Top Ecommerce Tactics: Rivaling the In-Person Shopping Experience with Shoppable Videos

Once upon a time, the only way to shop was in-store – an immersive experience where products could be touched, smelled, held, measured, tried on, seen up-close, from afar, under different lighting, and their tags examined. With the help of a friendly sales associate, you could make a quick, in-and-out pit stop and purchase or make a leisurely day out of browsing through all the merchandise displays at the local shopping mall.  

Then along came online shopping – and the challenge of transforming the ecommerce experience into one that rivals that of brick-and-mortar shopping. But as technology advances, so do the clever tactics brands can use to meet consumer expectations, set their brand apart from the competition, drive engagement, and simplify the often slow and distracted journey to making online purchases.  

In this blog we’ll look at one of the most attention-capturing, but also functional ecommerce tactics: shoppable videos – what they are, how they benefit your buyers and your brand, and what tools your team can use to leverage them on your site.  

What is a Shoppable Video?

Shoppable videos are wholly unique – they take the native experience consumers understand from browsing social media platforms and integrate it with online shopping. Viewers are hooked in with a dynamic video and are given the ability to purchase the products shown in the video through a variety of clickable elements. For example, a video showcasing a pair of friends setting up their campsite after completing a picturesque hike might feature some clickable hotspots on each camping accessory or clothing item in the video. These clicks could lead directly to the respective product where shoppers can see more details and add the item to their cart.  

When a customer watches a shoppable video, they instantly get a feel for your brand, your people, your customer base, and your products. So, it’s not just professionally filmed videos that are used in this way – it could be product demonstrations, influencer try-ons, how-to guides, founder stories, and other content that, in video format, would better bring your brand and products to life than photos or text would.   

Using videos – instead of photos – to draw more dimension and attention to a webpage is a smart ecommerce tactic, but adding an interactive shopping functionality to these videos is a brilliant one. By taking an aesthetic element that, on its own, is extremely engaging and then layering on an ability to facilitate a purchase, you now have a supercharged digital experience that is eye-catching, engaging, and drives conversions. 

By creating a more intimate, almost-tactile way for shoppers to experience products, shoppable videos can help to parallel brick-and-mortar shopping where product awareness, interaction, and purchase all happen in one place. These videos can replace the long and winding customer journey that online shoppers often don’t complete – especially through standard product list pages (PLPs) and product detail pages (PDPs) – with the shorter, simpler path to purchase commonly travelled by in-store shoppers.  

The Benefits for Ecommerce Brands

Shoppable videos are wholly unique – they take the video experience format consumers have come to understand and gravitate toward and integrate it with online shopping. But on top of meeting customer expectations, the shoppable video tactic also has notable benefits for brands:

• Promote active engagement – Often seen as a necessary evil, shoppers don’t want to have to rummage through user reviews, compare items, and figure out through text whether a product is right for them. Consumers’ attention spans are notably shrinking, and the solution for brands is to accommodate. Black text on a white screen might be informative, but it’s certainly not as motivating as a video that can convey a lot more in a quicker amount of time – and making those videos shoppable with buttons, hotspots, or tags adds an interactive component that facilitates quicker product navigation.  

• Increase conversions – Videos showcase a product in all its glory – how it looks in action, who uses it, and how it works in the real world. Shoppers are not only fast-tracked to specific products this way, but also gain more information, more quickly – a combination that ensures greater buying confidence and unparalleled convenience. The point of all your ecommerce decisions is to get your target audience to convert, and these videos can shorten the customer's path to purchase by seamlessly leading them from the awareness stage to the checkout page.  

• Set your brand apart – Most brands employ a more standard ecommerce experience complete with generic, grid-like product listing pages, static images, and a classic search function. Intentionally building a more immersive shopping experience can both demonstrate a commitment to customer satisfaction and differentiate your brand from others in your niche. Shoppable videos can help with this by improving retention rates and boosting both your brand presence and recall. 

• Foster an omnichannel approach: Intertwining the shoppable video tactic into social media can levels-up brands’ omnichannel strategy. For example, a video could be posted on social media and linked directly to a shoppable version of the video on the brand’s site. The social post captures attention, a click or tap carries that attention to your site, but the shopper isn’t dropped on your homepage and left to navigate their way to what caught their eye and they’re not directed to a specific PDP that may or may not be the item that piqued their interest. Instead, they’re led to a page with that same video that earned their click on social media – and now, with the interactive, shoppable layer, they can easily find, explore, and add those items to their cart. 

Building Shoppable Videos with Fastr Frontend

Fastr Frontend is a multi-functional solution that integrates with any platform, data set, and tech and unlocks ecommerce teams’ ability to quickly and easily design, deploy, and manage a myriad of digital experiences – including shoppable videos. 

Fastr Frontend's Experience Canvas – where the creative magic happens – doesn’t restrict you to specific templates that might limit your experience design; you have the freedom to make any existing video a shoppable one and in any style you want. For example, elements added on top of a video can be static, animated, fade in on a pre-set time delay, have a hover effect, link directly to a corresponding PDP or lookbook, or act as a hotspot that when clicked, opens a custom quickview.

And by facilitating the complete creative control to build any frontend experience, rather than solely focusing on providing shoppable video capability or templates, Fastr Frontend users have unlimited options for not only how they design their videos, but also where they're leveraged and in what format. For example, the video could be designed as a hero image, added to a PLP grid to break up the monotony of the repetitive rows of products, be input into a product carousel with timed auto-plays – the options are endless.

Shopping Around for Shoppable Video Solutions & Tools

Because shoppable videos are so effective, Fastr Frontend isn't the only fish in the sea; there is naturally a wide range of point solutions that exist to help brands use them to their advantage. Here are some of the popular tools on the market: 

Firework 

Firework is a Shopify integration that makes it easy for ecommerce stores to implement shoppable videos and other personalized shopping experiences on their storefront. With personalization being the name of the game nowadays, this point solution provides the digital tools brands need to leverage this strategy. Firework stands out with its SMS and email campaign capabilities, variety of formats, and engagement components like coupons, product cards, quizzes, and more to make your website as captivating as your social media.  

Their solution integrates with major platforms, including Shopify, Salesforce, BigCommerce, Adobe Magento, WordPress, WooCommerce, and other commerce partners, like AWS. All these features come at a costly price, with different products priced at a few different tiers. They cater to businesses with a high volume of monthly visitors, so small businesses and startups might want to look for other options. 

Videeo 

Videeo’s Popclips product looks to transform your product pages from static to dynamic with shoppable videos. Their platform caters to a video-first era by leveraging the shopping experience from TikTok and Instagram and bringing it to Shopify. They allow shoppable videos to be embedded anywhere on your site and browsing product pages and purchases to happen within them. Similar to Firework, Popclips also lets you embed your videos just about everywhere else, but it also boasts a scrollable feed of shoppable videos on your very own Videeo mobile app.  

With Popclips, the shopping experience is under your control and is natively fitted to Shopify. But despite its detailed functionality, it doesn’t integrate with any other platforms. Videeo’s pricing includes their three products - Popclips, the Mobile App Builder, and Live Stream Selling at three pricing tiers catered to small and medium businesses. 

Novel 

Novel is TikTok meets Shopify – a shoppable video tool that lets you add videos on any Shopify webpage. It’s a private app, meaning you’ll need to schedule a demo before you can download it. That said, the fantastic reel format, seamless purchasing and discovery interface, and many ecommerce integrations make it a worthwhile investment. Novel can integrate with CAA, Aspire, Cohley, Attentive, and more. 

The downside to Novel is that you might be able to view and include multiple products in one video, but customers can only checkout with one. That could cause lower average order value and potentially cart abandonment if consumers want to purchase multiple items and aren’t bothered to navigate to your website. Pricing is based on impressions per month and there are three tiers to accommodate brands who are just starting, those who are growing, and enterprise-level businesses.

Ghost

Ghost markets itself as a “modern video player for any site,” meaning you won’t be locked into specific platforms with this tool. Anyone from banks to ecommerce sites to realtors can use the platform to aid discovery and conversion with flexible video display options, up to 10 call-to-actions per video, and all sorts of direct links to product pages, booking forms, and more. If you’ve got a video on one of your socials that would be perfect to convert into a shoppable video, you can instantly import that onto the video platform. What’s great about Ghost is that it reveals the metrics you need, which can let you assess how well your videos are performing so you can capitalize on what’s resonating with your customers. 

Pricing is reasonable and is based on video views per month, with Basic, Pro, and Enterprise tiers to accommodate each video view range. There’s a Basic plan that is free to sign up for, provided you have 0 - 5000 views/month, which is great if you’re just finding your footing and want to experiment before choosing a paid plan. 

What's the Right Tool for Your Team? 

When fishing for a shoppable video tool, you must consider what functionality you need for this specific project, what capabilities each tool offers you beyond those needed for shoppable video creation, and how the tool will serve your team, brand, plans, and goals moving forward.  

One of the biggest draws to the Fastr Frontend platform is the flexibility it gives to ecommerce teams. The ability to integrate with any other business data or tool means removing siloed data and leveraging the full capability of your tech stack. The free-form design capability in the Experience Canvas means breaking free from rigid templates and creating frontend experiences exactly as you envision them. The no-code design and deployment freedom means removing development handoffs, bottlenecks, and holdups that stunt your growth speed and efficiency. 

But it’s not just limitless design and integration power that Fastr Frontend offers...

Want to schedule your experience to go live ahead of time? Our experience scheduling feature has you covered. Want to A/B test your shoppable video against a different experience or full-page layout? Our platform enables easy, scalable experimentation including a traffic-splitting capability and connects to your existing analytics tool to keep all of your data in one, familiar place. Want to accelerate your accessibility management and ensure your content is error-free and reaches the widest-possible audience? Fastr Frontend's Accessibility Panel – with the added boost of FastrAI – scans for and resolves accessibility errors in a mere moment’s time. 

A point solution tailored specifically to shoppable video may provide a more guided building experience – and finding, paying for, learning, and managing an additional one-off tool may be your chosen path. However, the benefits of streamlining your tech stack with one comprehensive, all-encompassing, platform with full integration capability are simply unbeatable. Tech consolidation means fewer subscriptions, removing the chance of overlapping or redundant tools, faster onboarding of new employees, fewer learning curves for ecommerce teams, centralized data and tool management, and simplified troubleshooting. 

Any shoppable video tool would very likely cover your basic shoppable video requirements, but the value of these single-function point solutions starts and ends with this sole use case. On the other hand, Fastr Frontend equips non-developers with the power to create, orchestrate, test, and manage not just shoppable videos, but any element, any use case, anywhere on your site – the only limitation is your imagination. 

Your Site, Your Way: Shoppable Videos & Beyond 

Shoppable videos bring the beauty of the in-person shopping experience to ecommerce like few other tactics can. While shoppers still won’t be able to interact with a product in a tactile way, nor would they be able to try things on or utilize Smell-O-Vision, they’ll be able to participate in a dynamic visual experience and more easily imagine how that product could fit into – or even add value to – their lives. 

With help from whatever tool it is you choose, we’d strongly urge you to leverage this highly engaging, highly functional ecommerce tactic.

And if a multi-functional platform like Fastr Frontend – that facilitates shoppable videos as well as any other digital shopping experience across your site – would offer your brand more immediate and long-term value than opting for a single-function point solution, then let’s talk. We’d love to show you the limitless potential your team would have with Fastr Frontend.