How long should an ecommerce video be?

Short. Shorter than the video you have. Almost certainly shorter than the one you are about to make.

The numbers that matter

On a store, a video card gets a glance. Not a decision to watch — a glance, during a scroll, with the shopper’s attention already committed to something else. You are asking to borrow it.

Working ranges by placement:

• Card in a carousel or grid: 6–15 seconds. It has to make its point in the loop.
• Product page: 15–30 seconds. Higher intent buys you more time, but not much.
• Full-screen popup: 20–45 seconds. The shopper chose to open this one.
• Anything over a minute: a landing page video, watched by people who came to watch it.

The first two seconds

Whatever the total length, the product should be on screen and recognisable within two seconds. Not the logo, not an establishing shot of the studio, not a title card — the thing that is for sale.

This is why social video outperforms brand film on stores so reliably. Social platforms punish a slow open ruthlessly, so anything that did well there already has the hook. A brand film is built to reward patience, and a shopper mid-scroll has none to offer.

It plays muted

Assume no sound, always. If the point of the video is in a voiceover, the point does not exist on your store.

On-screen text carries it instead — but text sized for a full-screen phone becomes illegible on a card in a three-across grid. Check it at card size before deciding the video works.

Loops change the calculation

A card video loops. A ten-second clip that loops cleanly is watched three times by an interested shopper and reads as considered. A ten-second clip that ends abruptly and restarts reads as broken.

It is worth trimming to a natural loop point even at the cost of a second of content. The seamlessness is more valuable than the second.

One idea per video

The single biggest cause of over-length is trying to do three things: show the product, explain the material, demonstrate the use. Each of those is a fifteen-second video. Together they are a forty-five-second video that does none of them well and gets abandoned at eight seconds.

Three short videos also merchandise better than one long one. They fill a carousel, they can be tagged differently, and you find out which of the three ideas the shopper actually cared about.

The test

Watch it muted, at card size, on a phone, having not seen it before. If you cannot tell what is for sale in the first two seconds, the length is not the problem — but it is where the problem is showing up.