Where to put video on a product page

The product page is the most contested piece of real estate on a store. Everything on it wants to be above the fold and almost nothing can be. Video has a good claim — and a real risk of getting in the way of the thing it is meant to support.

The three candidate positions

In the image gallery

Video as another item in the carousel of product images. The most conservative choice and often the best one: it is exactly where a shopper looks for visual information about the product, and it costs no vertical space at all.

The limitation is prominence. A video in position six of a gallery is seen by the people who swipe to position six, which is fewer than you would like.

Directly under the buy button

Strong placement. The shopper has read the price and the options and is deciding. Video here is answering the last objection at the moment it is being raised.

It works because it does not push the buy button down — it sits underneath it. Everything above the fold stays above the fold.

Below the description

The safest and the weakest. Nobody is harmed by it and most shoppers never reach it. Reasonable for a store adding video cautiously; not where it earns its keep.

The position to avoid

Above the buy button. It seems obviously right — show them the video first, then let them buy — and it consistently underperforms, because it pushes price, variants and the add-to-cart control below the fold on a phone. You have made a shopper who had already decided scroll to do the thing they had decided to do.

Video should reduce the distance between wanting and buying. Any placement that increases it is working against itself, however good the video is.

A sticky buy bar changes the calculation

If a sticky add-to-cart bar follows the shopper down the page, the buy button is never actually off screen, and video can sit higher without cost. This is the configuration that lets a product page be genuinely video-led without the usual penalty — and it is worth setting up before experimenting with prominent placements.

How many, and which

Three to five. The first one should be the product in use, plainly, with no set-up. Assume the shopper watches five seconds of the first video and nothing else — and make those five seconds worth it.

A useful ordering: product in use, then scale or detail, then customer content, then anything longer-form. That is roughly descending order of how many people will watch it.

Check it on a phone. Actually on a phone.

The desktop preview will tell you the layout is fine. The desktop preview has twice the vertical space and none of the thumb reach problems. Most of the traffic is mobile and most of the placement mistakes are only visible there: the card that clips its text, the section that pushes the price below the fold, the gallery that has quietly become eleven items long.