In today’s business world, e-commerce platforms are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, businesses gain access to more customers, while customers are no longer limited to the product options of the physical stores around them.
But brick-and-mortar stores still have the advantage of allowing customers to interact with products before buying them. They can examine the size and other tangible qualities that images on a website can’t convey.
This experience is often why many consumers prefer to buy certain products in person. A Wyzowl report cites that the biggest concern for nearly 50% of online shoppers is that “products won’t look the same when they arrive.”
The best way to mitigate this concern is to use a video that shows your product in use and at all possible angles. According to Wyzowl, 88% of customers say that videos help them make purchasing decisions. But creating and serving those videos in line with modern web standards can be complex and time consuming. Cloudinary offers tools and services that you can use to optimize and deliver visual assets in the format best suited for each digital channel.
This article shows you how to unleash the full potential of high-quality, immersive video on your e-commerce sites with Cloudinary’s latest features.
The process of creating and distributing product videos can be daunting. It requires various technical skills, including:
- Constant refreshing. Adjust the quality of your video according to the user’s device bandwidth, CPU, and network connection to deliver the best possible quality with fewer buffering interruptions.
- Proper management of digital assets. Produce and manage all your video assets, such as thumbnails, external audio like voiceovers, transcripts, captions, and subtitles based on the user’s language.
- Distribution across platforms. Deliver videos in the most optimized way for each type of digital channel (web, mobile, and social media).
Tackling this workload manually takes considerable time and resources, which is why you need a more potent approach. Cloudinary is a cloud-based, end-to-end media management solution that makes the entire video workflow easier and faster.
Cloudinary’s unique video processing and delivery capabilities help enhance your videos, and its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms, such as AI Background Removal and Imagga Auto Tagging, can automate video management tasks.
Cloudinary’s AI Background Removal add-on uses various deep-learning algorithms to recognize the primary object(s) in your video, then accurately remove the background within seconds. This technology enables your videos to focus on the products and key areas you want to display.
You can use this code to remove the background of an image on the fly in a Node.js application:
cloudinary.image("your-image-source", {effect: "background_removal"})
This process keeps the original image intact and creates a derived version with the background removed:
With auto tagging, Cloudinary analyzes your media data and automatically identifies scenes, visual objects, and concepts from which it precisely suggests accurate tags. These tags improve your videos’ discoverability and search engine optimization (SEO), allowing customers to find them more quickly.
Instead of combing through each video to come up with the right tags, use this code to handle tagging automatically:
cloudinary.v2.uploader
.upload("turtle.mp4",
{ resource_type: "video",
categorization: "google_video_tagging" })
.then(result=>console.log(result));Code language: JavaScript (javascript)Other noteworthy AI and automation capabilities include:
- Google AI Video Transcription add-on. Automatically generates speech-to-text transcripts for your videos.
- Google Translation add-on. Translate your generated video tags and transcripts into any supported language.
You need to consider your website’s performance when serving media assets like videos on your e-commerce store. Media assets usually have the greatest impact on your site’s load time, speed, and performance.
Videos are much more demanding than images because of their larger file size and the resources they need to run on the web. So you need to deliver videos in the most optimized format possible.
Relying on browser-side resizing (using HTML or CSS for responsive scaling when delivering full-size videos) forces users to download unnecessary resources.
Cloudinary provides features that enable further media optimization, like delivering videos responsively. Cloudinary’s video cropping and resizing transformations allow you to apply various changes to your videos on the server side, such as:
- Dynamically adjusting the size (width and height) of the video.
- Scaling or downscaling the aspect ratio.
- Cropping out foreground objects to bring the main objects into focus.
These transformations enable you to deliver videos in the dimensions best suited for customers, regardless of device size.
For example, the code below crops this video to a square aspect ratio while keeping the ship the main focus throughout:
cloudinary.video("ship", {aspect_ratio: "1:1", gravity: "auto", width: 300, crop: "fill"})
Employing this AI-powered automation downscales your video, improves your site’s performance, and creates a smooth transition across viewports, delivering a high-quality video experience for your customers.
This flexibility means less work for you while ensuring that your media looks perfect regardless of the device or display type.
Wyzowl predicts that 91% of businesses will use video as a marketing strategy in 2023. With so much content available, the competition for a viewer’s attention is fiercer than ever. If you want to stand out, you need to have an edge. Personalizing videos can give you that edge.
Personalized videos are tailored for each viewer by using data collected about them. For example, consider a Facebook advertisement for a clothing store that refers to customers by name and recommends outfits based on their shopping history.
Customers want to interact with brands that recognize and connect with them for who they are. Personalizing videos lets viewers connect with products and brands and encourage them to take action.
Cloudinary’s video player has many customization capabilities that bring in-store experiences and branding to life. Let’s go over two of the big ones.
Cloudinary’s video zoom feature enables viewers to closely inspect and explore products from all possible angles and accurately make purchasing decisions.
The code sandbox provides the complete code required to implement interactive videos with the video zoom functionality.
Cloudinary allows you to transform videos by adding overlays to incorporate what you know about the viewer. These overlays can include media assets such as brand logos, informative text, or links.
Some examples include an overlay on a clothing e-commerce store that can show clothes based on the current weather and temperature or one that thanks a customer by name at the end of a video. Overlays can also add information or links that allow customers to purchase the product in the video.
Overlays also protect your company against unlawful usage of your video content and make it easier for viewers to identify your brand whenever they come across it. Watermarking videos with your logo or other identifying information deters other e-commerce stores from using the videos without permission.
For example, the gif below shows a video overlaid with the company’s logo, reinforcing the brand without detracting from the video content:
In the competitive world of e-commerce, video is quickly becoming a necessity. If you want to stay afloat, the sooner you adopt it, the better.
Cloudinary allows you to streamline and automate video creation and delivery on your e-commerce stores. With Cloudinary, you can add background removal, auto-tagging, responsive video sizing/cropping, interactive product zoom, and interactive overlays to your videos.
Try out Cloudinary for free today to produce effective and scalable e-commerce videos.
