Online party supplies merchant eParty Unlimited is singing the praises of video.
Company president Jimmy Weng says adding product videos a year ago helped eParty Unlimited’s conversion rates grow. What’s more, thanks to recent changes to Google that reflect the importance of video, the merchant’s search engine rankings have risen as well.
How did eParty Unlimited, which has been in business since 1999, get started with videos? Since it didn’t have that expertise or manpower in-house, it outsourced video production and placement to Treepodia, a company that produces image-based video for ecommerce companies.
Weng says Trepodia placed javascript on its site that allowed the videos to be automatically created, using product images and descriptions, and placed on the product pages.
Weng says browsers who do not view the product videos have converted at a 5.7% rate, while those who have watched have converted at 8.3%. EParty Unlimited has about 2,000 SKUs in its system, and as a result of the increased conversion rates, now has video on 98% of its product pages, Weng says.
EParty also added Treepodia’s dynamic video sitemap service about six months ago, and that indexed the videos at ePartyUnlimited.com for increased search engine optimization. Weng says the difference wasn’t immediately noticeable, until the past two months, when Google changed its algorithm and placed a higher value on video.