Over the past few years internet video has dramatically changed the way we spend our time online. Back in the day the masses had to make do with images and text and the occasional flash animation. It seems only the wealthy or the very very lucky were privileged enough to posses a broadband line (or ISDN line) that was powerful and oil-slick enough to allow for streaming video of any reasonable quality.

Nowadays that has all changed – and it seems reasonable to assume that any stranger that you walk by in the street has spent at least a good few hours eyeballing YouTube or other, perhaps more scandalous web video archives. And the reason, other than the obvious, is that web video is now accessible. You can even stream video on your mobile phone these days (if you are privileged enough to own an expensive phone contract that is – vicious circle).

As web video takes up more and more of our online time it seems only right to capitalise on it as a medium through which we (as online businesses) can promote our websites and products/services. For most of you it may seem like a hard way to go about things but trust me – the benefits are enormous.

There are many avenues that an e-commerce website can walk down to show off your products. Let’s try an example and see how we would go about advertising and promoting an “Acer Laptop” on our site. We could use any of the following:

• An Image Gallery (showing front/back/left/right/top/bottom – perhaps even in a nice jquery rollover feature or lightbox)
• Product Description (a short description detailing only the top noticeable specs like the processor, operating system and RAM)
• Product Specification (a detailed specification including weight/battery life etc)
• Customer Reviews (always helpful and informative)

All of these do a good job of promoting the laptop – however what would you say to a 360 spin-around view of the laptop with music and narration detailing the spec? What would you look at first? My guess would be that if you saw a “video review” of a product you would immediately click play. A customer can then learn more about the product in those few seconds of video footage than they would through reading the whole specification.

There’s something about video that just appeals to us as consumers, it makes us stop and pay attention like nothing else. It is a solid fact of e-commerce marketing that the longer a visitor stays on your website the more likely they are to purchase your products.

Here is a good example of using web video for products (you may recognize the website and how well they are doing as a company):

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/9644467/Acer-Aspire-Timeline-5810T-Core-2-Solo-ULV-SU3500-1-4GHz-4GB-320GB-15-6-DVD-SM-Vista-Home-Premium-Laptop-Notebook/Product.html

This has been a short introduction to the importance of web video in e-commerce website design I will follow up on this next week with a more in-depth look into web video as a tool for generating the sale.

A poor feature of Magento, is how the sales emails are set up. Unless you know exactly what to do, you’re stuck with a bunch of emails that say ‘thanks for your purchase from the Magento Demo Store’ alongside the Magento logo.

I’m pretty sure that most stores will want their own logo and their own shop name mentioned in sales emails, why there isn’t a script to do this, I have no idea. Anyway, the simple way around it is just to update them all yourself, it doesn’t take too long.

Download the folder from app/locale/en_US/template/email

There’s about 30 or so files to change. You’ll want to update the telephone number, any references to Demo Store, the dummy email address and obviously the logo. With the logo I usually change it right at the root level by going to:

skin/frontend/default/yourtheme/images/logo_email.gif

Now when you test your sales and customer info emails, they should all read correctly. There’s one thing you should note however… this is not an update-proof solution. Make sure you keep a copy of it to overwrite an updates. There’s a permanent way of changing emails in the admin area but it takes much, much longer. For the sake of 20mins, I’d do this way every time.

Ecommerce giants Amazon and Play have recently decided to challenge Apple’s dominance in the MP3 market by offering MP3 downloads as part of its service. Amazon launched Amazon MP3 with the intention of reducing Apple’s markets share by undercutting it’s prices whilst maintaining the convenience of the iTunes store. As far as first year’s go, a 5-10% market share isn’t that bad, but Amazon is little more than inconvenience to Apple who still dominate the market share with over 70%.

It appears that any market share gained from Amazon was from other small MP3 download services, meaning iTunes has remained pretty much intact.

So why is iTunes so immovable from it’s perch as king of the MP3 downloads? Sure, nothing beats the convenience of simply pressing ‘buy’ and seeing it in your iTunes library seconds later as if it’s always been there, but you’d think that the more competitive prices of Amazon and Play would have made more of a dent than a scratch. Those with the knowledge will know that it only takes a second to import and Amazon download into iTunes.

I’m sure Amazon will continue as normal however with it’s MP3 download service – there’ really nothing to loose. A market with virtually no operating costs, no delivery charges, unlimited stock and clearly booming in comparison to traditional CD high street sales. It’s a division that all online music sellers should incorporate – but just don’t expect to loosen Apple’s grip on the market!

A very popular service on the high street is the ability for shoppers to trade in their old video games for store credit to use against buying new ones – something that often offers more than the traditional monetary value should the game be sold straight for cash.

E-commerce giant Amazon is now to be cashing in on the idea in what is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Amazon currently allows user to buy from the site and from other users, sell to other users and now sell to Amazon itself. This should work well for Amazon as it will certainly grow the site’s back catalogue collection of games that are now quite hard to get hold of.

Done correctly I can see this being a very successful and potentially massively profitable service for Amazon as they can begin to market their back catalog in the same way eBay markets its ability to provide buyers with rare items that are no longer sold on the high street.

A recent article about eBAy increasing advertising budget raises the question about how much advertising should be considered with ecommerce web design? On the one hand it can be a good source of revenue – as is most web advertising of recent times. On some of the biggest ecommerce sites, companies pay thousands for recognition on a homepage. However the big danger is that it can distract users from the main content of the site as the two parts ight for the user’s attention.

On sites like eBay this can be particularly harmful as sellers who pay high prices for premium listings expect to be given premium treatment – not to be just another link on the page. In a typical e-commerce situation, you may find that users convert to other website where advertising isn’t so obtrusive. It really is a fine balance – making sure the main content isn’t compromised, whicle ensuring advertisers are happy with their position on the screen for their cash.

On a loosel-related note, I have also noticed of late the increased advertising on YouTube, which has involved the display of eBay listings next to a video. Is this prehaps the beginning of a new way of web 2.0 ecommerce advertising? I certainly prefer to see potentially useful listings aggregated into a page rather than just static advertisements. If YouTube is going to advertise, this seems like a good route to take.