There are no eCommerce Best Practices

Earlier today I received an email newsletter that I get every day. A subject line, “Established e-commerce best practices are not set in stone” caught my eye. While the headline was misleading (it actually had more to do with successful direct email campaigns that run counter to currently accepted best practices), it still caught my eye, and is worth reading.

However, the meta-point of the title was very significant, and gave me pause. Think about it for a second. If I were to ask a grocer in 1890 (or even one from the 1980’s) to help me set up a grocery store in 2010, I would be cursed from the beginning.

In 1890, the grocer was the pivotal component of the grocery shopping transaction. The entire transaction literally could not have happened without the grocer. Today, the entire grocery shopping (down to the self-checkout experience) is geared around efficiency and profits – keeping overhead and costs low, transactions high, and the experience pleasant and consumer-focused enough that customers come back, frequently, and buy more (and with greater volume). Doesn’t that sound familiar to you?

Today, we are in the formative years of Internet ecommerce. Our customers regularly hear conflicting guidance from Internet and usability experts, discussions about how “the fold” doesn’t matter, and proof that when it comes to ecommerce, it still does (http://www.invodo.com/html/resources/literature/whitepaper/). Internet ecommerce is so new that you must constantly question, constantly analyze, and constantly investigate how to make the most of the experience you deliver to your customers.

At Invodo, we focus on the role that ecommerce videos play in conversions, with a focus on how the content & technology can together create a bridge to help you make conversions.

We have built an approach to content production that ensures that a viewer can quickly and easily learn what they need to in order to make an informed decision on a product’s value proposition without watching a commercial (far too much online product video is simply re-purposed marketing content from television campaigns). To make a comprehensive solution, we have built technology that helps guide the user to the product page via SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and in turn guides them to the video, even if the player is not in view or not on the page at all, via our Smart Merchandising technology.

When I first fell in love with “the online world”, it was Prodigy.  There, ads consisted of horrible ASCII art or 8-bit graphics. When the World Wide Web was born, web pages had gray backgrounds and no images. Now we live in a world where merchandising efforts on your ecommerce site and particularly on your product pages, can make the most of what technology allows today.

Consumers often approach online transactions with trepidation. They don’t want to spend what you might want them to, and they have questions. At Invodo, we believe that well-tuned content delivered through an ecommerce-focused, SEO-tuned video player provides that edge that helps consumers find your products and helps convert them from pondering browsers into satisfied customers.