Using video for e-commerce can boost your business to new heights. Attention grabbing virtual content encourages increased engagement, higher dwell times on sites and a rise in conversion rates.
Interactive Video e-commerce and the Purchase Funnel
Widely known in marketing strategy, the purchase funnel is a consumer focussed model featuring four stages of awareness, discovery, consideration and conversion.
In the awareness stage the customer’s attention is initially grabbed by creative, captivating and clickable video ads. For example, shoppable video or customisable video. They can then enter the discovery phase by clicking the interactive hotspots to learn more about the products shown. The viewer may be shown pricing details, images, descriptions and even a call to action. They might view a carousel alongside the video that shows other items being featured. The viewer indicates consideration of the product by clicking a call to action button such as “Buy Now” or “Learn More” to be taken to the product page. A conversion will occur when the viewer places an order, books an appointment or downloads a document.
Brands now utilise conversational commerce, video e-commerce and live shopping to provide a new and memorable shopping experience for the customer increasing the likelihood of conversion.
3 innovative technologies that are revolutionising ecommerce:
1. Conversational commerce is the practice of using social interaction to sell products or services. Virtual shopping app, Hero, harnesses conversational commerce to connect brands with customers via text, chat and video. This gives a human feel to computer-driven bots as teams can chat, schedule store visits and interact with shoppers via 1 on 1 video calls. When buying online, customers are considerably less likely to make a purchase than they are in physical stores. This is due to the lack of in person assistants to provide the answers and advice that gives customers the confidence to buy. Through virtual consultations, personalised advice and recommendations, the benefits of in person shopping are brought to the customer’s fingertips online. With the chatbot market set to be worth over $1.34 billion by 2024, conversational commerce is the future for developing customer-brand relationships.
2. Smartzer makes videos shoppable for e-commerce sites. Brands can use their quick and easy tagging platform to easily add an interactive overlay to all their content making it shoppable across their e-commerce site, livestream, social media, and video ads in minutes. When watching a video the customer can click items to instantly see more details about the featured product and add it directly to their shopping cart without leaving the video. By using Smartzer’s shoppable video technology, brands saw a 50% increase in engagement rates and were able to quadruple their conversion rates.
3. Live shopping bridges the gap between offline and online. Bambuser offers an add-on that enables brands to embed a code in their ecommerce sites to stream live through the Bambuser app. Using the app, brands upload the URL’s of the products that they plan to showcase in the live stream then go live to broadcast content to potential customers. If a customer sees an item that they want to buy, they can click the image shown in the side-bar and add it to their basket without leaving the stream. Bambuser also offers a one-to-one live shopping experience so customer service agents can interact individually with customers for tailor made experiences with product display, product comparison, add-to-cart and CRM APIs.
These three innovative and shoppable video technologies are transforming e-commerce helping to build customer trust and bring the offline online.
Updated: Feb 15, 2021
Shoppable videos are the most talked-about video format in 2021 digital marketing strategies. This format started to gain popularity as Instagram introduced shoppable images across the platform. This quickly evolved to include shoppable videos with associated shoppable products from the Facebook product catalogue. Most recently this includes livestream shopping which is currently being tested in the US market.
Outside of Instagram, brands are using interactive video platforms like Smartzer to create interactive and shoppable video experiences that can be shared across e-commerce, social platforms and forms of paid media. The interactivity occurs through a clickable overlay that can tag videos with additional information about available products. Smartzer’s platform has an overlay that offers multiple ways for the viewer to explore and shop products to maximize the value of this technology.
1. Tags on the video
The most widespread way of adding interaction is to make products on the video itself interactive and shoppable. This can be both in the form of invisible tags or visual hotspots that mark the clickable items. This provides an easy way for the viewer to simply click on anything that they have been interested in to immediately access more information. This form of interaction is particularly convenient for mobile users and mirrors the expected user behaviour driven by social media channels.
2. Shoppable Carousel
Another unique feature of Smartzer is a shoppable carousel alongside the video. This includes all the items that are featured throughout the video and can be either opened or closed. The viewer can click on anything in the carousel to activate a popup with more information. This is perfect for longer videos, or videos with lots of featured items providing quick and easy navigation.
Photo: Brown Thomas live event with Smartzer shoppable carousel
3. Shoppable Replay Screen
In addition to enabling the interactive overlay during video playback, the shoppable items can also be listed on the video replay screen as another way to shop the video once the video has ended. This provides a great alternative to viewers who prefer to finish watching the video and then explore the related shoppable items.
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Updated: Jun 18, 2021
Smartzer's interactive video platform can now also be used to make livestreams shoppable. Here is a step-by-step guide to building live shopping experiences using Smartzer.
Step 1: Set up your products
The first step to build your live shop is to prepare the items that will be featured in the live shopping stream itself. Therefore before you start, be sure to plan what products you would like to talk about and cover during the stream. Once you have the items, it’s now time to add them to the Smartzer editor. This can be done by connecting your product catalog to the editor and requesting the information by SKU or simply by adding the products manually. Speak to your account manager for more information here on what solution would work best for you.
Step 2: Build the shoppable carousel
So you have your products ready to go, check! Now it’s time to build the shoppable carousel that will feature as the live stream is playing. This can be done with a few simple clicks: first by adding the carousel then selecting add all products to the carousel. Once created you can reorder the items in the carousel as you see fit. With the carousel created, the Smartzer overlay is ready to go. Now it’s time to connect the player to your broadcasting service of choice.
Step 3: Connect the interactive player to your live streaming service
Each new interactive video project has a stream key and RTMP link associated with it. These can be used in a wide range of live stream broadcasting software to connect the Smartzer player to the stream. Stuck for choice? Here’s a list of a few Smartzer recommended services you can use to broadcast your stream:
OBS Studio (Desktop encoder & free)
Wirecast (Desktop encoder & paid)
Larix Broadcaster (Mobile APP & free)
Wirecast Go (Mobile APP & paid)
Step 4: GO LIVE!
Having input the stream key and RTMP link into your broadcasting service of choice, you can now go live with your live shopping stream. Simply distribute the Smartzer player URL via Social media or embed the player directly onto a webpage of your choice using the Smartzer embed code.
Following your live experience, the video can then be converted into a fully shoppable video using the Smartzer editor for on-demand viewing and to add to an online repository.
Interested in learning more? Please feel free to get in touch.