How to Master Video Commerce at Scale

With consumers spending more and more time online watching video, it’s easy to see why YouTube (100 percent video) and Facebook (almost 80 percent video) are the top two most trafficked websites. Video has captured the attention of consumers and isn’t letting go. Consider that 64 percent of shoppers visit YouTube before making a purchase, according to business media and research platform Dazeinfo.

Consumers seek video to help them decide what new pair of shoes to buy or shampoo to try. Video is three times to five times more likely to influence consumers to make a purchase, and is therefore a crucial part in the decision-making process. If you’re a retailer, mastering video commerce at scale is crucial for your online business.

As an online retailer, how do you create and implement a video strategy at scale? Consider the following tips:

• You need access to all pertinent video content available, including content that's produced by brands you carry, influencers across your industry, and any videos that you may produce in-house or with the help of an agency. All of this content must come into a centralized place where you can organize and access all videos.
• You need to match these videos with products and product categories. That’s the only way to know the percentage of video coverage you would have across your entire catalog, and be able to deliver the right video(s) to every product and category page.
• You need to follow the data and learn how each video is influencing sales and engagement. Follow visitors from each video to the shopping cart with the right metrics and key performance indicators in place.
• To scale with more than a handful of videos, you'll need the ability to automate this process, determining which content to deliver on each page, auto-testing and auto-surfacing the assets that convert well (i.e., your top performers).
• As your coverage grows and a larger percentage of your catalog is covered with video, automation becomes increasingly important. You need smart auto-matching and a video recommendation engine to determine which videos to showcase on every single page.
• As you engage more and more with consumers through video, you will generate more opportunities to deliver offers as they watch, truly making your video shoppable. This would easily be achieved by leveraging a video-to-product matching engine to automatically deliver the right offers with the right videos.
• Now that you have video on your site, you must ensure that these pages are indexed by Google so that your videos come up in search results. Note that the average retailer relies on Google (organically) for about 40 percent of its traffic. With proper coverage across your product catalog, associated commerce keywords and metadata for every video (which naturally comes from the video to product matching process), and dedicated search engine optimized video pages, you can now begin to increase your organic search traffic with video. With video search results on Google constituting approximately 25 percent of all search results, this new traffic is expected to be substantial to your business.

Retailers that use smart video technologies are the ones that are truly tapping into the opportunity presented by video for commerce. Let's face it, in seeking to obtain and deliver videos for your entire catalog, without automation you would have to manually search, tag and match thousands of videos — highly impractical and definitely not scalable. The right platform, technology and automated processes will enable any retailer to truly leverage the video commerce opportunity.

Allon Caidar is the CEO and co-founder of TVPage, a video commerce cloud that enables merchants and publishers to deliver engaging, shoppable video experiences that increase product sales.