SellPoint Touts High-Touch Product Experiences – But Online

SellPoint Touts High-Touch Product Experiences – But Online

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“The online shopping phenomenon has been subtly disruptive to manufacturers. It has created a fundamental change in the way people shop – research, then buy. It has separated the ‘what’ you buy from the ‘where’ you buy it.”

Dennis Marshall, vice president of marketing for SellPoint, an online digital video network that boasts a manufacturer client roster including Pentax, Canon, Fuji, Epson, Toshiba, SanDisk, Panasonic and Sling Media, says his company is in the business of shortening the distance the Web has created between shopping and buying, via its series of content-rich “video tours” that take the online shopping experience past a picture and a paragraph to a near-experiential level.

Marshall says that there are currently about 100 retailers in a syndication network whose sites take advantage of SellPoint-sculpted content, with the lion’s share being CE dealers including Best Buy, Circuit City, amazon.com CompUSA and high-profile regional online sellers. The company creates flash pieces or manufacturer-approved digital videos that highlight key buying messages for each profiled product SKU, and can even make product manuals available. “Our research shows that this type of presentation is especially helpful for emerging convergence products that consumers don’t have a lot of familiarity with,” explains Marshall. Manufacturers, for their part, are provided valuable and constantly updated feedback showing how shoppers interact with this content, via the company’s Dashboard function.

One study done by Coremetrics for CompUSA showed a 12 percent increase in sales where the video product tours were accessed by online shoppers, explains Marshall – but he adds that “this type of content increases both online conversion and store sales as well. It gives useful analytics to manufacturers, besides providing a compelling consumer experience.”

He says that the company’s goals are in part to “expand beyond the CE category. We have good penetration already in digital cameras, and media/memory. New markets with great potential are car audio, home theater and cell phones, in addition to health and beauty, and sporting goods. It’s clear that, for all these online categories, video content is the next big thing.’ ”

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