“Shop the look”: turning one video into a basket

One video, several products, one decision. It is the oldest merchandising idea there is — the mannequin in the window was doing it — and video is the first format online that does it properly.

Why it works better than cross-sell

A related-products row is a guess made by software about what else somebody might want. A shop-the-look video is a demonstration: these things were chosen together, by a person, and here is what they look like together. The shopper is not being sold three items; they are being sold one result.

That difference shows up in order value, and it shows up because the shopper’s decision is different. “Do I also want this?” is a second decision with its own friction. “Do I want that” — pointing at the whole thing on screen — is one.

Setting it up

Tag every product that appears. They show in the player as a slider under the video, each with its live price and variants, so the shopper can add the whole set or pick out the one piece they came for.

Order the tags the way the eye moves through the video. The first product in the slider should be the one the video is most obviously about — usually the hero item, occasionally the cheapest one if the video is an entry point.

Bundles: making it one tap

A shop-the-look video where each item is added separately is three taps and three decisions. Grouping them into a bundle makes it one tap that adds the set, with the discount applied by Shopify at checkout.

The important detail is that this is a real Shopify discount rather than a number the widget draws. It survives the shopper leaving, coming back a day later, and checking out on a different device — which a front-end-only discount does not, and which is how a store ends up with an angry email about a price that vanished.

When it annoys people

Three reliable ways to make it worse than nothing:

• Tagging things that are not in the video. The shopper sees a list of products they cannot find on screen and correctly reads it as advertising.
• Bundling at wildly different price points. A £30 top with a £400 coat is not a look, it is an upsell wearing one.
• Making the bundle the only route. Somebody who wants one item should be able to buy one item without hunting.

Where to put it

Shop-the-look belongs where discovery happens — the home page and collection pages — rather than on a product page. On a product page the shopper has already narrowed to one thing, and widening them back out is not usually a favour.

The exception is a genuinely complementary set: the frame that fits the print, the filter for the jug. That is not widening the decision, it is completing it.

What to measure

Average order value on sessions that opened a shop-the-look video, against sessions that did not. Conversion rate alone will mislead you here: these videos often convert slightly worse and earn considerably more, because they are doing a different job from a single-product video. Judge them on the job they are doing.