SellPoint Puts CE Focus On Online SKU Tours

CORONADO, CALIF. — SellPoint visited the Consumer Electronics Association Fall Forum, held here last month to promote its online services to both manufacturers and retailers alike.

SellPoint, based in Pleasanton, Calif., is a leading provider of on-demand video product tours, providing merchandising solutions to manufacturers of consumer products.

Its SellPoint Merchandiser provides consumer product manufacturers with what it calls "a controlled, consistent, and highly engaging product presentation" that is syndicated across all of their online points of sale.

According to Dennis Marshall, marketing and product management VP, who provided TWICE with a demonstration of the product, SellPoint's Active Product Page technology combines product tours with a customizable array of sales support materials, changing "static product pages into an active selling presentation that is proven to motivate shoppers to buy."

SellPoint Dashboard delivers graphical market intelligence updated daily that provides shopper interest and activity by product and sales channel.

SellPoint's Retail Syndication Network includes more than 100 of the top online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Buy.com, Circuit City, Costco.com, Wal-Mart, OfficeMax, Sears, Staples and more, Marshall said. He added that while the company has appliances, toys, sporting goods and tool companies as part of its customer base, it wants to go after the CE market "in a big way" in coming months.

So far SellPoint hosts tours of up to 500 SKUs at this point that average two and a half minutes, Marshall said, and sees the service as both a "selling tool" and a "training tool" for some retailers that have brick-and-mortar operations.

SellPoint's clients include Canon, Fuji, Epson, SanDisk, Panasonic, Sling Media and Pentax.

SellPoint released some of its work with Pentax to develop and syndicate dynamic product tours for the company's lines of digital SLR and waterproof cameras. Through SellPoint's industry-leading syndication network, the digital video product tours appear on every online retail site that sells these Pentax cameras including Amazon.com, Best Buy and B&H Camera, among others.

In the past year, shoppers have chosen to watch the online product tours for nearly 500,000 minutes, and spent an average of more than three minutes interacting with each tour, SellPoint said.

In addition to executing product tour development and syndication for the K10D, K100D, K100D Super, Optio W10, Optio W20, Optio W30 and the Optio T30, SellPoint will further expand its relationship with Pentax with additional product tours in the future.

"We initially chose SellPoint because of its unparalleled ability to syndicate product tours to a broad range of retail sites that sell our cameras," said Ned Bunnell, marketing VP, Pentax Imaging. "An added bonus is that SellPoint is actually able to identify even more online retailers than we knew about — ensuring that our product tours reach all online shoppers who are researching our cameras no matter what retail site they may be browsing." For more information, visit www.SellPoint.net.