CommerceVideos.com

Cabela’s is the largest mail order, Internet, and retail outdoor outfitter in the world.  The company’s direct division, which includes the web, generated $1.1 billion in revenues in 2008, while visits to Cabelas.com increased 32% year-over-year.  Cabela’s can claim bragging rights as the most-visited e-commerce site in the sporting goods category for 2008, and it is currently perched at #40 on the Internet Retailer Top 500 List (2009 ranking).  From the outside, it looks like the company is firing on all cylinders.

Video seems to be a natural fit for Cabela’s.  After all, the company has focused on delivering innovative experiences to shoppers through its ‘destination’ stores which were expanded aggressively in the 2000’s, and by sending out nearly 100 catalogs each year to hunters, fishermen, and outdoor enthusiasts of all types.  As the company grew, it also began to expand into media with the launch of Cabela’s Outfitter Journal and Cabela’s Television.   Today, the company now features a collection of roughly 250 videos on its web site, Cabelas.com [in addition to its TV shows].

Cabela’s aggressive push into new media is admirable. Of the videos it features on-site, most appear to be product-related from its “Field Clips” series, but there are a good number of how-to videos on the site as well.  The videos are professionally shot, most appear to be on location, and the on-screen talent was polished and well-rehearsed in the videos I watched.  It did appear Cabela’s might be using some manufacturer video content as well, then layering in their own intros and outros, but it was a little difficult to tell for certain – they all might have been Cabela’s-produced.  The post-production work was also great.  Shots transitioned nicely and fancy graphics spruced up some of the product videos, which was a nice touch.  The product videos for the most part were 30 – 60 seconds in length (some were longer) and the how-to videos I watched were longer on average, in the 2 – 4 minute range.  In addition, I suspect Cabela’s is tapping into co-op opportunities with videos like this how-to video featuring Purina dog experts which is interesting to note only because co-op is a primary strategy behind how many online retailers are funding their video production efforts, based only on my own observations.

So it’s undeniable that Cabela’s understands video production, that they ‘get’ some of the opportunity to take video online (and presumably how to fund it).  In addition, it’s clear they’re busy exploiting different types of video content both to sell products and educate their customers.  All of this puts Cabela’s well ahead of most retailers in terms of having a solid video commerce program.

So why would I say they fall flat on web execution, given how far ahead they are on the production side?

For starters, Cabela’s is using Windows Media Video format for their videos.  On a brand new computer running Vista, I couldn’t watch the videos without downloading a plug-in.  I use Firefox (not that it should matter, as 22% of Internet users do also), but the problem also reared its ugly head running Internet Explorer 8.  That’s right – a new computer running Vista and IE 8 could not render Cabela’s videos. What’s the point in spending all the time and money on creating video content for viewing online when end users can’t even watch the videos?

I can’t really see any way the decision to use Windows Media Video (instead of Flash, which is installed on >98% of web browsers) is helpful to Cabela’s.  In addition to the poor user experience, engagement analytics aren’t available, and what about everyone using Macs?

One area where Cabela’s is doing well though is in placing videos on product pages.  Placing videos on product pages is a proven method to increase conversion rates (not that it matters if no one can watch the video).  Cabela’s designates  video is available on the product page through a video camera icon, which makes sense as a product page trigger. The product page treatment is more aggressive than the one I last profiled on B&H’s site, for example.  Unfortunately, the video callout is still below the fold (see below) – a more effective treatment might be to move it directly under the hero image.

Cabela’s also features their video collection on-site in one central location, which is great.  It’s a handy way of browsing all the videos available from one spot.  There’s only one problem – finding the video collection is nearly impossible.  For those of you young enough (or old enough) to remember, the “Where’s Waldo?” books are an apt analogy.  A user has to first click on the “Outdoor Info” tab, then the word “Product Videos” is buried in a nondescript left sidebar text nav, which links to the video collection.  The built-in site search isn’t any help.  Despite the fact that video is the most searched for media online, searching for the word “Videos” when the site search is pre-selected to ‘articles and information’ (the section one might logically assume contains the videos), nothing of use is returned.

A third area where Cabela’s does well in video execution is in placing how-to videos on category level pages.  For example, check out the how-to video link in the right nav of this category page for “Black Powder.”  Category page videos are a great way to build trust into the shopping experience and provide differentiation when stacking up to competitors.

The SEO + video department appears a little behind at Cabelas.com.  Of the 15 searches I performed on the product name plus the word “video,” only one returned Cabelas.com on the first page of results in Google, and that was for a Cabela’s branded product and the result was for the generic video page on Cabelas.com.  More typical was a result like this one, where Cabelas was beaten out by competitors like Walmart.com and shopping portals for specialty products in the outdoors segment where Cabela’s should be more of a shoe-in.  Cabela’s appeared not to be following many video + SEO best practices at all, which might explain the poor showing.  For example:

• Videos were launched from Javascript (this is sometimes the only way to do it efficiently from product pages, but for video pages, a better practice would be to display the video in-browser, one per page)
• No meta descriptions and keywords calling out the product or nature of the video
• No use of H1 header tags to describe the videos
• No ability to download the video (this can aid with indexing)
• No mRSS feed available for the videos
• No descriptive text on the page where the video played
• No transcriptions supporting the video
• No permalinks
• No interactive links in video content
• Limited (if any) video syndication

Related not only to SEO but also in driving traffic to Cabelas.com, I wasn’t able to find evidence of Cabela’s initiated video syndication.  I searched for 10 videos on YouTube for products Cabela’s featured with video on their site, and couldn’t find any that appeared to be uploaded by Cabela’s even though there are a ton of videos on YouTube that feature Cabela’s.  Also of interest, it appears that Cabela’s is advertsing in YouTube’s new click-to-buy program. I couldn’t find a Cabela’s YouTube channel, though. (If you know if Cabela’s has a channel, please comment below and I’ll update this post).  One thing of note, I did see a user generated video featuring a Cabela’s product that featured a competitor’s overlay ad, which serves to emphasize a possible downside to hosting videos on YouTube:

Syndication of video represents another opportunity for SEO if you’re smart with embedded links on YouTube, provide useful descriptions of video content, and allow commenting.  However, syndication to YouTube, if not carefully monitored, can actually cannibalize on-site video SEO, as noted by Craig Bokesch of Altrec.com at last week’s video commerce summit.  I searched other video services for Cabela’s video (Vimeo, Google Video, Yahoo Video) but couldn’t find syndicated Cabela’s videos – looks like another missed opportunity for Cabela’s.

While the choice of Windows Media Video as a standard format and real lack of instituted video SEO best practices make succeeding with video more difficult, there are other untapped opportunities for Cabela’s.   For example, Cabela’s doesn’t appear to offer their videos to their affiliates, which is a shame given there’s so much content on the web around the ‘outdoors lifestyle’ – so this is yet another opportunity missed by Cabela’s in their online video effort.  Cabela’s also hasn’t featured any videos embedded in their emails that I’ve received (video GIF support in across popular email clients represents an opportunity to increase email marketing campaign results and Goodmail’s CertifiedVideo service now allows delivery of full motion video with audio to AOL).

Last, Cabela’s appears to have completely bypassed the intersection of video and social media.  Even though folks are creating their own videos about Cabela’s products and new research shows video sharing is more than popular than ever across demographics, Cabela’s offers their customers and viewers no options to share their videos to social networks, embed them on blogs, post them to Twitter, etc.  Another opportunity missed to engage with shoppers and gain additional site traffic without paying out a CPC or CPA.  Then again, given the choice of WMV as the underlying technology powering the Cabela’s video program as opposed to Flash, sharing would be pretty useless, anyway.

In all, Cabela’s has built a strong foundation for a video commerce program with a massive and growing library of video content which includes a robust collection of both product videos and how-to videos, not to mention the company’s TV efforts.  In addition, the company seems to take video seriously, as noted earlier when awarding props to the high quality of talent and video production.  The company seems to understand some of the basics behind a revenue generating video program (merchandising/educating on product pages, educating on category pages, leveraging co-op) but they’re missing the boat with off-site video (syndication, SEO, email, affiliates, social media) and are crippled by some technology decisions that would make expansion difficult (choosing Windows Media over Flash).  It will be interesting to watch Cabela’s video program evolve over the year.