Video has been proven to be a powerful driver of customer engagement and sales for online retailers. It is so important that retailers have gone beyond simple product videos and are now producing a wider variety of non-product video content.  They are also going to great lengths to make sure their customers can easily find these videos on their retail sites.  Many SLI customers have improved their search capabilities to include non-product content, and are now including graphic flags on products in search results for those that include video. And some are creating entire sections dedicated to video on their search results pages.

With all of this demand for video, the challenge many retailers now face is coming up with ideas for new videos and then finding someone to step in front of the camera.  If this is something you struggle with, the help you need may lie with your manufacturers and suppliers. Here are a variety of ideas for how you can tap into this resource to expand your store’s video library.

Manufacturer’s Videos
One of the easiest and fastest ways to add product videos to your site is to get them from the manufacturer. The quality of these videos is typically very high as manufacturers can justify big budgets for producing them. These videos can often be found with a simple search on YouTube or on the manufacturers web site.  When the video is on YouTube you can simply grab the code to embed it on your related product pages.

Motorcycle Superstore has made good use of this manufacturer’s video of the GoPro HD Hero2 camera by including it on their product page. The video is beautifully shot and features amazing action from those using the camera while they jump from airplanes, pull off extreme freestyle skiing tricks, dive with sharks, and free fall along cliffs in a wingsuit. And with over 8 million views, this is the sort of video that will not only engage your customers but also attract them to your site.

Manufacturer’s Rep Videos
The next time a manufacturer’s rep stops by to show off their new products, get out your video camera.  Since they have a deep knowledge of the products and are well practiced at presenting them, the manufacturer’s rep is one of the best people to put behind the camera.  This is also a good opportunity for someone in your business to jump in and ask questions.  The dialog between you and the rep makes for a more engaging video and shows your customers how well connected you are with those who produce the products you sell.

Here’s an example from Cruiser Customizing where the supplier and retailer work together to provide a nice overview of the types of motorcycle tool kits they sell.

How-To Videos
How to videos are a great way to create demand for your products.  When you teach someone how to do something new, you can expand the range of products they might buy and give them the confidence that they will be successful using those products.  An example from Northwest River Supplies (NRS), a manufacturer of paddling equipment, shows kayaking enthusiasts how to dress for fall touring.  The video showcases a variety of products that one would need, educates about product features and benefits, gives tips for how to use and also provides safety tips.  Since the presenter is an NRS employee who is an avid kayaker he is able to include some personal endorsement of the products.

Trade Show Videos
When you make that trek to your next industry trade show be sure to bring a video camera along.  You’ll find a large number of manufacturers eager to show off their products and answer your questions.  In just a few hours you’ll be able to capture enough video to keep your content pipeline full for months.  Video of the latest products and innovations makes for great Facebook posts and Tweets. These videos are also a great source of material to build a blog post around.

In this example a writer from Rockler Woodworking’s magazine Woodworker’s Journal pays a visit to the JET Powermatic booth at the AWFS show to learn about new changes to their products.

Instructional Videos
For more complex products manufacturers will often create instructional videos and may even include an instructional DVD with their product. In this example, Footwear Etc. has taken an  instructional DVD video included with their MBT Shoes and placed it on YouTube with a slight modification to include their brand name and contact info.  Footwear Etc. then links to the video from all of their MBT Shoes product pages.  Note, if you go this route be sure to get approval from the manufacturer before modifying their video.

As you can see from these examples, your manufactures and suppliers can have a big impact on your ability to deliver a steady flow of engaging video content.  As you put these ideas to use and publish exciting new video, don’t forget your responsibility for making sure your videos are easy to find.   Be sure to take advantage of the tools that your search solution provides to promote your videos in your site search results.

If you have other ideas for how manufacturers and suppliers can help retailers create video content and make it easier to find, please post them in the comments below.

How about sharing your thoughts on what 2012 will bring?

I’ll start – While 2011 could be called the year eRetailers got interested in mobile and social media, 2012 will likely be the year of the tablet, and … more social media.

As retailers begin to understand how people search, shop, and consume content on mobile devices, the soaring popularity of the iPad (one of the must-have items on people’s holiday wish lists this year), presents new challenges for retailers, as well as for those of us who provide products and services to them, in delivering a compelling shopping experience on the new “fourth screen.”

For tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire, the requirements for creating user-friendly search and navigation experiences are different than those for the mobile screen. We have more screen real estate to work with when it comes to tablets, which means a better display of product images and an easier-to-use touchscreen. On the other hand, “t-commerce” or “couch-commerce” will require a different experience than what is displayed on a personal computer or mobile screen. Site owners (and companies like ours) need to brainstorm ways to take advantage of the benefits of tablets (like brilliant displays of photos and videos), while keeping navigation streamlined.

For instance, tapping the screen is the standard method of navigation for tablets. However, small text menus – for instance, which you might find in lists of refinements – are hard to tap on without hitting another menu item by mistake. The same goes for buttons that are too close together, or pagination numbers: easy to click on with a mouse, tough to click on with a finger. In addition, as GetElastic reports, tablets are making it possible for website visitors to interact with content in new ways: people can “touch” content, swiping and zooming to choose how they view text and images. This tactile interaction may cause us to discover new ways to present information, new ways to display navigation, and new possibilities for innovative merchandising and SEO.

Users spend lots of time on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and now Pinterest. We can expect that the merging of e-commerce and social media will gain even more prominence in the months ahead. As we’ve discussed before in this blog, site owners have realized that if people are spending more and more time with their friends on social networks, the website search and shopping experience needs to come to the social setting – instead of trying to lure people away from their social networks.

Now, your turn. What are your predictions for 2012?

The use of smartphones and tablets for shopping this holiday was featured among the NRF’s list of the Top 10 trends for 2011. They predicted that half of Americans with smartphones and 70 percent of tablet owners would be using their devices to assist with their shopping.

Now that the majority of holiday shopping has been completed more reports are surfacing about actual usage.  According to IBM’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday Reports, sales from mobile devices were basically three times higher this year than last.  This data, which comes directly from the web analytics of top retailers, shows mobile devices driving from 10 to 14 percent of all web traffic and from 6.6 to 9.8 percent of all sales.

Mobile commerce has clearly arrived. The question retailers now need to be asking is how well are they meeting the needs of this new mobile consumer and what can they do to improve in 2012?

According to Tealeaf’s 2011 Mobile Shopping Experience Report, retailers have plenty of room to improve.  Their analysis of social conversations around mobile shopping found that 41 percent of the chatter voiced frustrations.  These frustrations were most often related to an inability to complete the purchase and problems searching for products.  A negative mobile experience could create even bigger problems for retailers as a Harris Interactive study points out with the finding that 63% of consumers who experience a problem conducting a mobile transaction say they would be less likely to buy from that company via other purchase channels. Ouch!

As you take a closer look at your mobile commerce strategy and initiatives one of the first steps I recommend is to separate smartphones from tablets.  Based on the data around usage and responses to surveys these devices are entirely two different beasts.  Some have even asked the question if tablets should even be considered mobile commerce. Others are coining new names for their use such as Tablet Commerce or T-Commerce.

Smartphones are being used to help shoppers find store locations and check hours.  And once these shoppers get to the store they put their smartphones to work to research products, read reviews, compare prices and fetch coupons.  Tablets on the other hand are primarily used for shopping at home on the couch or in bed.  In addition, tablet shoppers are about twice as likely to complete a purchase than those with smartphone based on the findings in the survey of online shoppers conducted by Equation Research for rich media merchandising company Zmags which produced a nice infographic summary of the results.

How people feel when using these devices also appears to be quite different.  The Zmags survey found that tablet owners felt happy and more excited to shop than those without tablets.  This was a stark contrast to tabletless smartphone and laptop owners who felt impatient, stressed or overwhelmed about shopping.  Further evidence of this impatience is illustrated in this infographic about disappointment of mobile customers created from another Equation Research survey.  A key finding was that 74 percent of mobile users would abandon a site if it didn’t load in five seconds or less.

With this in mind, here are some questions to think about:

1. How will you adjust you mobile commerce strategy to address the needs of these two types of customers?

2. How will this influence the designs of your mobile experiences on smartphones and tablets?

3. What unique content will you create and provide on these different devices?

Let us know your thoughts about these questions and any other comments or questions you have about the split personality of mobile commerce.

I am excited to introduce Steve Groenier as a new guest blogger at SLI Systems. Steve has a long history in e-commerce and online marketing, serving the past three years as VP of Marketing and eCommerce for IR500-ranked Artbeads.com.  He will be writing about the latest news and innovations in online marketing while supplying his perspective as an online retailer focused on driving growth.  This includes diving into the details and analyzing the numbers. His aim is to filter out the hype and identify the real opportunities for retailers to produce measurable and meaningful results.

Steve is passionate about finding innovative ways to drive growth for online retailers and has a track record for producing results.  His early adoption of new advertising channels such as Amazon Product Ads and Google Remarketing have been featured in industry publications and Google case studies.  At Artbeads.com Steve launched numerous initiatives to improve the customer experience, increase conversion rates and build a customer community.  SLI Systems Learning Search, Merchandising and Site Champion where among these initiatives.

In his own words, Steve says, “I believe online retailers must deliver quality content, engaging and personalized experiences, and community interaction in order to attract customers and build lifetime loyalty.”  He has shared his views with retailers while speaking at the 2011 Online Retailer Conference in Sydney, Australia and recently in an SLI Systems webinar titled, “How to Build Better Brand Loyalty By Adding Social Content To Your Site Search.”

While Steve would say that the creative work in online marketing is his first love he would be quick to point out, “it’s the science of online marketing that I find the most interesting and potentially game changing.”  Steve believes in tracking everything, rigorous testing and making data-driven decisions.  As such, with every blog post, you can expect Steve will have something to say about the numbers.

We look forward to having Steve blog for SLI Systems.

Did Mobile Commerce Really Drive the Growth in eCommerce Holiday Sales?

Like I said in my previous blog: This Holiday season was great. According to IBM, who produces two benchmark reports tracking online sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales increased 33% over 2010 says. And it would seem that we all skipped the nap after our Thanksgiving meals to get a head start on shopping.  Thanksgiving day sales grew by the largest amount, up 39.3 percent with Black Friday up by 24.3 percent and Cyber Monday up 33 percent.

Home goods and department stores saw the greatest gains on Cyber Monday with increases from 2010 of 68 percent and 60 percent respectively.  Looking a little deeper at the data it was interesting to see that both of these categories showed significant gains in their conversion rates.  Home goods retailers were up over 22 percent and department stores saw conversion rate increases of over 16 percent.

Improving conversion rates is a major initiative for every ecommerce exec so the big question on my mind was how did they achieve such strong gains.  Did they offer better deals than last year?  Had they redesign their site to improve usability?  Or, did this increase in conversion have something to do with the surge in mobile commerce activity?

On Cyber Monday, IBM reported that traffic from mobile devices was up 161 percent and mobiles share of total sales had grown by almost 200 percent.  The data from Black Friday showed similar gains and indicated that mobile was responsible for nearly 10 percent of total sales. Conversion rates from mobile were up as well with Cyber Monday showing an increase of 26 percent and Black Friday up by 32 percent.  Mobile commerce clearly had a hand in these conversion rate improvements and since this data was in aggregate, it could have had an even bigger impact on the home goods and department store categories.

These retailers have definitely been making significant investments in mobile initiatives this year.  Just about every major department store has launched new mobile websites and apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.  The improvements were focused on building features to make shopping easier.  For instance, search functionality was enhanced to include refinements and sorting.  The new apps for the most part included the ability to create shopping lists and some like those from Sears, Macy’s, Kohl’s and Target even added the ability to scan QR and barcodes so finding product information was even easier.

Department stores are also at the head of the pack in terms of their mobile site performance.  Sears, J.C. Penny and Walmart are consistently ranked at the top of the weekly Keynote Mobile Commerce Performance Index.  To speed up access, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s have gone even further by adding free Wi-Fi service this year in most stores.

Aside from the mobile initiatives, I think Free Shipping promotions were another factor that likely led to the conversion rate improvements.  At the end of August, Nordstrom began offering Free Shipping for the majority of items. On Cyber Monday, Macy’s dropped their minimum order value to qualify for free shipping from $99 to $75 and Kohls.com completely eliminated their $50 minimum purchase requirement.

I’m sure an interview with the heads of ecommerce at these major department stores would reveal many more actions they took to improve conversion rates.  Until then, I would love to hear what changes you have made to drive higher conversion rates and find out how that is working out.  Share you thoughts in the comments box below.

Welcome back everybody and Happy New year! This Holiday season was great, by most measures, which has prompted me to write about it.

While the news for brick-and-mortar stores was good overall, it’s the online retailers who saw some of the biggest gifts from Santa this season.  Physical stores on average grew same stores sales of 3.4 percent year-over-year and some such as Macy’s did much better with a growth of 6.6 percent.  But for Macy’s the real excitement was at their online stores with both macys.com  and Bloomingdales.com producing gains of 36 percent in December.  The story was similar with other online retailers, which according to comScore, Inc. grew sales by 15 percent year-over-year to rake in a record $37.2 billion this holiday season.

Some online retailers such as eBags announced gains of 32 percent over last year along with even stronger numbers on Cyber Monday, which broke their largest single day record by 46%.  So what drove this incredible growth?  eBags gave the credit in part to their optimization efforts which focused on site speed, site search, and their product pages.  Another bright spot for eBags was with sales from mobile devices, which grew 187 percent and accounted for 9 percent of eBags.com total sales.

In the coming days I will be diving deeper into these metrics to uncover what moved the needle for online retailers this holiday. I’ll explore which stores saw the greatest growth and reveal clues we found that could be what made the difference.  We’ll also take a closer look at the impact mobile devices and social media had for retailers this year and tell you which retailers are in the lead with these initiatives.

If you have a comment or burning question on your mind about what worked well for you this Holiday season, or how to improve your customer experience this year, leave a comment below.

Over the past several weeks we’ve shared with you some of the advice provided in our downloadable “Big Book of Navigation Tips.” Perhaps one of the key take-aways in the Big Book is that your job of enhancing navigation is never done – there are always more improvements that can be made. Product catalogues, buying trends, and customer behaviors all change, and a good retail site is one that keeps up with these shifts – whether seasonal or otherwise.

In the last section of the book, we provide some tips for how you can keep up with the trends and continuously improve your site’s navigation to engage visitors and convert them into happy customers. Below are a couple tips to get you started. You can find the complete set of these and other tips in the “Big Book of Navigation Tips“.

1. Run multivariate tests to continue improving your navigation – As you go through the process of updating your site navigation, you will need to test, test more, and test again. It’s a good idea to test different layout options, refinements, categories, and results orders to make sure you’re providing your visitors an optimal user experience and improving your chances to convert them into customers.

2. Examine your search logs for site navigation option cues – If you’re having trouble deciding what categories you should select for site navigation, looking at what people are searching for on your site is a great place to start. The search terms visitors are using in the search box is a good indication of how they may want to navigate on your site. For example, if there are a lot of queries with manufacturers’ names then manufacturer (or brand) should probably be a navigation option. If people are searching for waterproof products, consider adding this as a navigation option. Your analytics or site search software should be able to provide this information. It’s also important to look at your analytics on a regular basis, as new trends may dictate the need for new categories.

Just like in a physical store, it’s important to merchandise your navigation pages with information about what products are on sale, the promotions you’re running, what items are marked for clearance, and any other specials that you’re offering. There are a few ways to showcase this information – refinements, banners, and specialized landing pages are a few examples. Below are a couple tips to get you started.

1. Have merchandising-specific refinements – Refinements don’t have to be limited to product details. Visitors want to know what sales items, special offers, bundles and clearance items, you’re offering. Allowing them to refine by these factors is a great way to improve the usability of your site, and guide visitors to items you are promoting, while improving conversion potential.

2. Rank the products in a way that makes sense for your business – Many companies choose to order their products by popularity. This minimizes the amount of clicks people will typically make to get to the products they’re looking for. Consider also showing your highest margin products first, or the ones you have excess stock for.

You can separate the results into “items on special promotion” and “most popular items” for example, or show all items in the same results list, but with the top 5 items in excess stock first followed by the most popular items. We occasionally encounter websites that rank their products alphabetically by default. This is almost always a non-optimal way to rank your products, although it is sometimes a useful sort option.

For more tips, download the full ebook – Big Book of Navigation Tips.

When approaching navigation it’s important to remember that search engine spiders are a key audience. Google, Bing and other search engines analyze site navigation structures as they crawl your site to understand what’s important. For example, if a product page is only two clicks away from the home page it will be considered more important than one that is four or five clicks away. Not only should the pages be able to be crawled, but in many cases they should also be indexed. So be sure to follow SEO best practices when designing navigation pages so they rank well in natural search results.

Below are some tips to help you in this regard. You can find the complete set of SEO tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” available from our website. Next week we’ll provide some tips related to online merchandising in navigation so be sure to check back.

1. Ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines. To ensure your navigation pages can be crawled by Internet search engines, use short URLs that include useful keywords to your navigation pages (e.g., category or subcategories) with very little parameters. Avoid using javascript-produced links because the spiders may have trouble interpreting these. Also ensure that navigation pages are not excluded in your robots.txt file.

2. Include title and <h1> tags on your navigation pages. Customize your title and <h1> tags to include the category title of each category page. These are both located at the top of category pages and are factors that search engines consider when ranking a page. The text in the title tag appears in the search engine results – so it should be accurate, unique and compelling. You may also want to include subcategories within the title tag to help rank for those more specific keywords.

3. When making any changes to your navigation, consider what to do with your old navigation links. The main issue is the old navigation links may have generated great SEO results. You will likely want your new navigation pages to benefit from your old navigation pages’ popularity. The recommended way of handling this is to use a 301 redirect. This will redirect the old navigation links to any equivalent new navigation link. By doing this, the value of the old page will be linked to the new page, minimizing the negative impact on your SEO.

Refinements are an important part of navigation, as they help narrow a broad category so visitors get to items they’re looking for more quickly – and also help them get to particular items to suit their needs such as size, brand, style, or price faster. There is no shortage of options for how to present navigation refinements, which means some retailers offer too many choices or they present refinements in a way that confuses the visitors. Below are a couple of tips to guide you in this area. You can find a whole slew of refinement tips by downloading the complete “Big Book of Navigation Tips,” now available from our website.

Next week we’ll cover SEO, so stay tuned.

1. Consider using sliders for continuous refinements Test the placement of refinements – Using sliders for refinements like price or size range take up less space and are a nice tool to use along with AJAX to build smooth transitions from one information display to the next. Some visitors may find them more complicated than the alternatives – links or drop downs with fixed ranges, or text boxes allowing you to specify an upper and lower limit. So test and make sure your visitors do understand how they work and consider offering alternatives. Make sure your sliders work well on a touch screen device, and if they don’t you can  provide alternative way of displaying them.

2. Make sure navigational images can’t be confused as products – Navigation usability tests were conducted by showing participants a retail site with three product subcategories represented by an image and the associated text description. Many participants misunderstood that  the images were representations and took them to be three product images and assumed there were only three products. You should try to avoid these types of misunderstandings as much as possible. You can minimize confusion on navigation pages by showing products as well as subcategories. You can show other cues that will help differentiate between subcategories and products – such as showing the number of results they’ll see if they click on the subcategory images, label the subcategory images clearly and make sure there’s a clear distinction between the layout of your products and subcategories.