Justin: Hi I’m Justin Foster with the video commerce consortium and we’re very lucky to have with us here today at the streaming media west conference in beautiful sunny San Jose, CA, Ms. Alison Jeske from drugstore.com. Alison, if you would just take a moment and tell us who you are and what drugstore does?
Alison: I’d be happy to. I’m Alison Jeske. I’m the director of product management for drugstore.com and the family of our brands, which includes drugstore.com, beauty.com, and visiondirect.com. My team is responsible for site features and site enhancements and overall site experience on our family of site properties.
Justin: The reason we’re talking with Alison today is because drugstore.com is actually, really a pioneer with the use of online video and ecommerce. I would like to ask you, Alison, what was it that drove the decision to use video? How did that whole process work?
Alison: It really started with our total rebranding and redesigning of our media.com site which was last November–last September of 2007. We revamped the whole thing. One of the key components was introducing video. We had a lot of great videos produced by some of our key brands Frederick Frakay, Oscar Blandi, Jonathan Product. We had a lot of these great videos. We wanted to showcase those. Hopefully some of our objectives were to increase order value of course, always a key component for retail. But really driving customer engagement, and improving customer satisfaction.
Justin: What have you learned since you started using videos? Do you find it spurs engagement of videos? Is it driving sales on your site?
Alison: Well it’s still early to tell in terms of direct correlation. We’re definitely seeing a lot of positive customer feedback. We are definitely seeing longer session times. People are hanging around the site a lot longer, and engaging with those videos, and some of the newer videos that we launched rise up to the top very quickly in terms of views. And some of the older videos we have still hold the one and two position for the most views. And those are videos that have been on the site since last year.
Justin: That’s great. A lot of people that I talk with, I hear people–There’s kind of a buzz around online video. People are interested in using video. A lot of people just really aren’t sure exactly how to get started. What are some tips that you might give to another online retailer…who might be thinking there’s some potential with video, but they’re just not really sure if it’s going to work?
Alison: A couple things come to mind. One is: Talk to you manufacturers. Talk to your suppliers..find out who has videos. We found that so many of our manufacturers had videos for almost every product. But yet, they didn’t have a place to promote these. They kept them on their own branding sites. Just by asking questions, we found content was not going to be our problem .The next step was developing–finding a partner that was going to make it easy, we didn’t need IT help, we didn’t need to make this a massive project and develop a significant business case to try to pull these metrics together. Those are two really critical steps to ease ourselves into this.
Justin: It sounds like getting videos was a really important part of your video ecommerce strategy…you obviously don’t have to pay for the production of those assets. Now out of curiosity, you’re starting to do more self produced videos. What advice would you give on producing videos on your own? Is this something that should be a large initiative or expense or initiative?
Alison: It really doesn’t. We don’t really have budget specifically laid out, just for doing our own videos. It was something as simple as, I brought my camera in from home, we borrowed lights from the photo studio. We tried to script it out a little bit. We were going for something a little less scripted, a little more fun. Certainly bringing some whimsy with some of the products that we carry. Like gourmet girl cupcake maker. Some things, which are a littler funner type of products.
Justin: What is the future of video for drugstore and beauty.com?
Alison: It’s everywhere! It’s moving towards our product details pages. We want to take video not only in terms of a commerce component, but also, bring into educational content across various aspects of our site. We’re definitely seeing a future, and we’re definitely investing in this direction. It’s a very exciting time.
Justin: Good good. Well thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it here at videoretailer.org. And wish you a great rest of the show. And we’ll see you later!
