There’s a ton of innovation happening in online video for retail these days. In the latest example, Martin + Osa (a new brand from American Eagle) has launched a new website with a really cool video shopping tool called “Shop by Outfit”:

M+O’s Shop by Outfit is a great window into the future of video merchandising and video navigation — especially for fashion and apparel. As a friend of mine noted, it’s very “Harry Potterish”. The designers of the M+O video shopping tool have clearly decided to go “all out” for a showstopper site centerpiece. As the Martin + Osa press release puts it,

– Shop by Outfit: Full-motion video of models wearing outfits created by M+O stylists, enabling customers to see the product on real people who are walking, turning and standing, showing a life-like view of the product’s attributes. Customers can click directly on the image to select individual items or the entire outfit to buy.

However it’s important to note that the M+O video tool is optimized for PR and branding, not for conversions. How can you tell? Download size.

The initial page load is 18 megabytes… and the whole page takes 29 megabytes to browse. Click on “Men” and you’re in for 57 megabytes. Most upscale office computers, and many high-end homes, will handle this content pretty well. However…

• What happens to visitors on slow broadband? AT&T’s entry-level DSL broadband service in the US generally provides 768Kbps of downstream bandwidth. Without anything else happening in the background, it would take 189.7 seconds to download the INITIAL PAGE LOAD for the Shop by Outfit tool. That’s well over 3 minutes of waiting.
• What happens to visitors on dial-up? Well, if they want to take a break from their computer for 45 minutes, they’re in luck!
• What happens if you’ve got a fast connection, but a slow computer? We tested with a high-end 3-year-old Thinkpad, a cable modem connection, and a modern up-to-date Firefox browser. The M+O site caused occasional, intermittent browser freezes while the computer’s CPU caught up to the torrent of video data.

All told, the M+O Shop by Outfit tool gives a great user experience to probably 1/2 of the available Internet audience. It’s a great showstopper to establish the brand, land PR, and draw traffic. However it’s not going to be as effective at increasing conversion rates.

SilverDock and our clients have experimented with a variety of video formats and technologies. In general we prefer “low-impact video” that adds to the high-end experience, but degrades gracefully for lower-end users.

We do this for solid bottom-line reasons — you sell more. In fact in some tests, we were able to show that altering the video implementation method (speeding the page load by a few seconds) raised conversion rates by 45%.

If you’re looking to explore innovative video merchandising, video shopping, and video navigation tools, contact SilverDock. Our team has been building exceptional video shopping tools for leading retailers since 2006. We’ll help you evaluate your video strategy and develop a plan to reach your bottom-line goals.

Filed under: ecommerce, effective online video, online retail, product video, strategy, video