Labor Day Shoppers Get More Web 2.0 Treatment

The massive shift in shopper behavior to online shopping research is a profound trend that both merchants and marketers have failed to fully exploit. And when shoppers look online to research purchases, their searches most often conclude on the product pages of online retailers.

The online retail product page is the key point of influence in the purchase decision, yet it often consists of little more than a static “picture and a paragraph” of product information. The problem is shared by both online retailers and product marketers. Online merchants face an enormous logistical challenge of presenting thousands of products from hundreds of manufacturers. And marketers haven’t caught up with the fact that online retail product pages are among their most important media placements, driving product purchases far beyond the online sale.

The solution to transforming the online product page into an engaging and informative sales tool lies in collaboration between marketers and their online channel partners.

Our company, along with others, enables such collaboration by creating and syndicating “Active Product Tours™” on the product pages of online retailers. Active Product Tours combine product videos with printable collateral documents like owner’s manuals, product brochures, and sell sheets. Our clients are marketers, who provide the content. Our syndication network is the product pages of over 120 online retail sites. Much like the factory sales person conducting product demonstration at a busy retail store end cap, we enable marketers to place their product story right where shoppers are most likely to see it - while in the act of shopping.

And they do - over a million shoppers choose to view our online product tours every month and spend an average of 2.5 minutes of engagement with each product tour.

There are certainly other important elements to converting online shoppers into offline buyers- social networking, user reviews, where-to-buy tools, and the like.

However, all of these efforts are designed to lead shoppers to the point of sale, where conversion is key and easily impacted with the proper use of online services by those marketers and merchants who take advantage of them.

Cordially,

Rick Martin

CEO

SellPoint, Inc.

www.sellpoint.net

Rick Martin of CA 1:02PM August 29, 2008