How to Craft Ecommerce Video Ads That Sell & 17 Ideas To Test

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Picture this: You’ve just launched an online store and are excited to start making sales. Yet, despite your best efforts to promote your business, traffic is trickling in, and sales aren’t happening. If this sounds like you, you could benefit from a new approach to your tiktok ecommerce strategy. One that’s dynamic and engaging and has a proven track record of boosting conversions. These ecommerce video ads are a powerful way to connect with customers, showcase your products, and increase sales. In this article, we’ll explore the value of Ecommerce video ads and provide actionable tips to help you create compelling video ads that effectively boost sales and engage customers, leading to increased conversions and brand loyalty.

Ecommerce video ads not only help you boost sales. They also make for excellent website content that can improve your SEO ranking, helping you attract even more visitors to your online store. As you create and implement your Ecommerce video ads, Shophunter’s Shopify sales tracker can help you measure your performance so you can refine your approach as needed.

What Are Ecommerce Video Ads?

Ecommerce Video Ads

Ecommerce video ads are short videos made to sell products online. You see these videos on social media, like:

Facebook

Instagram

YouTube

They showcase a product’s features and benefits and vary in style. Some show how to use a product, others have customers talk about the product's greatness, and some tell a story about the brand. These videos are meant to make people interested in buying.

Why Do You Need to Create E-commerce Video Ads?

Creating ecommerce video ads is important for a few reasons. First, they increase engagement. Videos are exceptionally appealing and can better attract the attention of potential customers than text or graphics alone. With the rise of social media platforms, video sharing is all the rage! When viewers share your video, you increase your brand awareness and reach.

Boost Conversions with Ecommerce Video Ads

Ecommerce video ads also increase your conversion rates. Watching a video about a product or service can significantly persuade customers to buy. In fact, over 89% of individuals claim that watching a video persuaded them to purchase a product or service. Finally, ecommerce video ads gain trust and credibility.

Build Trust and Credibility through Video

When potential customers see videos of actual people using your product or service, it creates an enjoyable brick-and-mortar store-like experience. You won’t find that in photos or text alone. Bonus points if you or other company owners are in these videos; it gives a more human feel to your strategy, letting your customers get a peek behind the curtain.

What Are the Different Types of E-commerce Video Ads?

Here are the top kinds of videos that ecommerce companies use for effective marketing:

Unboxing Style Product Demos

These videos show unboxing videos of how a product looks and works.

Feature/Product Announcement

It aims to inform and excite viewers about the new feature or product while integrating it into the company’s existing brand narrative.

Customer Testimonials and Reviews

These videos feature real customers discussing how they like the product. It’s like hearing from a friend, which can make potential customers trust the product more.

Brand Storytelling

These videos tell a story about the brand, like how it started or what it stands for. It’s like sharing a bit of the brand’s journey. This can make people feel more connected to the brand.

Comparison Videos

These videos show the pros and cons of the two products. It’s like helping customers choose between two things by showing them side by side.

Lifestyle Videos

These videos show the product as part of a lifestyle, such as a coffee machine in the kitchen or an umbrella on a rainy day. It’s about making people feel a certain way about the product and the life they could have with it.

User-Generated Videos

These e-commerce video ads are videos made by customers, not the brand. People might film themselves using a product and share it online. This approach feels real and can be more convincing than professional ads because of its authenticity.

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17 Fantastic Ecommerce Video Ads Ideas

Ecommerce Video Ads

1. The White Company: Leverage Emotions

The secret to creating irresistible video ads is to do more than deliver information effectively; you must incite the viewer’s emotions. Customers are rarely all about rational thinking—before making a purchase, emotion heavily influences their decision-making, and effective ecommerce ads leverage that fact.

Take this: The White Company ad as an example. It’s a seasonal video that follows a family around the holidays. The scenes have been taken with a shaky camera effect, which gives the ad a “homemade” vibe. Without the need for a voiceover laying it all out for the viewer, the ad showcases a typical day in the life of any family around Christmas time, using characters that evoke the emotion of the season—and incidentally, portray the company’s core target audience.

Notice how the ad isn’t promoting a specific product or event but focuses on striking an emotional cord with the audience by showcasing a lifestyle and shared experiences that involve many of their products in use or the background. By appealing to emotions at the forefront and subtly marketing in the background in your e-commerce video ads, you can leave a positive, lasting impression on your viewers while still influencing their buying decisions in the future.

2. Etsy: Let People Know What You Have in Store

Puns aside, your business can work nonstop to help customers, offering:

Unique benefits

Timed discounts

Leverage Ecommerce Video Ads to Showcase Your Brand

They are improving your overall purchasing experience. But all this work is lost if potential customers never hear about it. Luckily, ecommerce video ads can be an ideal vehicle to communicate your brand’s efforts to customers and let them know how they can benefit from time-sensitive offers and promotions that spring people into action.

Inspire Action with Engaging Video Content

For example, this Etsy video for Cyber Week shows how to promote discounts. It starts by giving viewers a “sampler plate” of the many e-commerce products they can find in their store. The video uses a dynamic camera that lets viewers know a family gathering is happening but focuses on the many lovely products being used.

Drive Traffic and Boost Sales with Effective Video Ads

That’s just a means to an end, the actual cap of the ad is when they announce the timed discount for all those lovely products at the end of the short piece. Ecommerce video ads excel at getting people interested in checking out your online store and driving traffic to your website.

If you are done right, you can use platforms like Shogun Page Builder to create powerful synergies between your ads and your campaigns' landing pages (or product pages), leading viewers to take action that overhauls your conversion rates.

3. Sainsbury’s: Show Your Personality

Customers today interact with numerous brands and online stores every day, so your ecommerce video ads have to stand out among the herd even to have a chance. To achieve that, you must ensure every piece of content you share is crafted to be memorable and infused with your brand’s identity, just like in Sainsbury’s ecommerce video ad.

The company’s branding conveys a cheerful and energetic image through:

Upbeat music

Striking fonts

Happy people

The style of the displayed clothes and accessories

Every element plays a part in communicating this feeling. Each has been carefully selected to appeal to the company’s ideal buyer personas, following the company’s core mantra: colorful and stylish clothes for everyone.

Ecommerce Video Ads as Digital Catalogs

In broader terms, notice how e-commerce video ads can double as perfect digital catalogs of your offer. When appropriately handled, keeping it short, showcasing key products without feeling overbearing, and using the right CTAs, you can give viewers a quick yet memorable taste of what you can offer and invite them to learn more about what you have available after they are done watching.

4. Dollar Shave Club: Educate Your Audience, But Make It Fun!

Despite what you might think, video ads aren’t just about promoting something specific. You can:

Use videos to renew your brand image

Share information with your customers

Explain how to use a particular product

Leveraging Humor to Create Brand Affinity

Sometimes, you can use them to make your audience smile. Never underestimate the power of using humor to have potential customers associate positive feelings with your brand. Take this Dollar Shave Club ad “instructing” viewers on using one of their products, with a healthy dose of humor.

By deciding to add background music to the video, evoking a relaxing atmosphere (synergizing heavily with the soft, funny, and intentionally sarcastic voiceover), the piece ends up feeling like a parody of similar video ads that take themselves too seriously.

Humanizing Your Brand Through Entertainment

To educate your audiences, you must find a way to entertain them. Humor can be a great way to keep your viewer’s attention as you convey crucial information, but being open to approaching your audience in a positive, even self-aware tone can help give viewers a more human, relatable image of your brand.

5. Samsung: Focus on Your Product Features

As much as we like to illustrate how effective video content isn’t always just about promoting something, bringing attention to your products remains a crucial part of effectively advertising your business and ultimately generating conversions. Ecommerce video ads can also help you garner interest in what you’re selling and promote interest and action.

This Samsung YouTube ad example revolves around one of their product’s key value propositions: how the phone can take photos effectively, no matter the day or the lighting.

Highlighting Unique Features and Benefits

Taking a page from compelling product videos, this ad quickly highlights a specific feature that sets this mobile device apart. But, most importantly, it reinforces the positive impact that feature will have on their potential customers’ lives, which has more benefits than the immediately obvious ones.

Creating a Harmonious Marketing Ecosystem

Nowadays, most customers research a product online, comparing prices and features and searching for offers. By synergizing your ecommerce video ads with your product videos and other elements of your overall marketing strategy, you can create a content weave that makes your offerings irresistible to potential buyers.

6. DICK’S Sporting Goods: Convey Your Mission

Another effective way to ensure your e-commerce ads connect with your target audience is by associating your brand with a mission or objective you are collectively trying to achieve. Do it right, and you’ll demonstrate that your company cares about essential aspects of society and that there’s a more significant meaning behind your products—all of which can have a powerful, engaging effect on your potential customers, just like Dick’s Sporting Goods does with this ad.

Leveraging the Power of Testimonials

The video follows several young athletes using the company’s sporting goods, with voiceovers of them and their family members recalling how sports changed their lives and helped them become better people. Just like Samsung’s ad drew some cues from product videos, this one does the same from testimonial videos, which revolve around current or former customers talking about how they used your product and the benefits they received from it.

What makes testimonials effective is that they provide social proof of how your business delivers on its promises. This principle can also be leveraged in your ads to have a significant effect. For example, you can use it in your e-commerce ads to show how your brand is committed to a particular movement or group and how it contributes to nurturing them.

When done well, you make it easier for your target audience to connect with you and what you offer. You also shine a spotlight on important topics that both you and your customers are interested in.

7. Pinduoduo: Interactive Online Shopping

Sometimes, you need an ad that conveys vital information to your viewers. In those cases, you’ll usually have to contend with two primary challenges: keeping your ad short. Hence, it works as an effective video marketing piece, compelling enough to keep viewers engaged. These are precisely the two challenges the explainer video style has been designed to address.

The Power of Animated Storytelling

In this example from the massive online retailer Pinduoduo, we see them use the power of an animated video explainer to weave a narrative that gets their message across and speaks to their target audience’s needs and wants. Beyond that, it also presents the unique value propositions of their platform in record time.

Concise and Compelling Storytelling

It is an excellent example of leveraging the power of animated storytelling to use transitions and narrative to help your audience visualize and understand even the most complex topics. You can highlight what your solution can do while inviting them to explore it further once they are done watching your ad. This can be done in under a couple of minutes, ensuring your ad remains relevant and compelling to most people.

8. Book Depository: Take Advantage of UGC

User-generated content (or UGC) refers to any piece created by customers about a brand or its products and shared on the internet. They’re usually related to reviews or opinion pieces from people who purchase and approve of a product or service. Here, Book Depository uses UGC to craft a short video ad. These videos are called “unboxings” and showcase a customer opening the packaging of a purchased product.

The Unboxing Experience: A Visual Treat

Viewers enjoy these videos because they convey the feel of opening a present and provide a close and unfiltered look at what they can get when purchasing your product. Using UGC in your ecommerce video ads gives you a compelling avenue to show viewers an appealing, real-life take on your products. It often showcases the satisfaction of others who have already bought from you.

Most creators also tend to make extensive reviews of your store, mentioning the service quality, how the shipping was, if the product arrived safely, etc., which you can work into your ads as brand advocates and social proof statements. For example, the creator mentions that the books arrived in perfect condition just eight days later.

Building Trust and Authenticity Through UGC

Ecommerce sites have always struggled to gain new customers’ trust due to a lack of a physical storefront. As viewers become more skeptical of ads, using UGC in your content can be a great strategy to allow viewers to verify your product’s quality, helping your brand come across as more trustworthy and authentic.

9. Majka

Majka makes lactation cookies and protein powders for recent moms. Their video ads and testimonials of real mothers impressed with the results of taking Majka's health products, including hair restoration supplements and supplements to boost breast milk production.

10. Prepared4X

Prepared4X is a retailer of high-quality outdoors and survival equipment. As part of its marketing strategy, it records product ads to highlight its:

Survival tools' specific

Inventive features

The ads and testimonials show genuine buyers' enthusiasm for Prepared4X's products, specifically product demos and how-to videos about their survival torch.

11. FanfareLabel

FanfareLabel is a clothing brand that embraces recycling. In this unboxing video, their product and its packaging are the heroes in this story. The screenshot shows how the camera is focused on the product, which draws the viewer’s attention to it.

The Power of Sound and a Clear Call to Action

The sound used in the video also contributes to its value. High-quality video and sound can make the audience watch your videos more than once. The caption also describes the ‘Fanfare process’ and their thought process. To crown it all, there’s a bold call to action at the bottom of the page instructing viewers on where they should be headed next—the product page.

12. Jean Patrique

Jean Patrique sounds like a celebrity name, but it is a kitchen brand. This cookware brand featured a content creator who’s also a chef in this video. We can assume it’s an explainer video because he explains how to prepare the double cheeseburger he’s eating at the beginning of the video.

Some interesting elements in this video are the following:

Caption

Audio

Video length

I’d assume that because the video describes how to prepare a burger, it should be at least 60 seconds, but they finished in less than that. So, what product are they advertising? The grill pan used in the video. Subtle, right?

13. Hollywood Hair Bar

The name already gave it away, but Hollywood Hair Bar is a haircare brand. This product demo + close-up video helped describe what their growth serum product can do. It began with one of the tips we discussed earlier (storytelling), with the growth serum as the hero and curly hair as the plot. Text overlays like subtitles made the story more engaging to follow.

Speaking about keeping it real, the video featured different people using the product and showing the results they got. And all of that lasted for only 37 seconds.

14. Oodie

Oodie is a clothing line with blanket-like hoodies as its main product. The video used in this post is short and has a captivating sound that can make viewers better engage with the post. Plus, considering everyone in the video is putting on oodies, it’s safe to assume that it would make anyone watching consider getting one for their next movie marathon.

15. Solo Stove

Solo Stove is a brand that creates and sells outdoor fire starters. Their target audience is most likely people who love camping or the outdoor lifestyle. Considering their audience and product, we believe it’s only right that they used content creators for this video. Of course, the creators helped showcase how Solo Stove’s product can be used. The caption added in the video also hinted at how the product can make life easy for campers.

16. Glossier

Glossier is a skincare and makeup brand. Boldly written on their bio are the words: ‘Skin first, makeup second.’ They partnered with a creator to promote their eyeliner product. A creator partnership keeps your video:

Real

Authentic

Relatable

Elements can make your audience see your brand as trustworthy. The video shows how potential customers can apply the eyeliner. What’s more, the caption used in the video gives the vibe that people are using their product, and whoever is watching would be missing out if they’re not.

17. Sleep Test

Sleep Test, a company providing home sleep analysis kits, uses video reviews from satisfied customers on its eCommerce store to build trust with potential customers and displays them in a carousel format. Each customer video includes a relatable customer story focusing on how easy the product is to use and how it has improved the customer’s sleep cycle by pinpointing a specific sleep problem.

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Competitor Ads

5 Tips for Engaging Ecommerce Video Ads

Ecommerce Video Ads

1. Make the Video a Story

Stories distinguish your video from other brands. You want something to attract visitors and keep them glued to your:

Social media page

Landing pages

Website

Stories can do just that. Here’s an example of what your video script might look like if you want to make a video for a skincare brand: “A few years ago, my face was covered in acne. It was so bad I had to spend most of my time indoors.

A Relatable Storyline

All the products I was using seemed to make things worse, and then I decided I was going on a journey of discovery into nature’s ability to transform.” We’re sure you’re already imagining what the video would look like. Now, you want your video to have certain elements aside from being relatable, such as having a hero.

Crafting a Compelling Narrative

Your storyline should have a hero, who, in this case, should be your product or service. An exciting plot refers to the hero’s situation and other details that will keep viewers glued. Emotions: You want to evoke different emotions when people watch your videos. Sounds: This glue holds all these elements together and makes viewers watch your video repeatedly.

2. Add a CTA

A call to action compels people to act after watching your video. As such, inserting it in your social media post or wherever you want to upload the video is essential. The downside of failing to include one is that people will enjoy your content and move along because there’s no clear line of action for them to take.

The Power of CTAs: Driving Conversions

CTAs can help increase your conversion rates so much that including them in your post can increase effectiveness by at least 2x. You can insert them whenever you want people to take action. It’s safe to say that CTAs are your secret conversion weapons, just that they’re not so ‘secret’ and shouldn’t be inserted ‘covertly.’

3. High-Quality Videos Rule

Another thing you want to keep in mind is the quality of your video; the visuals should be appealing and engaging. That might mean your video production will be expensive, but you can consider that an investment. If you create a quality video for your ecommerce brand, you must ensure it’s great!

Give yourself time to plan and prepare for it. If you feel it’s not something you’re up to, you can consider outsourcing it to experts (aka content creators). Don’t forget to add sound to your video; it can:

Boost viewer engagement

Increase the video’s value

Evoke emotions

Encourage action

Enhance storytelling

4. Keep it Short

Short and sweet is the mantra of high-quality videos. Many social media platforms, such as TikTok and Facebook, allow video sharing and recommend between 15 and 30 seconds. That looks like a short time, but probably only when you’re counting, not if you’re watching Facebook video ads or scrolling through the For You page on TikTok.

Short-Form Video Marketing

TikTok recommends 15 seconds for video ads. The only time it’s probably alright to create long videos is if you want explainer videos to shed more light on your product and what it can do for your viewers. Other times, short videos are recommended. To be clear, long and short videos have a place in video marketing.

5. Keep it Real

If you want potential customers to feel like your video speaks directly to them, you must keep it real. In other words, let them feel like a human behind the video understands them, even if you’re using animations. That’s another reason why storytelling is essential. But if it’s something outside your ability or your team’s, consider collaborating with content creators. That might even be a better solution because content from creators would look like testimonials to your audience, and as you know, everyone wants to hear good testimony occasionally.

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