Wouldn’t it be great if you could reduce abandoned carts just by pre-emptively answering your prospects questions about your product? Well now you can, and you can use User Generated Content to do it. Consumers need to see the product Imagine you are ready to buy a new piece of furniture, let’s say it’s a...
Wouldn’t it be great if you could reduce abandoned carts just by pre-emptively answering your prospects questions about your product? Well now you can, and you can use User Generated Content to do it.
Consumers need to see the product
Imagine you are ready to buy a new piece of furniture, let’s say it’s a couch and you don’t wan to go into the store so you resign to buy it online. You probably start by visiting a furniture site and open several tabs to compare products. You reduce the list to 2-3 finalists, then decide on a the model you want. The technical sheet answers most of your questions, but like any online purchase, you are wary about the color and how it will look in your home.
Doubt is sown …
You start to squint at your screen to analyze the photo gallery of the product, but it’s too late: you no longer recognizes the product you were about to order: you see charcoal gray, sometimes taupe gray, sometimes mouse gray … The photos taken in the studio are so retouched that it is impossible for him to know what the sofa really looks like in real conditions . Your only options now are to try to find other images of the sofa, buy from a competing store with a better images online, or find a store to visit. At this point it’s probably just easier to start over with a new company. This scenario is called an abandoned cart, you get the item in the cart, but with questions still lingering, you never complete the purchase.
This is where User Generated Content comes into play. If a previous customer had created a video testimonial of the couch, all of your questions would have been answered and your doubts would have been resolved.
Video has become the standard in e-commerce
As you may have experienced, 1 in 2 consumers look for a video before purchasing a product online . And according to Wyzowl, 90% of them say the videos are helpful in making a buying decision.
The video can be either:
- Brand Content – which is content that, you guessed it, has been created by the company to show off the product. You can see in the gif below an example of Brand Content in which a company created a short video of a model wearing the product, a skirt, to show how it fits, how it moves and gives more indication to color and texture.
- User Generated Video – Is content created by a customer. The consumer presents the product and gives their opinion on it, as is the case in the gif below.
In both examples, the video reassures the consumer and removes any doubts about the product… and therefore improve the conversion rate.
Thanks to customer videos, retailers have seen increases in their conversion rate ranging from + 12% to + 230% depending on the products and videos. The key word for a video to be effective: authenticity !
That’s why more and more merchant sites are using videos made by real consumers to humanize their sites and create modern experiences based on community recommendation.
Omnichannel: video also reassures offline
It is not only on the online journey that video is a key tool to reassure consumers.
According to a recent Google / Ipsos study , 55% of consumers use video while shopping in stores . It was by polling nearly 24,000 users and interviewing 125 contacts in person that Google realized that some consumers were using videos as a shopping list. “ I don’t make lists, but I will watch a video in the DIY section to make sure I have all the materials I need to do my work. ”Explained one of the interviewees.
Another interesting fact from this study: 1 in 2 buyers claim that a video has already helped them choose which brand or product to buy .
Avoid the “product didn’t match the photo” syndrome
Did you know that 22% of product returns are returned because the product did not match what the customer saw on the site ?
This is 1 in 5 returns that can therefore be avoided by using visuals that are truly representative of the final product . And today, video remains the closest alternative to getting an idea of a product.
In short, video is no longer an option today on an e-commerce site because it guarantees the Internet user that the product that arrives in the mail will look like what they saw online.
If you’re thinking about embedding video in your e-commerce site but aren’t sure how to go about it, take a minute to read more about the product on our site, or request a demo to get a personalized demonstration of the product.