JC Penney, Forever 21 and American Eagle have all tapped hauls to get a bigger bite of market share, as the National Retail Federation predicts back to school shopping for grades K-12 to reach $21.35 billion. JC Penny recently announced plans to give gift cards to teens who create haul videos after shopping at the store.

In an effort to track how shoppers are using retail web sites and define premium position within site search results new research found that 94% of shoppers click between one and 10 products, and from there, they look for price, product features and preferred brands as key differentiators.

Searchandise Commerce yesterday announced the results of an in-depth research study titled “The Value of Retail Search and Position,” which was conducted by comScore and co-sponsored by iProspect.

The study revealed that two-thirds of consumers begin the shopping process online, and that half convert offline. The path to purchase, in most cases, starts with a combination of search engine and site search on retail web sites for price, brand and feature information, as shoppers surveyed consult an average of 4.1 information sources during the process.  The study further highlights that rankings matter in site search much like they do in search engine marketing: shoppers associate relevance and quality with products on the first page of search results.

By Tal Rubenczyk, CEO, Treepodia

It will come as no surprise to you when I say that retailers everywhere are incorporating product videos on their e-commerce sites to boost sales and conversions. Research shows that when product videos are featured, visitors are 85% more likely to convert. That’s a pretty compelling argument.

But did you also know that there are ways to enhance your videos to boost their conversion value even more? Things like adding appropriate background music, voice-overs, and text can all generate more clicks to purchase among visitors to your web site. The key to knowing what’s appropriate and what enhancements perform the best is to A/B test.

For example, you can create two different versions of the same product video and have them rotate on your site so they’re viewed in random fashion by your customers. One version might be just the video itself with no enhancements – the other version can include the addition of background music and text. After just a couple of days, you can see which version gets clicked on the most and the conversions they each generate, to determine which will be most impactful.