Video Commerce, Video e-Commerce or eCommerce Video is the practice of using video content to promote, sell and support commercial products or services on the Internet. The video can be downloaded and played or streamed to the viewer. Either way, the video often contains clickable links which can open up a web page or a transaction process.
The end goal is to convert a shopper into a customer1, but conversion is not the only metric as View Through Rate (VTR) is a common measurement2. Some merchants realize additional benefit such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO)3. A typical video commerce application would involve a video which contains a number of clickable objects so that the viewer can click on any of those objects for further information or to purchase them. However, the clickable object may not always be within the video itself, but part of the Flash or HTML5 player used to play back the video.
In 2004, one year before YouTube’s birth, Fabio Pilotti and Gianfranco Giardina created the first video of the e-videoshopping series: Videos specifically designed for the online store of Mediaworld, main european retailer of the consumer electronics industry4.
With the production of this series, the first online video-presentations of consumer electronics products were born. Those videos were meant to inform Internet users about online catalogue products in order to interpret clients’ necessities and help them through the purchase process.
This format has kept going strong and successful from 2004 to the present day.
The term vCommerce (video commerce) was first used by ShopNBC (a.k.a. ValueVision - VVTV) in the summer of 2007 as part of the launch of ShopNBC.TV. The strategy combined the use of leveraging web video content for higher conversion on eCommerce websites. The term was quickly adopted in the industry including the start of the Video Commerce Consortium (http://video-commerce.org). ShopNBC was also the first home shopping network to utilize live (and archived) webcasts (web-only live video streams which sold products just like TV shopping).
Video commerce can take place over any Internet-enabled communications device – a Personal Computer, a laptop, a PDA, a mobile phone, or a smart phone.