Product tagging: the ten minutes that decide everything

Everything else about shoppable video is presentation. Tagging is the mechanism. A beautifully placed, perfectly styled widget full of untagged videos converts at zero, and it will look completely fine while doing it.

Tag what is visible

The first rule and the most broken one. Tag the products a shopper can actually see in the video, and nothing else.

The temptation is to attach the whole collection, on the theory that more options is more chances to sell. It has the opposite effect. A shopper sees six products listed under a video that plainly shows two, recognises it as advertising, and stops treating the tags as information. Once that happens on one video they discount the tags on every video.

Order them the way the eye moves

The first tagged product is the one most people will tap, more or less regardless of what it is. Make it the thing the video is obviously about.

For a single-product video this is trivial. For a shop-the-look it is a real decision: the hero item is usually right, though if the video is an entry point for a new customer, leading with the most accessible price can work better.

Tag the variant

If the video shows the olive one in a medium, tag that variant rather than the parent product. The shopper arrives with olive medium already chosen.

Tagged at the product level, they arrive at a picker set to whatever the store’s default is — usually the first colour alphabetically, which is rarely the one they just watched thirty seconds of. Some will reconstruct it. Enough will not that this is the highest-return ten seconds in the whole workflow.

Let the price look after itself

Prices, titles and stock are read live when the card renders rather than copied at tagging time. This matters more than it sounds: it means a sale you start on Friday afternoon is on every video card on Friday afternoon, with no re-syncing and no stale prices to hunt down.

It also means you never have to remember that a video exists when you change a price, which is the kind of thing that is fine until you have two hundred videos.

How many per video

One to three for most videos. Four to six for a genuine shop-the-look.

Beyond six, the product slider becomes a list to scroll rather than a set of choices, and scrolling a list is a different activity from picking the thing you just saw. If a video genuinely contains eight products, it is usually two videos.

What happens when something sells out

A sold-out tagged product follows your theme’s own rules rather than becoming a dead link. If your theme hides sold-out products, the card behaves the same way. This is worth knowing before you tag a limited run: the video will quietly stop offering something that cannot be bought, which is the behaviour you want, but it will surprise you the first time if you were not expecting it.

A tagging pass worth doing

Once a quarter, open your five most-played videos and check the tags against what is actually on screen. Catalogues change, videos get reused for new campaigns, and the tag that was right in March is describing a discontinued colourway by September. It takes twenty minutes and it is consistently the highest-value twenty minutes anyone spends in the app.