Say a customer is tracking down a Buck Rogers Liquid Helium Water Pistol Space Gun, and can't believe his good luck when he finds one at your vintage toy site on eBay. But when a picture of that Phantom of the Opera Mystery Game from Hasbro circa 1963 scrolls past, there's no resisting, and he winds up buying it as well. That's what's happening to eBay seller Bobby Beeman, one merchant taking advantage of multimedia listings to boost sales.
Two companies recently announced services eBay sellers can use to illustrate items using video and motion. Auction Mercial automates the creation of infomercials, transforming an auction's pictures and text descriptions into a high-quality video — and it's free. The Slide Show Gallery from Andale offers auction sellers the addition of dynamic motion, in which a photo display of available items scrolls across the seller's auction or store listing on eBay, providing additional exposure to buyers, with pricing starting at $5.95 a month. (Slide Show Gallery also works with blogs, Web sites and e-mail.)
Show and Sell Beeman, a nine-year eBay veteran who runs Toy Ranch, recently added Andale's Slide Show Gallery to his site and is already wrangling more sales. "I talked to customers who did a keyword search for one item, but then they saw other items scrolling by that they weren't even looking for and purchased those as well," says the Texas-based e-tailer. "One customer bought an extra item for $40, another for $15; it's the power of suggestion, and I can definitely see sales picking up already."
The toy seller likes Slide Show Gallery better than the slide system offered by eBay because he says it allows him to include more than the traditional three or six products. You can set up the slide show to display the highest priced items, the lowest, ones that are up for auction but will be ending within a certain time period and so on.
Straight to Video For sellers who want to unleash their inner-producer, there's the new auction infomercial service announced yesterday. Sellers simply enter their eBay item number to "Quick Create" a Mercial (as in com-mercial). Auction Mercial imports pictures of the listing and a text description from eBay. Then it's one click to create and view your Mercial, which can be done in less than 30 seconds.
Using Auction Mercial does not require advanced video editing skills, says Mike Behnke, Auction Mercial president, and there are no downloads. "Sellers have enough to do without experimenting with video editing," says Behnke. "We remove the time and labor costs and offer a way for eBay Sellers to add high-quality video to their listings with easy-to-use, state-of-the-art automation."
Furthermore, Behnke says some sellers are better able to express themselves visually. "Some of these listings are painful to look at. They're all over the board with typos and, let's face it, some people do not have a great command of the English language. Nor should they need to. They're in business to sell stuff. Auction Mercials provides a more professional image for the seller," Behnke says. Plus, he said he thinks most buyers want to have an experience online that's more akin to watching TV than reading blocks of text.
When creating an infomercial, sellers can go the automatic route, or they can use their own voice recordings. Merchants can call the company and leave a voice recording on the phone that is then added to their video. There's no time limit for the Internet infomercials but Behnke warns that people will "click off if you're yakking too much." He adds, "We're carving out a position above the static shopping sites and, for now, below the capabilities of TV shopping channels. We're giving buyers a better experience and sellers a better medium and forum to build a personal relationship with the buyer."
Wes Shepherd, president of Channel Velocity, a company that builds eBay outlet stores for major brand names, predicts that multimedia listings will become standard. "Rich media, using flash or any kind of video, will eventually be used more and more if smaller merchants can use them for free or for a few cents per listing," says Shepherd. "The key is to use it to improve buyer education about a product. You should see the amount of questions we get about items. If it helps CRM (customer relation management), that would be a huge, huge help."
Regardless of what the future may hold for multimedia ads, Beeman is happy to reap the rewards now. "In just a few weeks," he says, "I've seen tangible results in the form of increased sales, so I'm a big fan."
Michelle Megna is managing editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.
Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!
Tools:
Add ecommerce-guide.com to your favorites Add ecommerce-guide.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.xReceive news via our XML/RSS feed
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
