What is Video Shopping? Types, Benefits & Strategies

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Video shopping has become a norm for consumers today. Thanks to the improved digitalization that has encouraged and allowed customers to engage in video shopping confidently through videos. 

While factors like secure online payments, improved customer services, fast shipping, and easy returns have bolstered consumers’ trust in e-commerce, it’s no secret that providing this level of convenience is a Herculean task for e-commerce brands. 

Video shopping, a promising solution, offers e-commerce businesses the convenience and accessibility to showcase their products in real-life scenarios. Additionally, video shopping also boosts sales and conversion rates, improves brand storytelling, provides cost-effective marketing, and reduces customer retention costs by minimizing product return rates. 

First, let’s understand what is video shopping. 

What is Video Shopping?

Video shopping is the process of directly buying and selling of products through products showcased in a video. This approach includes videos such as live streams, pre-recorded short videos or collaborative video content to present a brand’s products or services. 

In video shopping, viewers can interact with the host or seller through comments, chats, or direct messages, allowing for a personalized and interactive shopping experience or, in case of pre-recorded videos, consumers can click on tagged products on videos and make their purchases directly within the video viewing experience. 

Types of Video Shopping

Video shopping involves various types of content on which brands can enable shopping. Here are some commonly involved major types of formats: 

1. Live Shopping Streams

Live shopping streams are one of the most popular types of shopping videos. These videos allow e-commerce brands to host live streams where customers can easily explore products and shop them directly, without navigating to different platforms. There are two types of live shopping streams: 

• On-website: Many third-party video apps allow brands to host live shopping streams on their brand’s website, allowing website visitors to discover new products and make purchases directly from the live video.
• On social media: Many brands collaborate with influencers, content creators or hire models to host live shopping streams for them on social media channels like YouTube and Facebook. In these videos, brands present their products through videos, and customers can purchase them by commenting on the video or sending DMs. 

2. Pre-Recorded Videos

Another type of video shopping involves adding shoppable product tags to pre-recorded videos and integrating them into the website’s landing pages. These videos may contain branded video content showcasing products or collaborative creator content displaying products through engaging product demonstrations. Brands can then turn them shoppable, allowing customers to purchase directly from the videos. 

3. Social Media Posts

Channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok are no just social media platforms but also immersive e-commerce tools that offer users the ability to create social media shops, wherein they can upload products and facilitate purchases on the store. Brands can post videos on their social media accounts and add shoppable product tags to the content, allowing users to make purchases seamlessly. 

Benefits of Video Shopping for Businesses

The e-commerce industry is experiencing tremendous growth at present. Strategies like video shopping are allowing brands to unlock a wide array of opportunities for brands to grow and convert more customers. However, there’s more to this strategy than meets the eye. Here are some advantages of video shopping: 

1. Increased Sales & Conversion Rates

What exactly is video shopping? Simply put, it is utilizing video content to showcase and sell products. By using shoppable video content in the right places, brands can significantly boost sales and conversion rates by providing consumers with a more engaging and interactive shopping experience.

Content like live demonstrations, product showcases, and interactive Q&A sessions can help overcome purchase barriers, address customer concerns, and encourage immediate purchasing decisions.

2. Improved Brand Storytelling

Another benefit of making engaging video content shoppable is that it allows brands to present the products in a real use case. Video content allows businesses to effectively tell their brand story, showcase their values and pain points, and connect with consumers on a deeper level. Through compelling visuals, storytelling, and demonstrations, businesses can create emotional connections with their audience, foster brand loyalty, and differentiate themselves from competitors.

3. Cost-Effective Marketing

When it comes to marketing, videos have emerged as powerful tools that not only allow businesses to showcase their offerings more effectively but also reach their audiences with better impact in a cost-effective way. 

Leveraging existing video content, utilizing free or affordable live-streaming platforms, and reaching a targeted audience through social media channels can help businesses maximize their marketing ROI and achieve better results with less investment.

4. Enhanced Product Visualization

Product visualization plays a crucial role in e-commerce businesses. Video shopping allows businesses to showcase products in detail, highlight features, and provide immersive visual experiences that static images or text descriptions cannot capture.

High-quality video content, 360-degree product views, and virtual tours can enhance product visualization, increase consumer confidence, and reduce the likelihood of returns or dissatisfaction.

5. Convenience & Accessibility

Video shopping offers consumers the convenience of shopping anytime, anywhere, without the constraints of physical store hours or locations.

By providing accessible and user-friendly video shopping experiences across various devices and platforms, businesses can reach a broader audience, cater to diverse consumer needs, and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Top 5 Video Shopping Platforms

Now that you know the benefits of using video shopping for your business, it is important to understand that having an efficient platform to help you achieve your goals is vital. Here are some of the best video shopping platforms in the market currently:

1. Tagshop

Tagshop is a leading video shopping platform offering immersive shoppable features such as video content aggregation, customization themes and integration with all major e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Woocommerce, etc. The tool allow businesses to add product tags to all kinds of video content such as Instagram videos, YouTube videos, video testimonials, etc. 

Features: 

• Shopon.bio to create a shoppable link in bio store for your social media channels. 
• SnapUp allows businesses to collect UGC from customers directly through QR codes.
• Shop the look galleries for businesses to improve product inspiration and facilitate purchases. 
• Creator collaborator platform to allow brands to discover and partner with creators and leverage the collaborative posts instantly on their e-commerce. 

Pros:

• Tagshop’s integration does not affect page speed.
• Highly immersive, responsive and mobile-optimized galleries.
• Easily integrate shoppable videos into product pages. 

2. Videoly

Videoly is another popular video shopping platform that offers seamless video integration into e-commerce product pages. The platform is well-known for its immersive features that automatically connect product videos to online stores and allow businesses to generate sales. Along with easy installation, effective video placement and complete video control, the tool offers impressive insights and analytics into how well the integrated videos perform. 

3. Restream

Restream is a live video streaming platform that helps users broadcast live video streams to multiple platforms simultaneously. Whether you’re a content creator, marketer, or e-commerce brand, Restream offers a way to expand your reach by streaming to various social media platforms, video hosting sites, and other streaming services all at once.

4. Publitas

Pubiltas is another video shopping tool that allows users to add product tags to content, edit it according to their branding, and publish it on their e-commerce pages. The tool offers features like a no-code content editor and design tool that allows users to style their content effectively and convert more users from them. 

5. Livery Video

Livery video is an interactive video shopping platform that supports brands from various industries such as e-commerce, media, and events to host live streams on multiple platforms. The tool has AI-enabled features that make the tool highly automated and responsive. With Livery, e-commerce businesses can also host live shopping streams on the website, and allow customers to make purchases directly from the content. 

Best Strategies for Video Shopping

E-commerce brands across industries are implementing video shopping strategies to boost their sales and conversions—and for all the good reasons. Studies show that online videos have an audience reach of 92.3% among internet users worldwide. 

So, if you’re still wondering why brands need video shopping, its efficacy and significance cannot be overstated. 

However, like everything else, video shopping must also be implemented with the correct strategies. Here are some strategies that can help: 

1. Define Your Goals

Knowing what your brand needs is the most important strategy that you’ll need while implementing video shopping. Whether you aim to increase sales, boost brand awareness, or engage with your audience, defining clear goals will help you effectively tailor your content and measure success. Additionally, understanding your target audience is another essential factor in defining your goals. Make sure that your target audience and anticipated goals match the kind of videos you are working around with.

2. Focus on Optimization & Responsiveness

What could be worse than bringing your audience to your website only for them to see a feed that loads only half of the videos and shows broken images? This is why optimizing your website for video shopping experience matters. Ensure that your integrated videos run smoothly on different devices and are responsive. Work on mobile optimization and rely on tools like Tagshop that provide high-end video shopping functionality without disrupting your website page speed. 

3. Use High-Quality Content

High-quality content is more engaging, memorable, and clickable. Invest in creating good content or collaborating with influencers to help boost videos that capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged. Additionally, showcase behind-the-scenes footage, customer testimonials, or interactive demonstrations to add value and entertainment to your video shopping sessions. Keep your content fresh, relevant, and tailored to your audience’s interests and preferences.

4. Choose Relevant Tools

Another important strategy is to use tools and platforms that offer features and technologies to enhance your video shopping sessions’ interactivity, functionality, and overall user experience. There are various video shopping platforms, however, Tagshop tops as a video shopping platform with an array of features that not only allow users to integrate shoppable videos into their shopping experiences but also enhance the overall immersiveness of the website. 

Successful Examples of Video Shopping

Here are some of the most successful brand examples who have invested in video shopping:

1. Elf

Elf Cosmetics is a global leader when it comes to beauty products. The brand has a huge customer base and offers a range of products that are not only known for their brilliant results but also their sleek packaging and quality. 

Being in a highly competitive industry, Elf Cosmetics has an engaging social media presence, which has contributed to its success and growth. The brand is utilizing this content to implement video shopping and showcasing its products to a broader audience. 

Content like UGC videos, video testimonials and product demonstrations integrated into their e-commerce website are helping Elf content improve their engagement rate as well as conversions.

2. Malandra

Malandra is a Mexican jewelry brand that is utilizing video shopping strategy to boost its sales and revenue substantially. The brand is highly popular among women for their unique and dainty jewelry prices and customers often share their bought items on social media. 

The brand wanted to leverage this opportunity to drive more sales. By integrating engaging and authentic videos into their homepage, Malandra is able to showcase their products more exclusively and effectively. 

3. Dr. Squatch

Dr. Squatch is a men’s grooming and personal care brand. It uses video shopping to tell compelling stories about their natural and organic men’s grooming products. 

Dr. Squatch often showcases their products in action through video demonstrations, customer testimonials, and influencer collaborations, demonstrating the quality, effectiveness, and benefits of their products. 

The brand has turned these creative videos shoppable and have integrated them into their official website. This strategy has helped the brand out in building brand trust and yielding much better conversions.

How Can Tagshop Help Drive More Sales?

If you are an e-commerce business or marketer, by now, you must have understood the power of video marketing in the current marketing landscape. Video shopping is just an extended metric of the ‘Video Marketing’ umbrella and it’s time brands inculcate this value-driving strategy effectively. However, when it comes to experiencing results, only a few tools like Tagshop actually provide the real return on investment. 

To help you learn better, Tagshop is an all in one video shopping platform packed with features that can allow e-commerce businesses to monetize their social media presence, digital content bucket as well as their authentic reviews and testimonials. With Tagshop, e-commerce brands can literally collect all kinds of videos, turn them shoppable and integrate them exactly where their audience is. And if this doesn’t help businesses drive more sales, then what else will? 

Conclusion

In conclusion, video shopping offers a multitude of benefits for businesses, ranging from driving sales to improving brand presence. Because of its result-oriented approach, video shopping has gained popularity and is improving tremendously across all industries globally. By embracing video shopping as part of their marketing and sales strategies, businesses can adapt to evolving consumer preferences, stand out in competitive markets, and create engaging and personalized shopping experiences that resonate with their target audience.