Three Trends in Rich Media That Are Driving Holiday Shopping Experiences That Convert

Image source: Adobe Stock / Tierny.

Online holiday shopping is in full swing — living up to Adobe’s prediction that this will be the biggest shopping season yet. In early data from the season, I see three trends surfacing among the many retailers prospering from powerful Dynamic Media Classic (formerly Scene7) rich media capabilities: more product video, product personalization, and optimizing for lightning fast load times.

Trend one: Video on product detail pages

While it’s not a new concept, video on product detail pages has become pervasive and critical to success. More and more Dynamic Media Classic customers are adding video to media sets on product detail pages to provide a more compelling way to engage and convert shoppers. And customers (including me!) are beginning to expect and rely on video to make our purchase decisions. Part of the reason for this explosion in video is the rich capabilities you have to manage and deliver that video. With the unique ability of Dynamic Media Classic to automatically optimize video for multiple device types and bandwidths, retailers can give their customers the best possible viewing experiences that drive revenue.

Why is video so critical to the experience?

I’m seeing companies like ASOS, Kohl’s, and Dick’s Sporting Goods — to name a few — effectively integrate video onto their product detail pages to enrich their customers’ shopping experiences.

Trend two: Product customization

The second trend is being driven by retailers who are ready to create next-level experiences that give shoppers full creative license to personalize products before purchase. Customers love to be in control, they love to be creative, and they love to be unique. Dynamic Media Classic’s visual configurator lets you offer those pleasures to your customers.

Using the visual configurator in Dynamic Media Classic, retailers like Nike and Minted have carved out very unique positions in the markets they serve. The Nike by You experience lets the consumer choose their shoe — then fully customize colors and other aspects — until it’s just what the customer wants.

And over on Minted, the design marketplace that allows people to create beautiful cards, invitations, and more, Dynamic Media Classic is the engine that enables the user to customize by uploading their own photos and more, resulting in a beautiful expression of creativity.

You can offer the customized experience without building custom products using Dynamic Media Classic. Customers become more deeply engaged by something as simple as inviting them to design or configure their shoes by choosing shoelaces, or selecting what makes up the “scarf and gloves” item.

Trend three : Create lightning fast page load times with Smart Imaging

While not a sexy visual component of the shopping experience, our last trend is arguably the most important thing I’ve seen our retailer customers focus on this year.

We all know that the longer it takes for a page to load, the more likely a customer is to abandon the experience. By tapping into the power of Smart Imaging — an under-the-hood feature that can cut mobile load times by 87% — our retail customers have been delivering seamless shopping experiences to the unprecedented volume of traffic (more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail websites!) across all devices, screen sizes, and browsers.

How’d they do this? They got ahead of the holiday rush, uploaded roughly 60 million assets in the four months leading up to the season, and then worked closely with Adobe to set up, cache and test the experiences until they were perfect. And Adobe did its part to have rock solid systems in place that ensure as customer load increases, resources scale to normalize their website’s performance.

All of this infrastructure work paid off with record-setting results. Over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend alone, 41 billion assets were requested from 8,000 domains out of 200+ countries around the world — seamlessly.

It’s exciting to see our Dynamic Media Classic customers develop increasingly innovative rich media strategies. I look forward to seeing how these trends evolve in 2020!

If you’d like to learn more about optimizing your use of Dynamic Media Classic, check out these resources to stay on top of the latest news, innovations, and product training coming your way in 2020: