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Whether you’re using WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, or any other platform, one thing remains the same: ecommerce design is about the customer. You want to design your online store around the preferences of your shoppers — that’s how to raise conversion rates. And what do shoppers want? They want product videos.

These statistics from HubSpot make a pretty compelling case. Of the people polled…

• 71% think video explains the product better.
• 58% view companies with product videos as more trustworthy.
• 46% will shop at a brick-and-mortar store if a product video is unavailable.
• 73% more shoppers buy items after watching a product video.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it: videos partially circumvent some of the biggest disadvantages of ecommerce. There’s a lot of fear around buying products online because you’re never exactly sure about what you’re getting. Photos and images are one thing, but actually holding the product in hands before buying is another.

Videos help shoppers understand the product better. They show the product from multiple angles and in motion, giving insights into size, weight, mobility, and texture that photographs alone cannot. In fact, 57% of consumers say that videos reduce ambiguity, and as a result lower both customer dissatisfaction and the rate of returns.

Moreover, how-to videos can explain how to use a product. Seeing just an image, a shopper may have a million questions about the features or controls; they may not even bother asking your customer support because they could just go examine the product at a brick-and-mortar store.

But with a product video that doubles as an instructional video, all their questions are answered. You may even earn repeat visits; after the product is ordered and delivered, the customer may return to the product page to rewatch the video (which also increases the likelihood of them giving a rating/review).

Videos are also advantageous to search engine optimization. A 2015 Searchmetrics study showed that video appears in 14% of search engine results. That means if people are searching for a product you offer, having a product video could give you an advantage over your competitors. That statistics is from 2015, too — imagine how much stronger videos have become in SEO during the last two years.

As a visual artform, videos form stronger emotional bonds with shoppers than static photos. Moving images and animated facial expressions convey the target emotional atmosphere much more effectively. Imagine a still image of a child running to their mother compared to a live-action video. Which do you think is more likely to incite the emotional spark needed to make a sale?

Last, videos are easy to share on social media. This makes them a valuable marketing tool; every new share is free advertising, not to mention a vote of confidence. People tend to trust the recommendations of their friends, so if they see someone they know sharing your video, it makes your entire brand seem more appealing.

On the downside, videos tend to be more expensive to create than other media. Still, you should create ones for as many products as you can afford. The statistics above don’t lie: more product videos means more sales.

Questions? Suggestions? We want to hear your thoughts, so share your opinions below in the comments section now.

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Google recently announced a new cloud advertising analytics platform, Ads Data Hub, to give eCommerce merchants and other advertisers insight into the performance of advertising campaigns, with a particular focus on mobile. In recent years, brands have become increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of advertising data available from mobile campaigns, and Ads Data Hub hopes to give them a powerful tool for aggregating and analyzing advertising data from multiple sources including, but not limited to, the Google Display Network and DoubleClick.

Ads Data Hub is intended to help eCommerce advertisers to assess the value of advertising strategies and focus budgets where they’ll be most effective. Using a combination of big data analytics techniques and Google’s extensive cloud analytics infrastructure, Ads Data Hub allows retailers to collate large amounts of data from multiple channels to give advertisers insight into customer journeys in a way that has been difficult to achieve as mobile evolved to become the dominant computing and communication platform.

In the early days of eCommerce advertising, it was relatively straightforward to track the effectiveness of advertising. Most people used only one desktop machine, and tracking users from first contact with an advert to conversion didn’t present much of technical headache. On today’s mobile-centric multi-device web, it’s more difficult to establish the value of advertising campaigns and to target advertising effectively.

The lack of good data and a way to combine data from a fragmented mobile landscape discourages brands that expect to see a clear return on their advertising dollars. That’s bad news for Google: the vast majority of Google’s profits come from advertising.

Ads Data Hub is based on Google’s BigQuery platform, an industry-leading cloud big data analytics service that is capable of analyzing very large datasets very quickly. Advertisers will be able to pull together all their advertising data, including cross-device activity data and customer data from other sources, such as demographic data and search data. With the ability to collate all relevant data on a single platform, advertisers can build a complete picture of user journeys. The insights provided by Ads Data Hub can then be used to plan advertising campaigns and place advertising where it will generate the best return.

Measuring the effectiveness of mobile advertising is particularly problematic for eCommerce retailers. A common source of problems is the mismatch between advertising data and sales data, which rightly makes brands suspicious that advertising data isn’t as reliable as it might be and decreases confidence in the advertising data provided by Google’s existing tools, including Google Analytics. Without good data, advertisers have no clear idea of whether their marketing budgets are being spent effectively or where advertising should be targeted for an optimal return.

In theory, at least, Ads Data Hub will help eCommerce retailers to tie together all the relevant sources of data and gain a more complete picture of their customers’ journey to conversion. Ads Data Hub is currently in limited beta.

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Chatbots are taking the world by storm. Over the last year, the media has been full of stories about how chatbots are changing the way eCommerce merchants and other companies interact with customers. It seems as if every major instant chat provider has created a framework for building chatbots. This enthusiasm for chatbots is driven by the ubiquity of instant chat applications and the desire of brands to inject themselves into those conversations. Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Apple’s Messages, see huge user engagement, and brands want to be wherever the users are.

But how do you get people to talk to your chatbots in the first place? The user has to instigate the conversation. Potential users of a conversational interface have to be both aware of the existence of a chatbot and have some understanding of why engaging with it is good for them, and, unlike with a traditional web interaction, Google isn’t much help.

Twitter’s Direct Message Cards are an attempt to address the problem. Available in limited beta to Twitter advertisers, Direct Message Cards are promoted rich tweets into which advertisers can embed a series of canned responses. The tweet itself contains a prompt, and when the user chooses one of the options, it’s passed to the brand’s account, and they can respond with further automated DMs or by looping a human into the conversation.

I can see Direct Message Cards being particularly useful to eCommerce merchants, who can use Twitter’s targeting to prompt engagement with product or promotion specific tweets, and then follow up with targeted conversational responses depending on the option the user chooses.

If Direct Message Cards sound a little like the menu trees of old, you aren’t the first to have made the link. In spite of the hype around chatbots, the state of the art in conversational interfaces isn’t particularly sophisticated. The more ambitious chatbots are, the greater the chance of frustrating users who expect human-like conversations and end up with something closer to a menu tree or an 80s text adventure.

That said, for some eCommerce interactions, Direct Message Cards are likely to prove appealing to retailers, who benefit from the opportunity to open a direct line of contact to interested shoppers and to reach a wider audience through organic sharing.

Although I’ve focused on the way Direct Message Cards can be used with conversational interfaces, in essence they’re just rich media tweets that support multiple calls-to-action and integrate with Twitter’s direct message system. JollyChic is using Direct Message Cards to engage with shoppers and, after a limited interaction in a chat interface, direct them to the appropriate product page on their store or to an app install page.

Although Twitter isn’t at the forefront of social eCommerce, over the last couple of years they’ve rolled out several eCommerce-friendly features in a bid to attract retail adversing dollars. Direct Message Cards are an excellent addition that has the potential to help eCommerce merchants engage with customers along a more meaningful and personal dimension than simple promoted tweets.

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The evidence is in: video is a vital part of the future of eCommerce. 80 percent of millennials watch videos before making a purchase decision. eCommerce stores with videos on product pages benefit from higher engagement and shoppers stay longer. The dominance of mobile and video-centric social media means that more shoppers than ever are exposed to video — Facebook has made it clear that it thinks video is the future of its platform and that videos are more likely to appear in the Newsfeed than text and images.

All of which is making some eCommerce merchants nervous. After all, video is hard, right? And hard means expensive. To create video, you need to hire a video professional or invest in expensive cameras, lenses, lighting, studio time. All of which would blow the marketing budgets of many eCommerce stores out of the water.

But, in 2017, is video really all that difficult or expensive? Feature-rich cameras that would once have cost thousands of dollars can be bought for just a few hundred dollars today. And, of course, anyone with a recent iPhone or Android phone has a high-definition camera in their pocket.

But most important, the expectations around video have changed. There will always be a place for video with high production values, and professional video will always be expensive, but much of the most effective video on social media isn’t necessarily the slickest. Many successful videos are personal, with reasonable but not fantastic production value, and are essentially ephemeral.

Where video is concerned, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and eCommerce merchants shouldn’t be discouraged from creating and distributing product and brand focused video just because they don’t have the budget of Louis Vuitton.

Instagram and SnapChat are hugely popular among their distinct demographics, and it couldn’t be easier to use them to create and distribute slick and effective videos showcasing products. There’s no reason a fashion retailer shouldn’t showcase their products in short videos. If you sell tech products, make short demonstration videos. Any retailer can create “slice of life” videos showing the day-to-day life of their company.

And it’s not just social media networks like Instagram that make building a brand with video easy. Periscope is hugely popular and makes live-streaming a doddle. As I’ve argued in other articles, to compete with large eCommerce stores, smaller stores must focus on building brands that appeal directly to their customers — live streaming can powerfully contribute to cementing the relationship between your store and its customers.

One of my favorite new developments in the mobile video space is Apple’s Clips app. Clips provides a simple intuitive interface for recording, editing, annotating, and sharing video. The major benefit of Clips is that it isn’t tied to a particular social network. You can record and edit with Clips before sending video to any social network.

Video is going to be a big part of the future of eCommerce. If you haven’t started experimenting with video yet, what’s stopping you?

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Ecommerce is now a part of everyday life. According to a Pew Research report, 79% of Americans shop online. More than 40% make online purchases several times a month, and 15% do so on a weekly basis.

So, getting people to buy online is easy these days…right?

Nope! According to the same report, fully 64% of Americans say that, all things equal, they would rather buy from a physical store. Only 14% would buy online without at least checking the price at a physical location first.

Why the stubborn love for in-store shopping? Here’s a clue: 84% of Americans say that being able to ask questions about a first-time purchase is at least somewhat important. 42% say it’s extremely important.

But that doesn’t mean physical retailers get the last word! There are plenty of tools that will allow you to talk to online shoppers human-to-human, just like you would in a physical store. The most common is live chat.

Live chat (when staffed by a helpful, genuine person) is like the salesperson we all wish worked in every physical store. It’s there when your visitors need it, without being obnoxious or hard to get rid of if they prefer to browse on their own. And for you as a retailer, it’s even better—with live chat transcripts, you always have a record of feedback and a reminder to follow up.

Read on for some tips on making the most of live chat as a sales tool, or head to this page to add learn more about adding Olark Live Chat to your Hostdedi Magento store.

Tip #1: Make live chat available!

Just adding the option to talk to a human in real time can increase conversions among visitors who would otherwise have taken their questions to a competitor’s physical store. The questions you field will also help you improve your store pages—for example, if you receive a lot of chat inquiries about sizing, you might need to add detail to your size chart or make it more visible on your site.

“But if I add a chatbox to my site, doesn’t that mean I need to be available to answer questions all the time?”

That’s one of the most common questions we get here at Olark Live Chat, and the answer is no! Most live chat products, including Olark, offer an easy option to convert your chatbox to an email form when you’re offline. You’ll also be able to limit the number of chats you receive at one time so you don’t get overwhelmed.

If you want to encourage your site visitors to start a conversation about a specific product or service, you could even set the chatbox to appear only on certain pages—or add a click-to-chat button right next to a product listing on your site. For an example, check out how Apple’s chat placement on this page.

Tip #2: Chat proactively.

While many visitors will initiate a chat as soon as they have a question, others need a little nudge or a reminder that a real live human is available to help.

If someone’s been clicking around your site for a while without making a purchase, it’s a good indication that they have unanswered questions or can’t find what they’re looking for. Live chat tools like Olark give you visibility into this kind of visitor behavior pattern, so you can send a proactive chat of the “Hi there! Can I help you find something?” variety.

You can also send automated live chat messages based on particular behaviors. For example, you could trigger an automated message to send to anyone who visits the landing page for a new product, pointing out certain features and inviting questions. If a visitor replies to the automated message, you’ll receive a notification to take over and continue the conversation.

Wondering whether your visitors will answer an unsolicited chat? We did, do—so we did a little analysis, and found that over 30% of proactive chats receive a response from the visitor! For more data on the effectiveness of proactive chat, check out this post on the Olark blog.

Tip #3: Capture leads and follow up.

You may not close every sale in a single chat interaction, and that’s okay! The important thing is to start building a relationship with the visitors you engage through chat.

Try to collect basic information, such as a first name and email address, from everyone you chat with. You can do this by asking visitors to fill out a short survey when they start a chat, or simply by asking politely for their information so you can follow up.

If you use a CRM, such as Salesforce or Hubspot, integrate it with your live chat software so you can attach chat transcripts to customer records. Transcripts are packed with information that will help you tailor sales activities and marketing campaigns. If someone mentions in chat that they’re shopping for a wedding, that they have a five year-old, or that they’re trying to eat healthier, you can make sure they recieve content and product promotions related to their specific circumstances and needs.

Thinking about giving live chat a try? We’d love to help! Start a free two-week trial to get access to all of Olark Live Chat’s premium features and integrations, and be sure to stop by our website if you have questions—we’re available five days a week on chat.

Author

Kate Urban – As Olark’s Story Sherpa, Kate is responsible for shaping and shepherding human-centric stories of sales and support (say that ten times fast). In her free time, she enjoys mountain trails, bear hugs, and chocolate everything.

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Pricing is one of the most difficult decisions to make for eCommerce store owners. Although shoppers aren’t as price sensitive as some like to make out, poor pricing decisions can have a huge impact on revenues. If prices are high compared to the value on offer or the brand perception of the seller, sales will suffer, but in this article I’d like to discuss pricing errors made in the other direction.

It’s tempting to compete on price. If a store sells into a competitive niche, undercutting the competition might seem to be an easy win. But starting a price war or basing your business’s competitive strategy on low pricing puts it on a short road to a difficult place.

Let’s get the exceptions out of the way. There are successful businesses that compete almost entirely on price. They sell the same products other merchants sell, but they sell them cheaper. Their business model is based on being the low-cost leader in a market.

Big retailers like Walmart and Ikea have enough heft that they can put pricing pressure on their suppliers and benefit from economies of scale, but they offer little added value compared to up-market brands. And of course, retailers of commodity goods usually only have price to compete on.

Being the low-cost leader is a difficult business model to sustain unless you have a size advantage. Most smaller eCommerce stores will find it impossible to source products at prices comparable to those afforded to their larger competitors.

And that’s one of the major problems with competing on price. There are two ways to lower prices sustainably in the short term. Reduce profits or reduce costs. Reducing costs means cutting support, staff, wages, marketing budgets, and in many other areas that contribute to the growth of a business and the loyalty of its customers.

If you adopt low price as your strategy, then your business must be continually focused on lowering and controlling costs–like Walmart. You are attracting the price buyers, customers who are not loyal, but are looking for the lowest price. Once a competitor figures out how to sell a similar product for less, they will charge lower prices and you will struggle.

A key point to consider here is that if you can charge less, so can your competitor. If you have larger competitors in the same space, they may be able to afford to cut costs to the point at which they’re making a loss just to drive your customers to their store — and these are customers that have little loyalty because you won’t be able to invest in areas of your business that cultivate loyalty.

None of which is to say that promotions are a bad idea or that temporary price reductions to bring new customers to your store are harmful. They aren’t. But it is harmful to your business if you lean too heavily on price as a competitive advantage.

Many companies manage to thrive in spite of charging more than the competition, sometimes much more. How do they do it? By investing in branding and customer service processes that increase actual and perceived value. Shoppers are loyal to retailers that make them feel good about their purchases and valued as a customer — all of which costs the retailer. But if you have to choose between knocking a few cents off the cost of your products and investing in better customer service, I’d advise adding value before cutting prices almost every time.

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