How Shoppable Video Clips Convert Views to Clicks

Shoppable Video Clips (SVCs), a novel short-video format integrated into e-commerce websites, enable interactive shopping by presenting products alongside clickable product tags. This study investigates the impact of product presentation styles in SVCs-showing products in use versus displaying them-on purchase-related behavior. Drawing on economic theories of consumer information search, we suggest that SVCs showing products in use reduce information search costs, leading to higher add-to-cart rates. Using advanced machine learning methods to analyze thousands of SVCs from a European beauty retailer, we find that showing products in use increases add-to-cart rates significantly, particularly for experience products and strong brands. Moreover, SVCs showing products in use placed in upper-funnel stages, like video feeds, outperform those in lower-funnel stages, such as product detail pages. We discuss theoretical and practical implications and propose avenues for future research.