How to Make E-commerce Videos That Sell!

Brands are focused on profitability and growth, right? So in order to be profitable, you need to be smart on your marketing and zero in on your best-selling products and high-profitable products. So you need to be where the shoppers are.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high-voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million.

All right, folks, welcome back to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. As always, like, comment, share, engage. As I've said before and say again, if you don't like it, that's okay. Just comment, engage. Social media helps us get the message out there so people like my guest today can talk about some of the things that you're gonna wanna know about if you are interested in the e-com world of video— uh, videography, digital cinema videos, and the power of that on the media side today, as well as how it applies to TikTok and other channels. And of course, the digital marketing that encompasses all of that. So my guest today is an expert. He's coming in from overseas. It's kind of late, if I'm not mistaken, in your time zone right now. So I appreciate you joining me a little later this evening. Eitan, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you, Neil. It's a pleasure.

Yeah. So where are you actually in the world? Not like specifically your address. We're not going to dox you. We don't do that. But generally, what corner of the world are you hanging out in right now?

Based in Israel.

Israel. Well, you guys are having some fun today or in the last week. How are things going?

It's summer already here, so it's really nice. Yeah, we don't dive into politics, right?

But this isn't political.

This is just it's a challenging year for us here, but we're hanging out. We are strong and we'll prevail. But yeah, I mean business keep going and we focus on what's important.

Very well said. So in that way, have you lived there your entire life? Is that where your business was found? Okay, and then your business was funded, founded, and developed out of that location?

Yes, yes. Israel is a tech country, as you probably know, specifically for retail tech. I mean hundreds of companies or even thousands, and it's a very thriving industry.

Yeah.

Innovation of technology here and obviously selling primarily to the US market and other international markets.

Why video for you? What do you find about it? What do you love about it?

Yeah, I mean, I'm already in video for probably more than 20 years. I started when it was called broadcast, right? So I started on the media and entertainment side of things and where video started to go into cable networks and then obviously in satellite and today video is Obviously migrated to IP with all the OTT players. So I've been throughout all these transitions and during the last few years we saw an amazing opportunity for Vimi in the commerce space.

Yeah.

So traditionally we were dealing with mobile, working with mobile operators, content providers, and then we've launched a platform to help brands and retailers sell online with video. We know that marketing budgets are Very obviously high and getting higher and higher. And the video component within marketing is here.

Well, it's powerful to tell that message, tell that narrative. You know, they say a picture says 1,000 words, but I'm not sure that anymore in our culture with people having an average less than 6th grade reading level and an attention span of 3 seconds, that anybody's pulling 1,000 words out of a picture anymore. What do you say about that?

Yeah, I mean, the picture is 1,000 words, so video is 1,000 pictures, right? So I mean, we have like the 2 sides of the, of this equation, right? One, on one side you have the short-form videos where the TikTokification effect, right? Where we just decide within 1 to 2 seconds whether we want to continue to watch that huge, large, long version of 30-second video, right? Probably.

That's true. We're going for that.

So that's like a 30-second bite. Yeah. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have the long-form videos where YouTube is obviously thriving, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we can see that YouTube video volumes are increasing, but also TikTok or short-form videos are increasing. So we love video, we love it in any form, and it's probably the best way to interact and engage with consumers.

Yeah, it is a fascinating thing. You know, I've been involved in the business world for a long time and watched the evolution of video in terms of marketing and digital marketing, which has been very fascinating to me to see that evolve through the interwebs, especially different age groups and demographics that are shifting in different uses. What are you seeing as the trend, maybe based on age, based on platform, based on video type? Kind of give us some insights as to if we're going to focus our attention this year, where should we be kind of weeding our way through all this? Well, knowing—

Yeah, so I mean, we help brands launch in the US, for example, and we launch them on TikTok, right? Because with TikTok and using the right influencer strategy or content creator strategy, or just organically, right, you can scale and go viral. With the right product. It doesn't fit any product. Okay. Anyway, everyone are in TikTok. I think TikTok has a lot of users obviously in the US. And the idea is that if it's a product, probably less than $100, right? Something that you can show real transformation within 30 seconds, 60 seconds. Something like cosmetics products, fashion, electronics, gadgets, right? These are becoming very, very successful. And we talk about probably on a special version of video, which is the shoppable video, right? So today, Any video in TikTok, you can open a TikTok shop and it can, that video can become shoppable. So brands are looking for more ways to sell outside of their own e-commerce platform. They want to sell where their shoppers are. So they're going multichannel and video is the way to go, but you need to create those shoppable experiences and this is what we do here at Vimi.

Okay.

So this is the TikTok, what's happening on the TikTok side. And by the way, Instagram Reels obviously and YouTube Shorts and Amazon and Walmart are also starting to experiment and launching their own Vertical videos or shopping videos, shoppable experience.

I think it'd be amazing if Amazon actually bought TikTok. The whole thing going down right now, there's been questions and you maybe can answer this from on the ground. Is TikTok going to get shut down by the United States? I don't know. It seems possible, but they've also been not necessarily told they have to shut down if there's a vehicle or an out. So now the question becomes who maybe buys them, who engages them, who's the likeliest partner do you think to take TikTok Shop into?

Okay. I hear that Microsoft are very interested. Yes. And obviously I don't think TikTok will go anywhere. I think it will stay, but probably it should change of ownership or different structure, but it's definitely going to be there. Look, I mean, it's one of the, one of these platforms that you can, it's not that crowded, right? It's getting more and more crowded, but it's less crowded than other platforms. And you still have with, again, organically, you have the ability to show yourself something that's really difficult to do with SEO, with other organic strategies. Obviously SEO is the game of the big brands, of the big players, long-term purchasing and traffic, long-term. Right? Same on Amazon. You need to spend a lot to get recognized by Amazon and search crawlers, and also you need to invest in advertising, 30, 40% of your revenues, right? And Meta, I mean, those CPCs are getting very expensive, and TikTok is nice because you can organically check what's working, and then you can continue with paid media on TikTok, which makes more sense.

We've experienced that firsthand. One of our clients, Voltage, uh, clients, Tiffany, Is, uh, Tammy. Excuse me, I don't wanna call her Tiffany. I think her name was Tammy. Um, had one of her videos go offer her product and now she's selling out by noon every day. It's a handmade product. She's got 10 people sewing locally to create the product. That's kind of how it's been her mechanism, but now it's blown up. And so she's having to get more outsourced, more manufacturing to get the product in the next day before it sells out. And she's in this cycle right now of just trying to keep up with demand and a couple more videos popped off. Which is great because the creator side, those people are making great money on the creator side, just pumping out the video. So it's extremely powerful medium. And you mentioned a few others too. And just to say them out loud again, YouTube Shorts, which has definitely been powerful for traffic, Reels on Instagram and Facebook. I guess those are kind of combined sort of, but they're slightly different channels. And then TikTok. So basically a 4-pronged video strategy. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yes, correct. And also Meta tried with live shopping and obviously It wasn't that successful. Live shopping is catching up in the US, but the shoppable version, if we're differentiating between live shopping and shoppable version, shoppable version is mostly the short-form videos, vertical videos that are going out there for primarily for awareness, attention grabbing, but also for conversion, right? And these are the type of experience that we try to educate. So there are a few trends, if I may elaborate what I mean, gaining a larger scope of what's happening here. because of cookie deprecation, cost of advertising both on Meta and Amazon, right? And so people are looking for this first-party data, right? Brands are looking for first-party data to try to make their advertising much more targeted. And the way to do that is getting more and more complicated. So what else you do for customer acquisition, right? So you go to probably influencers and you go to influencers and it's all right. We see a lot of brands doing that and— Influencer is video, right? And they need to create videos. So once they create this video, they post it on their own channels, on their brand channels. You can need to gather all this analytics. So I have video assets. You can reuse those video assets. You can associate product to video and introduce the shoppability capabilities. In TikTok, you must create product pages on TikTok and you must check out in TikTok. The fulfillment can vary. You can fulfill by TikTok or by other, like on Instagram and also YouTube just announced the They are releasing a new API to include shoppable thumbnails within the environment of the video player on YouTube. You can redirect to your own e-commerce platform or even redirect to Amazon or whatever you want people to go to.

Multi-platform, you can go to multi— because before they had a Shopify integration, did they not? And that's kind of a new thing, but now they're saying they're going to upgrade for multi-platform Amazon and other.

I mean, that's redirect, right? You can redirect the link to any other platform.

version, what you're saying.

Exactly. Shoppable version.

That's right.

You have on-player like thumbnails, but also below the player, a special area where you can introduce those clickable like Google Shopping, right? So you can redirect to the product page. That product page, you can decide whatever product page it's going to be. TikTok is very unique because they want the checkout to be on their own platform. So every platform has a different type of requirements and characteristics and set of API. So these are the, let's say the social media, YouTube, obviously, Then you have the marketplaces that video is also a main vehicle and if you are— and the retail media opportunity, right? Retail media again is an amazing opportunity because once you have that video, you can take this video to, if for example, in Amazon, you can deploy that on the various Amazon video-related assets like Twitch, but primarily Amazon Prime where advertising is obviously available. So you can also launch that video. Again, in a bidding type of technology on the big screen as well. And you can do it also in Netflix and others. So there is a big list of channels or marketplaces or social networks and platforms that are very interesting for this type of—

The opportunity and the challenge, isn't it? Because then people are, well, shoot, where do I start? Well, I mean, the simple thing you're saying really, and we can say in concise measure here, start with the video.

Sort of.

Figure out where your audience is and kind of stay into one of those channels or try to create as best as possible an omnichannel, but start with video or do video. Brett Curry was on here from OMG Commerce, and I just thought of a quote when you were here. He mentioned it on the podcast that in terms of media and straight media, television, etc., about 30% of those people are now flowing over to Amazon, even if the advertisement doesn't say go to Amazon. So there's a very powerful demand capture thing happening.

Yes.

And a very powerful demand discovery happening on the TikTok side right now. Leveraging that SEO and connection. And hey, Amazon and TikTok, if you're listening, I mean, if Amazon were just to leverage the TikTok connectivity through their existing shop apps like we use in our house, they might— could put up a video right through the existing Amazon app and have it have that connectivity. You guys would blow it up.

Yeah. But they're just barely—

I mean, it's all the buying app commands. They just don't have the ability to monetize it. And if I can monetize my video reviews through the Amazon app in coordination with TikTok, they crush it. So Amazon, you I would consider buying TikTok for that very reason right there. You pretty much dominate the social market.

Maybe you start to facilitate the deal, Neil.

I'm working it right now, brother. Anybody in the comment area, make it happen. Come on, you heard the idea here first. Don't steal my idea now. But I definitely think they could take over 150 million Prime members, all of a sudden become activated affiliates, and connectivity to the TikTok Shop platform as well as Amazon in that combined ability for me to become a creator when I was a buyer. That Yeah, well, that would really help Amazon. I mean, they tried with the influencer and associates platform of yesteryear, and they tried the influencer side. And I'm not saying it doesn't work. It just, if you are paying attention to this, it lacks connectivity. And the TikTok Shop creator platform has a simplified connectivity for the creator to make money and the brand owner to connect together. And that's very powerful and very easy for the brand owner to know they're going to get a video and the creator to know they're going to get paid, which is a problem in disjointed systems today. Like if we've gone to outside creator sites and then tried to get them to come to Amazon or other locations or get their videos, sometimes they just don't produce a video even though you pay for them.

And TikTok also helps you with access to those creators. They have like a creator marketplace that you can access.

Oh yeah, all kinds of data. Fantastic data about who and what and how much they actually respond and how many videos they make and a high percentage of their accountability. And of course they get dinged if they don't make the videos. So that's an awesome platform opportunity, no doubt. Where are you bullish at right now? In 2024, if you were to tell somebody, okay, here's where I would focus right now this year, where would you tell people?

I mean, in terms of the brands or—

Let's talk about creators and brands.

So if you're—

let's start with the brand first. If you're a brand person, video is an option, and I've got products and brands I'm moving forward with, what would you be bullish on? What would you be telling them right now?

Yeah, so as a brand, I focus on profitability and growth, right? So in order to be profitable, you need to be smart on your marketing and zero in on your best-selling products and high-profitable products. So You need to be where the shoppers are and they're not very expensive to bring them to your own e-commerce platform. So, and they are already on those platforms that we mentioned. Oh yeah. Implementing those multichannel shoppable strategies, right? Working with the right influencers, which is probably the best ROI they can get. And once you are successful with these product launches, then you can launch them on Amazon and other platforms, and then you can bring traffic to Amazon, which helps you also on the search on Amazon. Right. And on these places, because otherwise it's going to be very difficult if you, again, if you are launching something new. In terms of the creators themselves, I think they're obviously, they understand there's a huge opportunity that is shaping up. I would just advise, just advise them to be more focused on their specific niches or products they want to target. Some of them, they need to, there are now more and more monetization options that they can enjoy from. Not just, I mean, if you're doing YouTube, it's not just YouTube advertising, right? Or the income that you get. Brand deals is also very important. Even create their own merchandise and launch their own platform is something that they are considering. So I think it's going to be very dramatic, the influence of influencers within marketing activities of brands. So that's definitely where the market is going.

Yeah, no, it's certainly fascinating to watch. Business Insider called it the year of the creator. And as we've gone in through now April at the time we're recording this, it is a fascinating endeavor to watch so many people Uh, able to take the power of that media and really monetize it for the first time in a meaningful way for them. Others have tried, but it's been complex. You have to get so many, you know, profile views and so many followers before you can do it, link, and then you've got to make sure you've got somewhere to get product or digital. And there's just a lot of connectivity to that. But a couple of platforms nowadays are making it much easier for people to just go straight in and be the creator and make money doing it and then get really good at it. And with some of these folks who are hooking something I'm hoping I'll get a lady on right now. She's doing about $20,000, $30,000 a day. I've been soliciting her to come on the podcast and talk about her as a creator, just how is she doing it and whatnot. She's literally capable of just repeating a successful process of video by video, and she just dialed it in, which is fascinating to me. Nice personality and topic for it.

They're learning and they're becoming solopreneurs, or even, I mean, educate themselves how to manage their self as a brand and also as a business, right? And Yeah, the potential is huge.

Yeah, the potential is definitely huge. On the video side, what would you tell somebody who's thinking about being a— okay, 2 people again, we're kind of talking to the creator side and the brand business developer because these are 2 things that got to connect. Either you're doing it yourself or you're getting somebody to do it. So on the brand owner side, what is working video-wise right now? What are you suggesting to people in terms of the kinds of videos, the length of the videos, the format? What would you give somebody in their mind?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the brands are, let's say, are hesitant or afraid about video because they said, okay, it's It's too expensive. It's the like high quality, high production value, fully polished, but it's not, right? You have on the other side of the spectrum, what TikTok taught us is authenticity. No one cares about the background, right? Sound should be nice. The video, the hook should be in the right place. There is a methodology how to create great things. So start to create video. The best videos are created by the brand owners, right? By the founder or by the the executive team.

Yeah.

Because they are very connected and it's shown.

Yeah.

Like in the, like within seconds you can identify if someone is connected to the product or no. So videos don't have, doesn't have to be fully polished. Definitely on the short form on shoppable video. If it's a live shopping event, yes, it's more of a longer form video. It needs to be more structured. You need to have the right host and you need to have the right planning before and after the, before, during, and after the event. So there are 2 types of things. So Start creating videos, start posting them organically, see what works, and then push it with also with paid media. That video on the various platforms that, uh, that is relevant for this video, but again, implement the right platform to support that. Okay. We are at Vimeo. We are able to provide brands with a platform that is connected to their e-commerce platform and where they manage one video is associated with product and it's automatically deployed across all those channels. in a shoppable way. So we are providing all these shoppable experience across the entire array of channels in a very simple product.

Interesting.

Can I unpack that for a second with you and say, okay, specific avatar, I'm an Amazon seller, I've got a product and brand on Amazon and I come to your service, what would I expect or how would I work with you?

So if you have those videos, great. We can pull those videos from Amazon or you can pull them to our backend, to our platform. We will define if you wanna check out, if you want to check out on Amazon from the other platform, it's great. If you have a landing page or a product page, great. If you don't, we will give it to you because we are also an e-com provider. And the idea is that we can easily deploy all these assets across all the other channels. So we can open your TikTok shop and manage all the product pages on TikTok. We can also launch it on Meta, right? And on YouTube and all the other channels, right? So it's very easy to select channels and we are facilitating all these shoppable experiences. We are integrating to your Order management system to your inventory if required, and it's really seamless. So instead of hiring a team that is expert on TikTok and another team that is expert on YouTube, another team, which is usually what happens when you grow as a brand, let's say mid-sized brand, then you can work with company like Fimi. We can outsource this through technology and services that we provide, and it's seamless. Your assets will be visible and shoppable across all these channels in a very simple way. We give you all the analytics and all the data. So you can improve targeting, improve campaigns, and improve the quality of your videos.

That's very good. Yeah. Well, and the data is important, right? Because you gotta know which video is working well and how to repeat that video. And then obviously, if you're repeating the video as a brand owner, how do you get UGC content creators to just replicate the message and the narrative? And you gotta do that with data and data-driven. And as you said, and I echo 100% with what you said, you must be omnichannel today. If you are going to be on Amazon, discover your products, that's great, capture that demand, but then look at other ways, other channels. TikTok Shop, Shopify, etc., other marketplaces, Etsy, wherever it makes sense to take that product with buyer psychology, of course, in mind. You got to open the other channel. There's an opportunity for you, right, to exit a business that has a multi-channel opportunity, creates a much higher valuation for those companies instead of just 2x or 3x on just Amazon only, or just a 3x or so on Shopify. You're going to get 5 to 10x on omnichannels if you open. Nice. Yeah, it's really—

hey, Amazon is very important, right? You definitely need to be on Amazon, but it's getting more and more difficult to discovered on Amazon and more expensive to sell. So—

It is difficult discovery.

Amazon, you need the multichannel to start redirecting outsourced traffic to your product page on Amazon. Amazon are aware of that, right? And there are huge benefits if you start bringing traffic to Amazon. This is why even if you want to be successful on Amazon, it's important to have this multichannel just to redirect back users, create traffic to your store and product pages on Amazon, which will help you with discovery and sales.

Well, it doesn't matter. There's demand capture. So there's another angle, not that this is not counterpointing to you. It's just a nuance that there is, like I mentioned, 30% of TV traffic coming on. There's demand capture coming across at 18 to 20% based on Shopify, TikTok, or other channels that are falling back. So the key to being successful on Amazon, folks, if you're listening to this, and we're gonna say relatively the same thing right now, capture the demand that's coming in. That's your opportunity. If it's brand new and holistically no one's ever heard of it, you don't launch it on the Amazon channel. If it's a product you've seen and you can create an innovation of that product to capture demand coming in from multiple locations, we've repeatedly done that with success to take outside Amazon conversations, channels, news, whatever it is, and then capture the demand that's already coming in Amazon.

Yeah.

Getting a better product in place and then pushing it back out the other direction. So it's just, it's a strategy at the end of the day. But you're right, if you have something brand new and you're, you think it's awesome and that maybe the next best pet thing or whatever, and you're not sure if the market really wants this, let's call it the Elon Musk style kind of product, go to TikTok Shop, get it discovered, get your UGC creators and get it there. And what you're saying today, Aiden, is get it discoverable first and then go capture that demand in the channels that they're most likely to get to, like Amazon, et cetera.

Yes. And again, just to emphasize what you said, I mean, if you're in a product market fit stage, Launch it on TikTok or all those short-form social platforms, work with influencers and validate. It's probably the cheapest and fastest way to understand if you're on the right way.

That's a market research tool, right? I mean, that'd be a great takeaway from today.

100%.

Get people interested in, if you don't have anywhere to put them just yet, they'll message you, they'll find out, you'll discover if they really want that product, can they connect with you? And then you will know for a fact that somebody wants that product. Demand research. That's a fascinating number of tools to do that with.

And if it works, then you need to, you can start scaling.

Then get it on the platform.

Yeah. It may be Amazon, Meta, right? But you have the right tests in place. Yeah.

Aiden, is there a question I didn't ask you that maybe you want to answer? That topic I didn't get to that you wanted to cover?

No, I mean, just this topic, create, start creating video, create more and more video. It doesn't have to be polished. It doesn't have to be like high production value. Short-form videos, authentic videos are the ones that are working and you post every day, get the data, check it out and improve. So, and Use experts, use external agencies, use technology companies because those platforms are getting more and more complicated and complex.

Yeah.

They're evolving, they're changing every day. You need a type of a partner to help you in this journey. Agreed.

Agreed. Very well said. Okay, last question. I love to ask this at the end. I've been doing it most recently and I think it's kind of a fun one. So if I were to, if I had power in my network to give you a connection to somebody to sit down, have lunch, grab coffee, do something, meet someone, And it was in our power to do that, who would that be? Who would you like to—

A specific person? Maybe the CEO of Walmart.

Okay, CEO of Walmart.

Okay.

So guys, if you're in— okay, CEO of Walmart, if you're listening to this, the old joke in America, the 6 degrees of separation, you know somebody who knows somebody about 6 players deep on average, the Kevin Bacon effect. So if you're listening to this, and you are the Walmart CEO, thank you so much for joining us. If you're not or connected, then tag in the comments or whatever, there's a connection that might be able to be made here.

Who knows?

You never know if you don't ask.

Right.

I appreciate that. Thank you so much, dude, for joining me and giving us some amazing tips. Folks, hopefully you paid attention to what's going on today. If you're not making videos, then get out there tomorrow and start making videos and look at the opportunity. Go check out the show notes and the platform. Check out what Aamir's doing. Thank you so much for coming on with me, man.

Thank you, Neil. It was a pleasure.

Ask you this. If you're serious about building an e-commerce business starting on Amazon FBA, what if myself and my team worked with you one-on-one to execute the steps outlined in the podcast while helping you discover what the heck to sell, how to make sure it's profitable, and how to successfully launch a brand. Plus, how to do it under a consulting plus performance-driven model where I put a $10,000 skin-in-the-game guarantee for those that show up and are serious about building a real business done with us. If yes, text keyword profit to +1-417-413-4209. That's 1-417-413-4209. And I will personally respond with a few simple questions. If you're not in the US or Canada, please visit voltage dm dot com. That's voltage dm dot com. Click Get Started and book a no-pressure discovery call with me or a member of my team to learn more about the Business Builders one-on-one coaching and mentoring for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and those looking to build an empire or retire using the power of e-commerce. Once again, thank you for listening, and be sure to tune in next week for a brand new episode of the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast.