E-commerce marketplaces involve a lot of different steps in the selling process. Enhancing the shopping experience is one that is frequently overlooked. Marketplace giant Walmart brings back its Rich Media feature to help buyers with more interactive content. In today’s documentation, we will discuss everything you need to know about Walmart Rich Media.
Let’s think about 10 years ago, shopping online was not much popular. You had to walk inside the store to buy anything. You could visually look at the items, and physically check items. You were able to feel the item and understand easily if that is the item you’re looking for.
But in the present day, online shopping is at our fingertips 24/7. We can easily buy anything online. We can just search for our desired items, check the details, add them to the cart, and then checkout. But, our online shopping experiences are not the same as the in-store experience. That’s why as online sellers you need to do your best to enhance the shopper experience online. So that, buyers can have a total overview from every angle.
What is Walmart Rich Media?
Rich Media is the use of interactive or multimedia content to provide an enhanced experience for buyers. The enhanced content dynamically shares product highlights and features, which will improve search results, increase order conversions, and reduce returns. To improve the customer experience and make your products stand out on the digital shelf, you may use Walmart’s rich media to enrich the content of your online listings. It helps customers with purchasing decisions. Buyers can have a bird’s eye view of the item they want to buy. All of which support improved customer engagement and education.
How Can Walmart Rich Media Help Your Business?
- Engage with Customers: Overall, Walmart rich media gives sellers the opportunity to connect and engage with customers. The information a seller chooses to publish, whether it be additional photographs, a video demonstrating the product in use, or any of the other module possibilities, gives the customer a more thorough understanding of your company’s mission and why they should buy your product.
- Boost Conversions: Drawing shoppers in with rich media and
keeping them engaged puts you one step closer to closing the sale. On average conversions increase by 10-20% according to Walmart.
Which Modules can be Displayed on Walmart Rich Media?
- Marketing Content
To make smart buying decisions, customers rely on exceptional product content. Through the rich media on your product listings, you are allowed to add marketing content on your listing. Walmart marketing content is similar to Amazon A+ content and is displayed at the end of the description part. It contains a detailed visual representation of the product features with more images and less text placement.
Provides customers with visually enhanced product information which improves the user’s shopping experience. Create enhanced marketing content and publish it throughout your product catalog. It allows you to form relationships with your customers.
- Product Tour
Product tours, also known as product walkthroughs, help brands simplify their products and uses. It helps new users understand features faster than if they had to learn entirely on their own. The more sophisticated your product, the more important it is to have a product tour that guides users through the learning curve.
Effective product tours help you in three key ways:
- Shopping Experience: Product tours simplify learning about product use and enhance customers’ shopping experience.
- Driving Meaningful Action: Effective product tours take meaningful action instead of providing passive overviews of key features.
- Improves Engagement: When the first experience with your product goes smoothly, users are more likely to remain engaged and recognize the value of your product, improving the rate of user retention.
Product tours are core components of self-serve user onboarding. And when done well, they increase product adoption and retention, while reducing inbound support requests and the need for additional user training.
- 360° Spin Image
It is a feature provided by Walmart Rich Media content that allows suppliers to show the full 360° view of their items. Buyers can check from every angle before they purchase. Walmart provides free hosting services for various rich media assets, including 360° spin images.
Walmart 360° Spin Image Requirements:
- File Type: PNG or JPG.
- Size: At least 1500 x 1500 pixels and less than 5MB.
- Can have up to 24 images of slightly different angle shots that when seen in order are a continuous spin of the item.
- Videos
Videos are the most engaging part of Rich Media. Videos can include product features, instructions or uses, etc. to give the shopper a complete practical overview of the item.
Technical Requirements for Videos:
The following guidelines must be followed when creating a video:
- Your file should be in the.mp4 or.mov format.
- You must include links that lead to downloaded videos (no YouTube links).
- There must be an accompanying .vtt captioning file.
- The size restriction for videos is 100MB.
- The name of the video files should be the GTIN Item ID of the products.
Videos must be accompanied by closed captioning (.vtt) files in order to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This guarantees that any website or app can be perceived, understood, navigated, and used by people with disabilities. Here are the guidelines you must follow:
- Should be a .vtt file type at the end.
- Contains no redirects.
- The ideal practice for videos that only include music is to include a single caption frame that disappears after about 10 seconds.
- The recommended approach is to insert a single caption frame that fades off the screen after around 10 seconds for videos without music, audio, or sound.
- Make the language easy to understand.
- Use plain language and avoid figures of speech, idioms, and complicated metaphors.
- All new information should be at an eighth-grade level of understanding.
- Inform users of a configuration change, such as “You will be taken to our photo site”.
- Confirm the presence of captions.
- Captions allow a person who cannot hear the audio content of a video to still understand its purpose.
- Anything that flashes more than three times in a second shouldn’t be in the media.
- Verify that text that appears over images or videos can still be read.
- Logos do not require minimum contrast.
How to Submit Videos
To submit videos to Walmart’s hosting services, you should create a case for Partner Support via the following path. You must build a case before uploading rich media content.
Step 1: Go to Help and click on Contact Support.
Step 2: Select a support category called Items and Inventory.
Step 3: Select Rich Media then select Videos. After that, you can find your best contact options. In this instance, only email can be used to create a case.
Step 4: Select the case from here and then you have to choose options for API and Seller Central.
Step 5: To open a ticket, choose Seller Central. After selecting that you will find your options where you can write your case details.
Step 6: Download and fill up the CSV template below to include all of your requested items and the corresponding requested details.
The fields in the feed file must be filled out in order to process your request. The following information must be entered into those columns:
- Sellable GTIN: Give the GTIN for the item. Give GTINs for each item you want the video to be posted to. If an item is part of a variant group and you only provide the GTIN for one of the variants in that group, the video will only display that single variant option.
- Item ID: Provide the item’s item ID.
- Rich Media Video Asset URL: Link to the hosted external download URL (must be able to download video from the link provided) in the Rich Media Video Asset URL column.
- Rich Media Video Title: Fill out the Rich Media Video Title column with the name you want to see next to the video.
- Rich Media Closed Captioning URL: Give the URL for the downloadable .txt file in the Rich Media Closed Captioning URL field or the name of the closed captioning file in SharePoint.
- Rich Media Caption Language: In the Rich Media Caption Language box, enter the video language, choosing English if there are no spoken words.
Step 7: After all the procedures, click on Submit Case & Upload Files. Submit your file and wait 72 hours for a response. If anything goes wrong Walmart will specify the incorrect details. Your task is to correct false information.
A very important NOTE on that: Once submitted, all content will be reviewed by Walmart. If the content violates Walmart’s Prohibited Products Policy, it will be rejected. Walmart will submit your rich media material if your file is ready. There is no charge applicable for these alternatives. I repeat it’s a free service.
- Customer Review Video
Customer review videos are one of the best ways to use videos for promotion. Visitors are 64% more likely to convert into customers after watching a video in your review section.
A customer review video is a review video by a customer who has used your product or had an interaction with your brand. The customer talks about your product, explains his experience, and shares his views. Customer reviews have the highest effectiveness rating among other forms of content marketing. This is because it’s a recommendation coming from a real customer who has used your product. Moreover, it’s a video that makes the review more plausible.
- Documents
Product documentation is a type of technical documentation that explains almost everything there is to know about a product. There are several types of user documentation that can be written separately or comprise a comprehensive user guide. Let’s discuss some of them.
- A Quick Start Guide: It is a short version of a user manual. It’s more popular than a complete manual because people just don’t want to read that much.
- Installation and Setup Instructions: An installation guide or manual focuses mainly on how to install the product rather than on its features or usage scenarios. In the case of software products, it’s also referred to as a setup guide that should provide configuration procedures to make the system ready for use.
- User Manual: A user manual or user guide is the most well-known type of user documentation. It contains the fullest information on the product and is often composed of the sections we describe separately.
- FAQs: FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions and it’s a list of common questions people might have while using your product. It also includes the answers to those questions.
- Comparison Table
A product comparison table contains a selection of similar items that highlight their main features. It facilitates decision-making by helping a consumer focus on the similarities and differences between the items.
For example, imagine you are looking for a new iPad. You are mainly interested in the price, the camera, and the connectivity. Instead of having to open each individual product page to scan for each feature, you can compare the models under consideration at a glance directly in a table.
4 reasons to use product comparison tables:
- Systematization of the comparison of products
- Keeping users on the website
- Enabling direct conversions
- Improving the user experience
Always remember that product comparison tables are designed to assist the customer. Avoid manipulating the data to influence the decision in favor of one of the products. This can lead to a loss of credibility.
- Expert Reviews
Walmart is an ideal platform for third-party sellers. One way to drive online sales and credibility is through good online customer reviews. Positive Walmart reviews will result in more profits and a great reputation with Walmart merchants.
Why Are Reviews Important to Marketplace Sellers?
- Can be read immediately
- Trusted by shoppers
- Reflect the business
- Impact more than algorithms
- Increase perceived value
Customer reviews are incredibly influential in boosting your sales. As per the Local Consumer Review Survey, 79% of online shoppers trust online reviews as much as someone’s recommendation. Reviews act as trust builders for shoppers.
Mistakes to Avoid When Developing Rich Media
Creating Walmart Rich Media pages is time-consuming, and there are lots of elements to perfect. In their rush to get their pages published without utilizing the proper resources and expertise like those offered by Ecomclips. Here are the most common mistakes we see – and ones that can easily be avoided.
- Using non-unique copy. While it can be tempting, you should never just paste an identical copy, as Google does not like plagiarism – even if you’ve only plagiarized yourself.
- Creating unique but painfully fluffy descriptions that don’t tell the reader how your product benefits them and why they should buy it.
- Not conducting the right keyword research. Neglecting niche, relevant keywords, particularly long tails, in favor of only using head terms, or choosing keywords that aren’t relevant to the product is disastrous because you won’t be ranking for the right terms in search, so buyers can’t find you organically.
- Not including enough images. Because your customers can’t touch, pick up, or get close to your actual product, you need to include as many images as possible to show your product from all angles, to give the customer a sense of how the product will look, feel, or perform. 360-degree product tours are incredibly useful for this.
- Adding rich media modules before adding product information. This results in absorption failure. Get your product information in and successfully absorbed before you add rich media modules.
Final Thoughts
In early 2022, Walmart announced that Walmart.com will once again support Rich Media Enhanced Content on product pages. At this time, Walmart will only be supporting video and 360-spin images. Marketing modules, comparison charts, and other forms of Rich Media will not be supported, but Walmart has communicated its intention to support these other forms by the end of 2022 or early 2023.
By adding Walmart Rich Media to your content you are keeping shoppers engaged longer and keeping them on your page. For Search Engine Opt (SEO) and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) purposes this is beneficial. You’ll start to find that your content is being put in front of more shoppers, more often. If you have any queries about selling on Amazon, feel free to comment below.
