Are you a Shopify store owner and your store sells products that are very innovative? If the answer is yes then you might want to consider adding videos to your Shopify store.
Adding videos to your Shopify store is a great way to educate the customers about your products, it helps them to understand more thoroughly about your product or your brand. It’s perfect for innovative products where customers need clear explanations before they decide whether to buy them or not. It’s also good if you decide to add a new product and you want to showcase its brand-new features.
Video is widely used amongst sports stores. Stores that sell innovative products like hair-nurture capsules can use videos to showcase their effects. This can help educate the customers about what the product offers and push them to click the buy button!
Table of Contents
Some cons of adding videos to your Shopify store
Video size is usually large compared to image size. This results in your website taking longer to load. And if you don’t have a strong host it can take forever to load your website. Consequently, your store will lose many potential customers.
If your store sells casual products or you don’t have a strong host it’s better to use images because image sizes are smaller.
How about the benefits of adding videos to Shopify store?
Improved SEO rankings
Adding a video to your store often results in customers staying on your site longer. For this reason, the “dwell time” will increase, and we all know that dwell time is an important criterion Google use to rank your site.
And it’s even better if you have a youtube channel. For this reason, your videos can show up toward the top of search results with great video SEO. It’s also easier for customers to share your videos to their social accounts or websites and spread the word.
Video helps reduce returns
Product returns are a severe problem for retailers. This is even a worse problem for online stores. The average returns rate for brick and mortar stores is 20%, this number for online stores sits at 30%.
When being asked what the reasons they return the products, 22% of customers say that it’s because the product they received looks different than what’s shown on the website.
This problem can be solved by adding videos to the product page to further showcase the product. The more they understand about your product, by way of complete visual description, the less likely they are to return that product.
Product videos drive conversions
A survey conducted by getshogun shows that 84% of shoppers say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product after watching a video on the Shopify product page.
They also recommend some video formats you should use on your Shopify product page:
- Product tours
- Unboxing videos
- Production line videos
- How-to’s
A recent survey by Animoto shows some interesting stats:
- 96% of consumers find videos helpful when making purchase decisions online
- Nearly three quarters are more likely to purchase a product or service if they can watch a video explaining it beforehand.
Videos emulate the in-store experience
Video is the closest we can get to bring the in-store experience to the customers through the screen.
Images with good lighting and background as well as a high-quality camera are only static two-dimensional views of something that lives in the real three-dimensional world.
Videos help customers see the product in action rather than watching a standing-still picture.
How to add videos to your Shopify store product page
There are basically 3 ways you can use to add videos to your store: coding, using apps or outsourcing.
Coding
It’s actually not hard to add videos to your product page by yourself. Follow these steps.
Note:
- It’s not mandatory but I recommend you to use videos with MP4 format, this is the most widely supported video format.
- Try to make the video size < 20 mb. If your video size is > 20 mb you might have to upload it to youtube and get the embedded link from there.
Step 1: From your Shopify admin dashboard, go to Settings -> Files.
Step 2: Click the Click Upload files
Step 3: Select the video you want to upload, click Open
Step 4: Copy the store URL and store it somewhere (notepad, google translate,…)
Step 5: From your Shopify admin, go to Products > All products.
Click the name of the product that you want to change.
Step 6: Click the Show HTML button to view the HTML code for the product description inside the rich text editor:
Step 7: Get your video URL from Step 4. Replace “your_url_goes_here” in the code below with the URL you get from step 4. After that, add the code to the HTML:
<video controls=”controls” style=”max-width: 100%; height: auto;”>
<source src=”your_url_goes_here” type=”video/mp4″ />
Your browser does not support our video.
</video>
Step 8: Click Save
Apps
Easy video – Product videos by NexusMedia OÜ
Makes adding video to your product page easier because it’s suitable for people that don’t comfortable with making changes to the code.
Pros: The apps also provide a customizable video layout: you can easily choose between popup or inline video layout and flexible video settings (autoplay, thumbnail icon, video aspect ratio)
Cons: The app charges $5/month
Installing too many apps might make your store load slower. Therefore, the recommended number of apps installed for a store is 5. Save these slots for something more important.
Outsource
If you’re not comfortable with coding or if you want to make your video mobile responsive with a wide range of customizable video layouts but don’t want to pay monthly for the app, outsourcing this task is a great option.
You only need to pay once instead of paying bills monthly. This can help you save lots of money in the long run. As mentioned before, adding multiple apps can make your stores run slower so if you already installed lots of apps to your store then I recommend you outsource this task to developers.
Conclusion
To conclude, adding videos to your store may have many benefits such as: improve SEO ranking, reducing returns, drive conversions. Video is exceptionally good for innovative products, other than that, images and good copies are more than enough. I also recommend staying away from videos if you don’t have a strong host because adding videos to your store might make it load relatively slower.
As a certified Shopify expert, HappyPoints are happy to assist you with adding videos to your Shopify stores or any other requests. Feel free to give us a quote.
This article is a part of an ebook that provides a step-to-step guide to customize your Shopify theme, feel free to grab the full free eBook: Top 12 DIY Shopify customizations to drive sales
Writing Reference
<1> https://getshogun.com/learn/shopify-insert-video
<2> https://www.revenueriver.co/thecuttingedge/video-backgrounds-homepage-pros-cons
