Today, the VCC released a new whitepaper highlighting the use of eCommerce video.  The whitepaper focuses on explaining the three disruptive forces behind the proliferation of online video and shares techniques e-commerce, branding, and technology professionals can use to exploit the disruptive forces in e-commerce.  The whitepaper also includes 18 charts, tables, and screenshots highlighting video commerce trends, uses, case studies, and implementation paradigms.

As always, I am interested in your feedback on whitepapers like this.

Happy Selling!

View more documents from Justin Foster. (tags: video commerce)

Jeffrey Grau, Sr. Analyst at eMarketer, published a groundbreaking report on the state of video in e-commerce yesterday.  In the press release for the report, we learn about an explosive growth of e-commerce video viewership relative to traffic changes year-over-year.  From the period October 2007 – October 2008, the number of viewers of e-commerce videos increased 40% relative to a much more modest growth of 4% in overall site traffic.  

I rarely recommend the purchase of reports like these, but in this case I’ve read through the whole report and highly recommend it.  The world of e-commerce…

Earlier this month, Internet Retailer released the results of a survey highlighting some stats relevant to online video in e-commerce.  Taking part in the survey were 45 web-only retailers, 25 chain store retailers, 14 consumer brand manufacturers, and 11 catalog companies, making the total sample size 95.  The video-specific results of the survey appear below – along with some observations.

A full 41.7% of surveyed retailers indicated they were already using video, and 43.3% of respondents planned on deploying video in 2009. I was surprised (shocked, actually) at the percentage of respondents already using video, yet…

Thank you to everyone who attended today’s VCC webinar, “The ROI of Online Video.”  To those who were unable to make it, or had trouble logging in due to password issues, the deck is posted below.  Next time, the webinar registration and access process will go much smoother – forgive us as this was our first attempt!

Also, special thanks to Jimmy Healey from OnlineShoes.com for taking some time out of his busy schedule to share with the group.  As always, comments and suggestions are appreciated – feel free to post them to the blog or, if you’re a VCC…

In an ongoing quest to learn more about video commerce, I spend a lot of time thinking about the ideas actually driving the industry forward.  Through countless interactions with e-commerce professionals, business people and folks outside the industry, I’ve finally come to the conclusion these are the central “breakthrough ideas” behind video commerce.  I’m curious to learn your thoughts, especially if you disagree with them or you believe there are others that should be on the list.

To understand the paradigms driving video commerce forward, I started looking at the central problems facing the industry today:

1) Obtaining/producing video content

Yesterday’s post was extremely popular in terms of traffic, so I thought I’d share a few more examples of retailers using video since it appears folks are hungry for this information.  Special thanks to Mike from Hot Topic/Shockhound.com for making us aware of ShockTV and Sascha for making us aware of Frontlineshop.tv.  If you’re producing video and want it featured here, comment or send email to justin [at] video [dash] commerce [d o t] org.

Happy Selling!

Orvis (product, how-to, partner videos)

Crutchfield (built a learning center consisting mostly of how-to and educational videos)

Wine…

The other day a VCC member called asking me, “Are we the only ones doing video commerce? It sure feels like it sometimes!”

In an early-stage market, it’s easy to feel like you’re going it alone.  This blog post doesn’t include a lot of commentary, but it does include a lot of links to folks in the retail space presently using video.   The included retailers in this list aren’t all necessarily doing a good job (most retailers today have barely scratched the surface when it comes to exploiting the potential of video commerce)  – but this list should illustrate some…

Last night, I moderated a panel on “Video Commerce in a YouTube World” for the Seattle Direct Marketing Association.  The panelists included Jason Lohr-Johnson, Video Art Director at REI, Jimmy Healey, Product Manager at OnlineShoes.com, and Alison Jeske, Director of Product Management at drugstore.com.

I saved a copy of all the presentations to SlideShare and posted complete video footage from the event (broken into four parts for easier consumption) in case you wanted to check them out.  You’ll have to excuse the quality of the video, which was shot with an inexpensive…

Due to an unfortunate and unavoidable scheduling conflict, the VCC webinar “The ROI of Online Video” has been RESCHEDULED. The new date is THURSDAY, JANUARY 22 at 10:00AM Pacific/1:00PM Eastern.

If you already registered for the webinar, you will need to click the REGISTER button in the email sent to registrants and supply your email address and first name in order to receive your webinar sign-in link, which is unique for each attendee.

If you have not yet registered and would like to learn more, check out:
http://www.video-commerce.org/webinar-roi-of-online-video.html
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email…

According to a recent article published by Internet Retailer, retailer Ross-Simons expects to add 700 product videos to its online video library in 2009 while investing heavily in an in-house video production studio. According to VP of Marketing Larry Davis, “We have about 300 product videos on the site and the chief benefit has been to reduce our return rate by about 10%, which is a significant cost savings.”

“Customers return jewelry because it’s the wrong size or the item doesn’t fit,” says Davis. “A product thumbnail can be beautiful to look at, but the size of…