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A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research.

What is meant by this statement is that eCommerce video brings products to life in a way that text and static images can’t. From the comfort of the couch, shoppers can fully experience the product through videos.

Note that 33% of online retailers planned to add video to their sites in 2010, making it a higher priority than any other advanced feature [source]. If you run an eCommerce website and underutilize or completely ignore this potentially valuable medium, it’s time to act. 2011 is the year when eCommerce video has become a mainstream and even a key component on retail websites. The race is on – your task now is to get into the game, because if you are slower to adopt eCommerce video today, you’ll soon face the problem of having to catch up very quickly. The one that uses every tactical step available for effective eCommerce video is first in line, remember that.

Why You Need eCommerce Video Now

Online videos can support multiple business objectives. You can put them on the eCommerce product pages, category pages, in dedicated video galleries, and in email campaigns (video in email marketing has been shown to increase click-through rates by over 96% and also drove a 51% increase in subscriber-to-lead conversion [source]). Connecting with your customers through video allows a much more real experience when shopping online. You create company recognition, build trust, and humanize your brand.

Benefits You Can Derive from eCommerce Video

Giving more visual info on the product, eCommerce video is an incredibly effective way to appeal to a buyer’s senses. You give fine detailing, show extra features and functions, demonstrate product in action – that gives a final push to convince shoppers when they are looking for a reason to buy the product. Plus, a good product video can bring in positive attention and additional traffic, powerful SEO juice, higher sales, and also a significant drop in calls/questions asking how the product works. Report showed that retail sites with video increase conversion by 30% and boost average shopping cart by 13% [source].

Tips for Effective eCommerce Video

The idea of providing videos for your customers may not sound a new one, but there are many online merchants who are not taking advantage of the benefits videos can offer. The stats show that visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than the visitors who do not [source], still very few online merchants integrate eCommerce videos. Talking about the principles for effective product video, here are a couple of things you can learn:

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With all that hysteria that abounded concerning online shopping, a well-designed category page is absolutely critical in the success of an eCommerce online business. Here the ergonomic design means everything. If you have any intention of making profit, you have to have a category page designed to minimize user’s physical effort and discomfort, and hence maximize efficiency of browsing. Today we’re going to give you an update on the part 1 of the list of usability standards for eCommerce category pages that sell. After several hours of work put into trying to find and analyze additional five examples of effective category pages, our blog team shares this showcase, critique and optimization discussion. Check out and then look at your category page from the point of view of these good examples and improve accordingly, avoiding the denoted pitfalls.

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H&M

What’s good

• Quick look and ‘try on’ options: On H&M website, quick look appears as a pop-up window, displays color varieties, available sizes, and even gives a range of alternate views. What makes this particular quick look remarkable is a ‘try on’ option. Basically, the H&M store integrates of dressing room functionality on their website. This section allows customers to try on different styles, including clothes, accessories, shoes, and other products to see how all that items match together. Chalk it up to use in your store!
• Product image change on hover: when the user is mousing over the product’s thumbnail, alternative image is displayed to show either a whole outfit or simply a product item (it actually depends on what was primarily shown). That is done for users’ convenience, they just hover over the picture for each product alternative views without having to click.
• Adding shadow to product image: at H&M store, they wrap the product images with shadow effect. This gives a depth and kind-of push the image towards the viewer. The shadow is translucent and takes on a bit lighter color than the image that cast it, so the page feels neat and clean. Plus, there is just enough white space to let images hold this shadow attractively.

Things to Change

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Category pages of the eCommerce shops are perhaps one of the most complex pages as they embrace a huge amount of information, product specifications, and even some useful tools for customers. Online store business owners spend so much money designing their category pages and driving shoppers to them, so they therefore need to make sales from these pages. Nevertheless, there are a lot of mistakes website builders make when developing a category page. Many sales catastrophes simply appear because of category page not providing enough information. In this article we will go behind the scenes of some most popular apparel eCommerce stores and represent you the list of usability standards for category pages that sell and increase the engagement level of online shoppers.

A well-built eCommerce page must include certain key elements. Many of the most successful online retailers share these very similar category page functionalities and practices. So, the implementation and proper handling of the following aspects can play a great role in changing how long customers stay on your eCommerce category pages and how many of them eventually proceed to certain product page and make a purchase.

• Offer different layout options for the category page and let customers choose.
• Make sure you achieve design simplicity and charm.
• Keep the category product page clean and easy to navigate.
• Incorporate multiple search filters and browsing refinements.
• Use visual navigation cues.
• Use properly-sized and sharp quality product images that tell a story.
• Avoid requiring clicking if you want your customers to stay.
• Offer product quick view option.
• Consider layering (when all the information is available, yet it is one click away to be shown on the same page).
• Provide enlarged images and alternative views which can be quickly viewed without leaving the page.
• Let visitors perform easy graphic manipulation actions like zooming, panning, or rotations.
• If possible, show the scale of a product and its context of use.
• Write creative and descriptive product titles that highlight the benefits.
• Make the price easy to find.
• Shout about cost-savings.
• Create contrast through size, alignment, color, shape, and other opposites.
• Mix font styles and font variations.
• Allow multiple color views on hover.
• Say about product availability and sizes.
• Include star ratings and product reviews to earn trust with the visitor.
• Integrate a prominently displayed call-to-action: ‘Buy Now’ button, ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Proceed to Checkout’ buttons.
• If possible, display the delivery cost or other delivery details.
• State the lead time or show the countdown clock to create urgency in the customer’s mind.
• Provide clear path to follow.

The list is far from complete, however all these things are critical to netting sales. If you include these elements once, you will reap their benefits for years to come. Yet you have to decide how best to integrate them into your design. Again, we’ve been looking around for examples of excellent category pages from eCommerce apparel sites to analyze them and help you. The following optimization discussion contains just about everything you need to know about the good category pages. However, when designing and developing your category page, please avoid the pitfalls the analyzed examples made.

Note that today goes the first part of this post covering initial 5 examples, check out the part 2 of this article.

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Abercrombie

What’s good

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With so many choices of marketing ideas and sales strategies, you need to work out which option will cater best for the needs of your eCommerce business. For this reason suggestive selling is a proven and tested technique for increasing profits. There is no reason not to employ this technique as it does increase sales, mainly because customers often purchase more than they have planned before. Your task is to provide a more convenient way for store visitors to find what they would like to see or what would be useful for them. Get all the benefits of working with following services and software that will simplify the task of creating cross-sell/ up-sell products functionalities or affiliate programs for Zen Cart, VirtueMart, and osCommerce. Previously, we made the list of 3 Proven Marketing Strategies for PrestaShop and Magento. All of the mentioned tools for these different eCommerce platforms can instantly grab the wheel and relieve you of much effort, so let them make the money for you!

Zen Cart

CROSS-SELLING

If you are using Zen cart as a shopping cart software for your business (Zen Cart is a free, open source online store management system, which is PHP-based using a MySQL database and HTML components), featured Zen Cart modules will simplify the task of creating cross-sell products, so you can easily link products to each other to suggest items that customers might also wish to purchase. All these cross-sell tools are separate third-party modules to be installed in Zen Cart if you desire.

• Better Together (free-available, Zen Cart compatibility v1.3.9) is a Zen Cart discounting module allowing vendors to promote related items. Using this software you can link a product with another specific product, another product from a specific category, or any other product, with an associated discount if both are purchased together. Note that this is an order total module, which means that the discount is not shown until checkout time. This add-on should only be used with carts at 1.3.5 or better.
• Cross-Sell (free-available, Zen Cart compatibility v1.3.7) is the Zen Cart software add-on that will allow you to add up to 6 optional products on your current products pages.
• What about Cross Sell Advanced (free-available, Zen Cart compatibility v1.3.7), this is an admin add-on module for the existing cross-sell module that allows you to assign up to 6 x-sell products at one time by simply typing in the corresponding products’ model numbers into text fields. This service requires cross-sell to be installed, however does not override any files.

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How can you relate products effectively to maximize your sales volume? What are the ways to attract more customers to your web store? If you ever bother answering these questions, you should pay attention to the following marketing strategies intrinsically meant to boost your sales, increase average order size and customer pool.

• Cross-selling is a sales technique that consists in offering additional products that are likely to interest the customers when they make a purchase. Cross selling refers to the practice of promoting complimentary items – you link certain products together, draw customers’ attention to the products that complement their purchase and encourage them to explore these relevant items. Often to persuade the customer to accept the recommendation, retailers may also provide a cross selling offer discount.

  Cross-sell products may appear in the product info page (in this case people call them related products, meant to be purchased in addition to the item the customer is viewing) and on the shopping cart page. It is highly advisable to display cross-sells already in the shopping cart as customers tend to make more impulse buys on this stage. Anyway, choose wisely which products to highlight and where and what moment to offer cross-selling on your website. You can use the analytics website to find the best relevant associations between your products. But do not overwhelm the customer with additional products, cross-selling must be perceived as an intuitive ‘plus’.

  Apart from offering associated products, there is also a widespread cross-selling form called ‘People who bought this, also bought’ – in the order details page the customer sees products that other people have purchased along with the chosen product and thus can be easily induced to make additional purchase. This is a good way for retailers to maximize the cart. Keep in mind that with cross-selling you may increase your average buying basket by 30% – that is a third of your product sales.

• Up-selling is another proven strategy to drastically increase your online profits. Retailers can enhance their checkout process with an up-sell block to offer the customers an upgraded or premium version of a product customers have chosen. Discounts may also be applied with an up-sold product.

  Through selling the customers just before they complete their purchase, you easily generate add-on sales as the wallet is already out. If you are not focusing on this, you simply miss out on some serious opportunity to boost your cash flow.
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