There are thousands of housewares and home furnishings eCommerce sites for consumers to choose from. That’s a lot of options. So how does a company stand out among the rest? Product videos might be the best bet. Digital video on a landing page has an incredible ability to increase conversions by helping consumers understand the product and provide as much information as possible about the products offered. Consumers don’t want to spend their time reading about a product. They want videos. Brands that cater to such demands are more likely to see higher sales and gain loyal customers.
Video Review Labs worked with Phoenix-based eCommerce brand, House Home & More, to build out a holistic video strategy and create product videos for their entire product catalog. House Home & More started out with a beautiful brand, but struggled to tell their story online and to communicate their products’ quality through text and photos.
Carpets and rugs can easily come across as flat and cheap in images and it can be tough to build lifestyle visuals around them. Shoppers weren’t able to tell the difference between House Home & More’s high quality, American made products and cheaper off-shore produced knockoffs. They had quality construction and expertise to prove and a story to tell. So the Video Review Labs team attacked the project in two halves: indoor and outdoor products. We produced the indoor product videos first with a gap of time in between projects to strategically test video performance on the site and make changes in the outdoor category.
Creating the Videos
For the indoor portion of the project, our team flew out to Phoenix to work directly with the HHM team. We wanted to form a long-term relationship and knew real face time with the people behind the brand was necessary to get a sense for the “why” and the voice behind it all. It also gave us the opportunity to film some inside their factory and warehouse to really tell the brand’s story and drive home the American made quality aspect of the products.
We worked remotely to coordinate the entire shoot. We filmed inside a model home where we could match the products and style the house so the product videos felt like a stylish lookbook of how to integrate indoor carpets into your home (as opposed to being just informational). We created the vibe of a family home and followed the main character who is the typical purchasing decision maker for housewares: the mom.
We produced the next set of videos in Austin at a home with a beautiful backyard for the outdoor product videos. Location scouting was key here to find the best spot creatively, but also was a lot of work to make sure everything was measured correctly down to the inch for the products to be custom cut in Phoenix.
Proof is in the Pudding (or Analytics)
Videos were implemented at the product page level, category level, and on respective company pages like “Commitment to Quality” and “About Us”. We measured the impact of the indoor product videos three months after they had been implemented across the site. We used Google Analytics and Wistia’s player analytics to track results precisely. Here is what we found:
20.88% conversion rate increase
Conversion rates site-wide increased by 20.88%. That led to 8.15% more transactions and a 7.04% increase in total revenue. This was partly because of an improved cart-to-detail rate (the rate at which products are added to the cart after viewing product details.) Basically, this metric tells us that people are clicking a product page to learn more about a product and getting the information they need to make a purchase rather than not getting what they want and backing out of the page. Plus the conversion of shoppers whose first time it was to interact with the site went up 8%. That means people who came to the site for the very first time felt more confident to buy with video than without video on the site.
Video viewers were 23% more likely to buy versus non-video viewers
We also found that if you viewed a video on your first visit then you are more likely to return to the site. Once the user returned, they were 3x more likely to convert.
Average video viewership was 70%
That means people are watching each video 70% of the way through before clicking out of it. This is a really good level of viewership for product videos, especially longer videos like these that fell in the 60 to 90 second range. This metric led us to the decision to still make the outdoor product videos and all future videos a little bit shorter to fall in the 30 to 45 second time range as opposed to 60 to 90 seconds so we can get viewership even higher.
Unique Purchases For Tape-Down Stair Treads Increased 145.45%
This metric really stood out because this is probably HHM’s most complicated product. It was one of the driving reasons to create product videos in the first place because people always struggled with comprehending exactly how these stair treads are installed. So this increase was really cool to see because we were able to communicate the value of the product and educate people well enough through video to actually grow sales significantly.
Product videos made a significant impact on House Home & More’s eCommerce business. Product videos helped elevate the brand to a new level with a sleek, big brand look that shoppers felt comfortable engaging with. Strong creative and strategically placed videos on the site led to greater conversions, order values, and overall revenue. Customers were more educated about the products and felt a stronger connection with the brand which made them more likely to buy and become returning customers.
To compete in this space houseware brands really do need to implement new media like product videos, especially to contend with the big boys like Home Depot and Lowe’s. The value of working with a team like Video Review Labs is that we are creative and nimble to where we can create different types of videos to test online and find the right path to growing an online business with a long-term video relationship. Get in touch with us to talk about how we can plan and execute product videos for your eCommerce or Amazon business to drive real results.
