Consumers expect modern websites to be mainly visual. But, the more compelling and complex the related media is, the more data is involved, compounding the site’s weight. In today’s content-craving world, delivering unoptimized media can cost you because it leads to sluggish page loads, resulting in visitors abandoning your site in search of a faster alternative. In fact, a page load that takes more than three seconds can cause as many as 40% of your visitors to bounce. Given this competitive, digital-first environment, you can’t afford to lose page views, for time is of the essence.
Cloudinary’s Product Gallery widget, which launched in 2019, has enabled many brands to effectively and efficiently showcase their products in a sleek and captivating manner, saving countless hours of development time and accelerating release cycles. By adding Cloudinary’s Product Gallery widget with its customizable UI to their product page, retailers reap numerous benefits, often turning visitors into customers in short order.
Most business buyers prefer to research purchase options online, as do many shoppers. No wonder online retail sales in the U.S. rose by 32.4% in 2020—an impressive gain of $105 billion.
For B2B and B2C businesses, text-heavy websites are no longer adequate in attracting shoppers. Instead, engaging visual media—spin images, videos, 3D models, augmented reality—are becoming a must for conveying eye-catching details and differentiators about products or services.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers had high expectations for digital experiences. They now expect nothing less than seamless, intuitive, and engaging experiences regardless of the channel or platform they are on. The Cloudinary product team is well aware that meeting those expectations has created new challenges for retailers and brands, especially those that relied on in-store sales before the pandemic. To understand the challenges so we can better solve them, we recently worked with Meet the Boss, a business-collaboration partner, to host three virtual roundtables with brand leaders.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation for businesses and customers alike. Across verticals, brands were forced to evaluate their digital strategies and the ways in which they connect with audiences and customers. To explore brands’ visual media challenges, changes, and opportunities, Cloudinary recently cohosted a virtual roundtable with six leading brands from the Brand Innovators community on the topic, Brand Visualization in a Post-Pandemic Environment.
We’re excited to announce Cloudinary’s integration with SAP Commerce Cloud, through which the latter’s customers can significantly boost the visual media experience on their website or app.
SAP Commerce Cloud powers some of the largest e-commerce sites (B2C, B2B, and B2B2C businesses), complete with building blocks like storefront design and order management. Reinforced with Cloudinary’s laser-sharp focus on optimizing, managing, and delivering images and videos, the new extension will enable SAP Commerce Cloud customers to create unique and engaging visual experiences effortlessly.
While managing marketing campaigns, you’ve most likely come across situations whereby a campaign must go live ASAP. Or, last-minute changes in the content, design, or brand guidelines emerge just before launch. In those circumstances, getting your creative team to generate new images or modify existing ones on a tear can lead to a lot of stress and missed deadlines. To help you navigate those rough waters, we are releasing an integration of Cloudinary with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) content builder.
The digital economy is driven by highly visual experiences. After all, viewers process images 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, it’s no surprise that top-notch visual media has been an essential component of a captivating e-commerce experience for years. Nor is it surprising that visual media’s importance only rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, a reality for all retailers, including our client Levi’s.
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: