Video on collection pages: the underused placement

Home pages get the attention and product pages get the effort. The collection page — where shoppers actually spend their time, and where they most often give up — gets a grid of thumbnails and a filter bar.

Why the page is hard

A collection page asks a shopper to compare items that are deliberately similar, using images that are deliberately consistent, at a size that hides most of the differences. Thirty products photographed identically on white is easy to build and genuinely difficult to shop.

The information a shopper needs to narrow it down — how it moves, how it sits, how big it is — is exactly the information a consistent product grid removes.

What video adds

A band of video between the filters and the grid does three things at once: it breaks a monotonous page, it shows a handful of items in use rather than on white, and it gives a shopper who cannot decide a way in that is not scrolling further.

How to place it

A carousel, not a grid. There is already a grid on the page. A second one competes with it and the shopper has to work out which is which.

Below the filters, above the products. High enough to be seen, low enough that shoppers who know what they want can scroll straight past to the catalogue. Never above the filters — a shopper who came to filter should be able to filter.

Four to six videos. This is a supporting section. It is not the page.

Match the playlist to the collection

A playlist per collection you actively merchandise. Generic brand video on a specific collection page is a missed opportunity that is worse than nothing: a shopper looking at boots does not want a video about your values.

This is the main reason the placement gets skipped, incidentally. It needs content per collection, which is real work. Start with the two collections that earn the most and leave the long tail alone.

Keep it out of the way of the page

Collection pages are usually the heaviest pages on a store already — a lot of images, a lot of markup, filters and sorting. Video here has to lazy-load, has to show a poster first, and must not be the element the page’s loading speed is measured on. Reserve the space it will occupy so nothing below it jumps when it arrives.

How to tell if it worked

Not clicks on the videos. Look at whether shoppers who saw the band went on to a product page at a higher rate, and whether they reached a product further down the collection than the shoppers who did not. The job of this placement is to get people into the catalogue, not to be interacted with.