A workflow for keeping your store’s video current

Every store that adds video reaches the same point about four months in: a library nobody has looked at, some of it for products that no longer exist, with a campaign from two seasons ago still on the home page.

The fix is a routine, and it is short.

Automatic import, and what it does not do

Connecting an Instagram account means new posts arrive on their own. That solves the tedious half of the problem — nothing has to be fetched by hand — and it creates a different one: the library now grows without anybody deciding it should.

Arriving is not the same as being merchandised. An auto-imported video is untagged and unplaced until somebody does something with it. Automatic import is a conveyor belt, not a merchandiser.

The monthly pass

Thirty minutes, once a month.

1. Tag what arrived. New imports, tagged properly, variants included. This is most of the time and all of the value.
2. Check the top five. Open your best-performing videos and confirm the tagged products are still the right ones. Catalogues change underneath videos constantly.
3. Retire what is dead. Videos for discontinued products, last season’s campaign, anything tagged only to things you no longer sell.
4. Look at one number. Attributed revenue per video, top five. Ask what they have in common.
5. Check one placement on a phone. A different one each month. Layouts rot quietly when themes update.

Why retiring matters more than adding

Placements are finite — a limited number of pages can usefully show video, and on some plans a hard limit. Every slot occupied by a video for a discontinued product is a slot a current product is not using.

Pruning also improves the average. A shopper who taps three videos and finds two dead ends stops tapping, and that is a cost paid across the whole library.

The thing that breaks silently

Imported social videos rely on links that expire. A library can look completely healthy in the dashboard and be showing blank cards on the storefront.

Whatever you import with should be re-checking and refreshing those links on its own — and either way, looking at an actual storefront page once a month catches it.

Keep it small

Twenty well-tagged, well-placed videos outperform two hundred that nobody has curated. The instinct is to import everything; the discipline is to import what you will actually merchandise.