SellPoint Saw Jump In Users During '07 Holiday Season

PLEASANTON, CALIF. — SellPoint, a provider of on-demand video product tours, said last month that online shoppers spent 4.2 million minutes viewing SellPoint Active Product Tours in December, with consumers spending an average of more than 2.9 minutes viewing each tour.

The 2007 holiday shopping season was "record-breaking," said SellPoint, with Thanksgiving and Black Friday seeing the two biggest days for online shoppers viewing Active Product Tours of their products. More than 100,000 shoppers were said to view the tours each day, and those two days were responsible for 515,000 minutes of view time.

These numbers represented a 30 percent increase over the 2006 holiday activity.

The Active Product Tours are described by the company as "dynamic and detailed product presentations featuring audio, video and printable sales collateral related to a particular product." Its patented Active Product Page technology features a customizable variety of sales support materials, and users can reportedly view them with a single click everywhere the products are sold online.

The tours were viewed by online shoppers for a total of more than 37 million minutes in 2007, according to the company.

These new findings represent a 30 percent increase over the 2006 holiday activity. So-called Cyber Monday — the Monday following Thanksgiving weekend when people return to work and reportedly spend an increased amount of time shopping online — was also very active. Roughly 90,000 shoppers viewed the tours that day, said SellPoint, for a total of about 216,000 minutes of view time.

The company cited a Coremetrics study announced in November that measured a 35 percent increase in the sales conversion rate among shoppers who viewed SellPoint's Active Product Tours vs. those who did not. In addition, shoppers viewing the product tours spend more than 2.5 minutes engaged in detailed product information about each product viewed, SellPoint said.

"The increase in viewing activity for our Active Product Tours is yet another sign that online shoppers demand complete and thorough product information before making a purchase decision," commented Rick Martin, CEO of SellPoint.

The company recently added Brother to its client roster, with tours for Brother printers and all-in-ones available, and said it had doubled its client roster in 2007. Other clients include Canon, Fuji, Epson, SanDisk, Panasonic, Tivo, Hitachi, NetGear, Pentax and Adobe. Its Retail Syndication Network contains more than 100 online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Buy.com, Circuit City, Costco.com, OfficeMax, Sears, Staples, Toys "R" Us and Wal-Mart.

The company also announced last month it had secured $7 million in financing from Granite Ventures and previous investor Menlo Ventures, and that it will use the money "to fuel current momentum and expansion of its business."

Regarding the financing, Standish O'Grady, managing director of Granite Ventures and a SellPoint board member, said, "Online video product tours continue to grow exponentially. Studies show that product tours have become a key factor in converting shoppers into buyers at the online point of sale. Given this, our investment in SellPoint was an easy decision as it is the company positioned to lead this growing category based on its unique, patented Active Product Tour technology and the value it provides to consumers, manufactures and retailers."