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.

An increasingly popular feature of ecommerce web design is to include videos on the product page to give users and shoppers a more interactive experience. It certainly provides a useful outlet for websites selling DVD’s, videogames and other similar media where trailers and how-to guides provide a more in-depth showcase of what a product can do than any description or photo.

The videos on Amazon, as shown below, have been well integrated into the page by being placed at a good size below the necessary information where they cannot be missed, but do not intrude on the user’s use of the site. It is also important that they do not play automatically when the user visits the page. The last thing they want is Donald LaFontaine’s voice booming out whilst trying to read about a film!

Similarly, albums and singles are now available to listen to on such sites in 30 second clips, which makes you wonder if previews of  different chapters of movies will at some point be available rather than just small clips. I don’t think it needs to go much further than this, but with full movie downloads sure to be available in the future on sits such as Amazon, you’d expect anything is possible.