Shopicam

The Shopicam chat bubble is inherently different from other competing chat or video functionalities because, not only is the bubble itself an animated GIF that attracts and engages visitors, but once they click the bubble and watch the video, there is a customizable call to action that can direct the visitor to another page, guiding them effortlessly toward conversion.

Another critical component of the Shopicam platform is the ability to dig into the analytics for each video. Merchants can see things like impressions, clicks, button clicks, and watch duration as well as understand the direct impact Shopicam has on revenue by plugging in metrics to their simple calculator. 

And for merchants who lack confidence in their ability to best incorporate shoppable video into their current marketing strategy, the Shopicam team are willing to hop on a call and offer some content creation advice. They have first-hand experience in seeing what has worked and what hasn’t for customers, and are motivated to help their customers see the best results from their platform. 

The main metric that Shopicam will impact is on-site conversion rate. Through this, they may also improve Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), time on site, and you may even be able to increase average order value (AOV) by upselling/cross-selling within your video, this just depends on what the product is and how you might sell it alongside other products in your video.

Setup and management of Shopicam would most likely be handled by your marketing team, but could be done by anyone with minimal experience using website technology and a cell phone video camera (so anyone). You can bring in a specialized video team, or shoot the videos yourself. This is a case where video quality doesn’t always matter; sometimes a raw handheld shot of you with the product and talking about it is all someone needs to convert. Alternatively, you could use influencer videos with your product. 

Assuming you already have video content on hand, the setup is fairly straight-forward. Videos are uploaded to the system and can be customized in a few different ways by clicking into the video title.

From within each video, you can update how the video will display on the website by toggling on and off various settings based on their preferences. They can also update the call to action and CTA destination from within the video settings tab.

Another key feature is the ability to use “Spots,” which is essentially a way to make the video shoppable. With this tool, merchants can highlight key components within the video that will appear during a predefined time frame while the video is playing. When a viewer hovers over the designated spot, it will show an image based on how the spot is set up that a shopper can then click and be directed to another page to learn more or make a purchase.  

Once you have the video customized to your preferences, installing it on your site is simple. There are two ways to go about it, the first is a native integration with Shopify. Easy. Otherwise, you can copy and paste a few lines of code into the footer of your website. Also pretty easy.

From start to finish, adding a new video with one or two spots should take between 10-20 minutes tops.

If you need to create video footage, things will take longer, of course. And odds are you will want to create new footage, update footage, and add footage with each new product. So to truly maximize the value of Shopicam, you should have a healthy time/resource budget for video marketing. Hopefully you are already using video marketing in your ad campaigns, etc., and can therefore easily copy over the content without needing a standalone budget just for Shopicam.

Shopicam is a great tool for retail/etail merchants who have a physical store presence and want to showcase products from that store, in their online store. That said, anyone with a product to sell and a story to tell would benefit from shoppable video, and Shopicam can truly increase conversion rates for just about any brand.

The ease-of-use of the platform makes it accessible for merchants of all technological capabilities, and the ability to effortlessly determine revenue impact per video is key for understanding the tool’s ROI.

One caveat is if video isn’t already a key component of your marketing strategy, there will be significantly more upfront work to indoctrinate this tool into your stack and make it effective for your business. This would involve creating a video content strategy and investing in the level of production required to properly represent your brand and products. However, as mentioned, the Shopicam team is happy to consult on video production concepts and best practices to help get you up to speed in as little time as possible, so it’s a win-win for you as video content has been proven to convert visitors to customers at much higher rate than written content alone. 

For this reason, Shopicam can be extremely more attractive to merchants who already have a ton of video marketing assets, merchants who are working with influencers who regularly create video content, and merchants who are using video marketing content in their ad campaigns. It’s a lot easier to copy over from existing video sources than to build out a standalone budget for Shopicam footage. That said, you may still create some standalone videos… Tinker around and see what converts the best.

All that said, there’s no time like the present to get started with shoppable video. Video is the future of shopping online.