As pandemic restrictions necessitated, many shopping trips in 2020 took place outside the traditional brick-and-mortar store, or at least void of the physical aisle-browsing experience. Same-day curbside pickup became a safe and convenient alternative, and e-commerce transactions skyrocketed as consumers shopped online. In fact, Digital Commerce 360 estimates that, compared to 2019, e-commerce transactions grew by more than 40% last year.
Today’s tremendous growth in e-commerce means that competition among businesses is heating up. One way to gain a competitive edge is to boost your product’s authenticity by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into your product pages.
This tutorial shows you how to do the following:
Headless is not a buzzword anymore. In fact, the concept of headless architecture is gaining momentum due to the flexibility it offers for composing new experiences and for tackling the undue complexity of an ever-evolving technology stack. That’s because while the evolution of the martech landscape has enabled disruptive, digital innovations, the approach of buying point solutions for solving specific challenges can expose companies to the complicated nature of new technologies, systems, and platforms.
Billions of views on the Internet every day drive one of the biggest industries on the planet: advertising. The sheer size of that market and the competitive nature of vying for consumer attention results in a constant need for innovation. Readers are jaded, and display ads are blind spots.
As a technology company, Cloudinary owes its success to its ability to build solutions that address the most critical challenges you, our customers, face. The companies we serve run the gamut of digital businesses—retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, media and entertainment, travel and hospitality—which, coincidentally, all care about the same things.
It is not every evening that you get executives from leading brands, e-businesses, and media organizations, some of them Fortune 500 companies, in one “room.” That was what made Cocktails With Cloudinary—a virtual mixology experience hosted by Rob Floyd, global liquid chef and star of the hit TV show Bar Rescue—so special.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and that also holds true for video, one minute of which, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, is worth 1.8 million words. That's why online stores rely on rich media to promote products and sales. Images and videos impart a real sense of involvement with a purchase—a car, a vacation getaway, an apartment rental—setting your business apart from the competition.
To engage with modern users, today’s websites must be extremely visual. Even though high-quality images and videos can help keep visitors on the site and convert them, those media assets also add to the page weight, load time, and bandwidth. Unoptimized content can result in performance issues, causing visitors to bounce off.
So, your boss comes to you in a panic: he's just heard about Google's Core Web Vitals initiative and needs you to optimize the company website right now! "No problem," you say, hiding your fear that it's not something that can be done overnight. Just taking the first metric, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how can you possibly identify all the large elements - most likely images or video posters - of the many hundreds of pages that make up your site? There are already thousands of high-resolution (read massive) media files stored away, which marketing could use any time. How are you going to make sure they're all compressed to a size small enough to be delivered within the threshold? Not to mention all the new images and videos that will be created over time...