Incorporating video into site search

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When I was at the Internet Retailer design show in Miami last month I noticed that more and more retailers are using video on their site. Fat Brain Toys president and co-founder, Mark Carson showed me an example of video on their site that shows kids playing with one of the more popular toys on their site – the Bilibo. Videos like this help potential customers get a much better sense of how the product works and how it looks.  As well as improving conversions I’m sure they will also help drive traffic if the videos are posted on YouTube and the like.

In addition I had the pleasure of sitting next to Cynthia Morgan one evening. Cynthia is president of Quadras Integrated – an agency that now specializes in producing video for online retailers.

All this talk got me thinking about how we can incorporate video into site search. I started sharing some ideas with an engineer who was walking past my office and he informed me he had already implemented them and more for an existing customer, etrailer. It doesn’t seem that long ago that that I was intimately familiar with the search on all of our customers’ sites – including how they were laid out, how many searches they got per day, what the top search terms were and a host of other details. Now we are running the search for over 350 sites it’s just not possible to do – although this is a problem I’m happy to have. It’s nice to see that their is innovation happening that I don’t know about.

Here are the ways etrailer are incorporating video with site search using the example search  sway-control:

1. Products that have video associated with them show an icon beside the listing. In this case the icon is a fairly small “TV” icon. You can try something larger, more prominent if you want to highlight the video more.
   
2. They show videos that are related to the products shown in the search results on the search results page. In this case they are shown at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the video takes you to a page where the video is played.
   
3. They have a facet at the top that shows just the videos and articles when you click on it

SLI conducted a Trends in Ecommerce survey last year. 32 percent of the participating retailers indicated they intended to pilot online video in the next 12 months. If  you are one of the retailers that is doing this – I recommend you look to highlight the videos in your site and navigation. This will make more people aware that you have the videos and should help with your conversions.