Retailers missing out on video to increase sales

The research is out: Using videos effectively don’t only up the number of conversions on your retail site – they actually reduce the rate of returns too. Videos are on the most rapidly growing content types for online sellers.

The e-tailing group‘s 13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study revealed that the 100 leading retailers reviewed increased their use of online videos by 18%, between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter in 2010.

A core challenge remaining is the integration of online video for the average retailer.

Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, which creates videos for retailers and provides a platform for distributing them, told eMarketer in January that despite rapid uptake, “Retailers are still miles away from saturation, because even when they have videos on their sites they are not being created at scale. At this point there are only really a couple of retailers that have thousands of videos.”

Wax’s argument is backed by research from SundaySky, which provides a platform to mass-generate video content based on website content. The company found that three in five of the top retailers had fewer than 100 videos, and most of those had fewer than 10. The company automatically and manually studied the websites of the top 50 retailers in the Internet Retailer 500 list and found that typically, sites had relatively few videos as eMarketer reported.

The problem is retailers are failing to use the benefits of video to improve their transaction rates. SundaySky found that over half of those studied in the report.

“SundaySky found that many retailers were missing out on these benefits by embedding videos in suboptimal ways, such as pop-up windows. Nearly half of the retailers studied had no videos at all indexed by Google, and about a quarter had up to 10 indexed,.”