Vzaar is a video hosting and delivery service designed for ecommerce, allowing online retailers and eBay sellers to showcase their products in video.
We first spotted Vzaar back in 2007, and since then it has come along nicely.
Who Needs the Vzaar Video Player?
Vzaar has big sellers like Toys R Us under its client list, as well as many individual eBay sellers. It has been designed with ecommerce in mind to use video to highlight products, although it can be used by a variety of businesses for things like tutorials, informative videos etc.
Compared to YouTube – Minimizes Visitor Leaks
When compared to the likes of YouTube, Vzaar prevents visitors leaking from your site. With YouTube videos:
- there are ads in the video
- if you click the video you are taken to the YouTube website with lots of distractions
- at the end of the video YouTube highlights related videos
If you are presenting a video of a product to potential buyers on your website, the last thing you want is for them to leak out of your sales funnel (i.e disappear off to YouTube or watch another video). To maximize the amount of people that buy the product you want to ensure they stay on your site and don’t get distracted. That’s one thing that the vZaar player is designed to do.
Compared to Vimeo, Blip.tv etc… – No Commercial Videos
The problem with a lot of free video hosting sites is that they have rules about the sorts of videos you can upload, and often commercial videos are not allowed. While you can get away with having commercial intent videos on video hosting sites like Vimeo and Blip.tv, they may in future ask you to pay or prevent you from uploading more videos. At worst they may even delete all your videos creating a real headache.
Vzaar Main Features & Competition?
Knowing that free video sharing sites are generally not suitable for hosting and providing video content for an ecommerce product, then using something like Vzaar is the route you will probably want to go down.
Competiton includes the likes of
- Brightcove,
- Viddler,
- EasyVideoPlayer with Amazon S3,
- Kaltura
- Ooyala.
Like Viddler, Vzaar has positioned itself as a relatively low cost introductory solution with the ability to scale to large sizes.
It is pretty easy to use and has the regular bells and whistles you would expect from such a service including
- easy embedding,
- easy uploading,
- batch uploading,
- listing in Google search,
- brandable video player, and
- detailed statistics.
Features that Set Vzaar Apart…
Among the cool and more unique features to Vzaar are:
- eBay Integration: Vzaar integrates pretty easily into eBay auctions and allows you to provide auction details from within Vzaar making adding videos to auctions a lot more manageable.
- Quick Replace: If you want to replace an existing video you can use their quick replace feature. This replaces the video seamlessly without any URL changes or the need to change the videos embedded on your site.
- Call to Action Link: Vzaar allows you to include your company name which links to your website in your videos. It also gives an option to provide a link at the end of the video. These can be set on a per video basis and give an opportunity to encourage the user to buy the product or take whatever action you want.
- MailChimp Email Capture: If you use Mail Chimp to handle your email subscribers then you can integrate it with Vzaar show an email signup form at the end of your video. It is a shame that other email subscription managers like Aweber are not included.
- Iphone App: You can manage your Vzaar account and your videos from your iPhone.
What’s Missing?
Overall Vzaar does the job well for what it intends, although there are a couple of features I would have liked to see:
Viral Embedding:
While you can embed your Vzaar videos on pretty much any web-page you like, there is not any code for visitors to use. For example, any YouTube user can get the embed for most videos and then embed that video on their own website, this does not seem to be possible with Vzaar.
This means that if someone found your video useful and wanted to post it on their own website then they wouldn’t be able to and you miss out on the potential additional exposure that would bring.
Competitors like Viddler do this. I suspect Vzaar has prevented this option so you don’t get competitors embedding your videos, but that seems pointless if your competitors would just end up sending you buyers through the video.
More Email Services:
It should be able to include an email signup form at the end of the video not just from MailChimp, but other email solutions like Aweber and Constant Contact.
EasyVideoPlayer (EVP) does this and is much more suitable for hardcore marketers, but is more expensive and lacks a hosting option (but it hooks in with Amazon S3 hosting very well and has instructions on how to do this). In comparison EVP might be a bit overkill for many eBay auctions and online retailers.
Split Testing:
Having split testing built in would be handy as this would allow you to test two videos against each other to see which produces more sales or desired actions.
Again competitor EasyVideoPlayer does this, but alternatively you could just use Google Website Optimizer with Vzaar with no problem.
Vzaar Pricing
Vzaar offers a free trial for 30 days which gives full access to their features and 5GB of bandwidth. Prices then start at $50 per month for 50GB of monthly bandwidth usage.
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