New Ways to use YouTube for your Commerce

French Connection UK has made an arrangement with YouTube to use out-linking annotations in video and laid the foundation for a better way to use YouTube for your eCommerce.

How to use YouTube currently

At this time you can use YouTube to host your product videos. There are advantages and disadvanteges to host them on YouTube or to host them on your own webspace or other hosters. I don’t want to discuss these in this article but a big advanatage of YouTube is that it can drive more traffic to your site through Google Search. Between the usual search results you can find some video results.

The problem is to get the user from the YouTube Video result to your eCommerce site.
Currently you can just implement a logo or text directly in your video but not a link. You can just set a link in the video description below the video.

How to use YouTube in future

You can use pop-ups in the video and link them just to other YouTube Videos. French Connection has made an arrangement to use these pop-ups to link directly to the product in the online store.
French Connection make a nice use of it. In the videos they answer questions which possibly are real troubles of customers in a “How to…” manner. For example a stylist explains “How to wow people at work” and shows an outfit which would fit for that occasion. After that you see a model wearing that outfit and there are direct links to buy the items in the online store.

Conclusion

If this function will become accessible for everyone there are more advantages to host videos on YouTube.

1. You can direct your customers better to your online store
2. On your site you can use it to cross-sell products by showing related products in a product video.
3. You can make a better use of your YouTube Channel to sell things like French Connection with its YouTique

What is your opinion? Is it a good feature for eCommerce?