Why E Commerce giants invest more in videos?

In the recent years E-commerce has seen an enormous growth with giants like Amazon, Alibaba, Ebay and Flipkart dominating the list. These giants had grown to be the behemoths that they are today by setting aside and even pushing many smaller businesses to extinction. They show a difference in the business model, Products, service, delivery etc, which makes them the kings in their own territory.

The top position of these E-Commerce giants may not remain the same throughout. There are fresh ideas and technologies emerging each day and staying ahead of emerging E-Commerce players is a challenge even for them. They need to adapt to newer ideas, newer marketing strategies and keep their more loyal customers engaged and even other stakeholders like the sellers and the employees engaged.

Videos had become an important means of communication both internally and externally for E- commerce biggies . The uses of these videos are many.

Videos for Training and internal communication

The mere size of their workforce and the Stakeholders compels them to have a strong communication system. Many of their processes are routine and involves many people doing it in a similar fashion. Mistakes are something which E-Commerce companies cannot afford. Starting from Sourcing, warehousing, customer relationship, engagement to delivery.

Their employees need to think in unison. The information can not have a varied output like that of playing a chinese whisper. The videos can be on the following lines,

Defining corporate policies

• Updates on recent developments, event and performance reviews
• Training to upskill employees across departments
• Visually explaining complex processes
• Establish uniformity- sorting, packaging, delivery and return
• An orientation about the company
• Health and safety instructions
• Customer greetings and relations
• Work processes- Order processing, issues, delivery etc

This way the information is not disturbed and they tend to get the details with clarity.

Communication with Sellers

A marketplace is always in need of more and more sellers to display products. Hence, there are many videos created, targeting sellers. E-commerce videos aim at informing the sellers how easy and rewarding it is to set up shop in the marketplace.

There are also E-commerce videos which talk about the success stories of small scale sellers who made it big by selling online. Alibaba inspires women entrepreneurs by showcasing how women balance their families and business by being associated with Alibaba’s platform

The final category is the video tutorials and guidelines on how to set up shop, how to do packaging etc.

DIY videos

DIY and How-to videos are among the most popular categories of videos on YouTube and are promising in getting viewership. The E-Commerce giants have a massive list of products displayed in their sites and creating a video which promotes their usage is a simple, entertaining and a subtle way to market them.

This is a E-commerce video from Ebay’s YouTube Playlist (User Generated )which educates viewers on How to make cell phone covers using the material available on Ebay. This is a nice way to engage your audience in trying something cool as well as displaying the links to these products and enabling conversions.

The above images shows how target and etsy had also taken the DIY route to engage with their audience.

Storytelling through Videos

Some of the E-commerce videos follow a storytelling approach which are not salesy but convey a social message that is engaging and entertaining. These videos are widely shared on social media. These kind of videos have an emotional impact on viewers. A video on Amazon’s YouTube channel is about the day in the life an Amazon dog The video is cute and appealing to a wider audience.

Etsy creates a story around artistically stimulating products by their sellers through a series of videos titled One of a kind gifts from etsy

Videos on some easy and fun tips to make life easier like this video by Groupon, is a sureshot way to gain lot of viewership.

Buyer Guides

Guides can be of two types: the one aimed at the seller and other at the buyers. Since, we have already covered that part for the sellers, we would look at some examples of videos created for the buyers.

These can be guides created by the E-commerce companies or User Generated content to help other users in making informed decisions.

User Generated Content

The marketplace is now saturated, the trick is to narrow focus on the potential customers and give them a reason to spend more time with the website and other online assets. User Generated content is a great way to increase the time spent with the brand.

There are a lot of influencers out there who create E-commerce videos on various product usage and reviews. E-commerce channels include them in their playlists. These videos contain annotations with links to specific landing pages to purchase products.

Facebook Videos

It is no secret anymore that Facebook competes head-on with the Video Sharing giant YouTube and is optimizing the platform for video content. E-commerce giants’ video presence on Facebook is no less than that of YouTube.

They have utilized this platform to the fullest and the usual pattern is a series of videos which are usually shorter and run into not more than a few seconds

We could also see very little overlapping between the videos uploaded on their YouTube channel and the ones on Facebook. This indicates that exclusive video content is created for Facebook audience.

On the other hand, Etsy has it’s own style in showcasing the stories of it’s artist sellers which usually runs to 4 to 5 minutes. Their storytelling videos are so interesting that the viewers are kept interested from the start till the end

Animated videos

It is very obvious that animated videos have a capability to explain complex processes in a simple manner. Amazon uses an animated video to explain store owners how an E-commerce store can be set up through amazon webstore with their own domain names and how sustainable and easy it could be for them.

Alibaba has created an animated video to explain it’s business model, a platform which brings buyers and sellers together.

These video styles and usage is not only limited to the bigger brands in E-Commerce, even emerging E-commerce business should think about investing their efforts in creating videos on the above mentioned lines to increase online engagement. We welcome your inputs on video marketing for E commerce businesses. Please mention them in your comments below.