a firm providing platform to mass produce video based on website content, studied the top 50 retail websites from the Internet Retailer 500 list. According to this study, 40 percent of the websites had less than ten videos, 20 percent had 11 – 100 videos, 18 percent had 101 – 1000 videos and only 22 percent had 1000 plus videos.
The same survey also noted the types of videos most commonly used on retail sites. Product specific videos were most common at 74 percent, followed by category videos, informational videos and home page videos at 40, 38 and 28 percent respectively. Videos can not only improve conversion rate, but also help in SEO of the website. Marketers need to seriously consider this internet marketing tool.