How to optimize your marketplace business with api.video

Selling your products online is the best way to reach the right customers today. And integrating videos to showcase your products just elevates the experience. Videos enable customers to resonate with your products and services better, and build a connection that text or photos cannot.

 

In this blog, we'll see how api.video can help you implement video functionality to your marketplace app or website.

 

Now before we proceed, what do we mean when we say ‘marketplace’?

What is a marketplace?

An online marketplace aggregates services and products from different providers in one platform. This means that multiple vendors can operate in the same product category, making such a platform more complex than a simple webshop. This approach gives consumers the benefit of being able to choose products that are cheaper, or vendors that have better reviews.

For example, your app or website could:

• offer French language courses from multiple e-learning platforms
• list freelancers who offer dog-walking and plant-sitting services in a specific city
• enable users to buy bubble tea and display all nearby tea shops on a map

 

Whether you’re inviting B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), your vendors and their buyers can all benefit from video functionality. Vendors can upload videos to better showcase their services or products, and they can upload ads for their store and promotional videos about a specific product they sell. They can also ease the workload on their support teams by offering user instructions or troubleshooting videos directly through your platform.

 

Let’s see how you can achieve this with api.video!

 

Have an e-learning platform instead of marketplace? We have something for you too!

How videos can improve user experience

We have selected some features that show how video functionality can directly improve usability for your vendors, and enhance the shopping experience for buyers. Using api.video’s VOD product, you can:

 

• enable vendors to make their product offering more marketable by uploading product showcases and promotional videos,
• enable vendors to upload user instruction or troubleshooting videos for their products or services,
• allow buyers to upload video reviews, like unboxing videos,
• use metadata to easily match video content to vendors or products through custom key-value pairs.

 

Here’s an example:

We have created an in-depth API showcase that focuses on metadata and its use cases. Check out the blog here!

 

• handle customer complaints through video - ask buyers to upload short videos and use them to validate claims, and reduce the amount of fraudulent complaints. You can use metadata to tie the underlying layer of information to the complaint videos.

 

Here’s an example:

• give vendors the functionality to restrict videos from their buyers. For example, if you want to ensure an age-appropriate experience, you can restrict content that is not suitable for underage buyers. You can also enable vendors to offer private videos to their buyers through your platform.

 

Now that we have some interesting functionalities laid out, let’s dive into the specific features of api.video that can help you implement these.

Features that will help you sell

Check out the complete list of features that api.video offers on our website. To stay on track with the online marketplace use case, we have collected some of our features that are especially useful for apps or websites targeting this industry:

 

• Use upload tokens to enable vendors to upload videos, or to enable buyers to upload video reviews or log video complaints. You control when an upload token expires, and you can even create single-use tokens.
• Manage access to videos using the private videos feature. For example, if your marketplace sells alcoholic beverages or tobacco, you can restrict product videos in these categories so they are only visible for buyers who are of legal age.
• Use video tags and metadata to add an extra layer of information to video content. With metadata, you can define custom key-value pairs and store relevant data with every video.
• Set up domain referrer restrictions to make sure that your vendors’ videos are protected and that content can only be played in your app or website.
• Enable vendors to add annotations like captions to their videos to improve user experience. Captions can make your marketplace’s video content more inclusive by inviting global audiences, including users who are hard-of-hearing or deaf.
• Enable vendors to brand their videos using watermarks like company logos.
• If you’re developing your marketplace using a CMS, check out api.video’s available no-code plugins. These enable you to implement video functionality without needing to write any code.
• Use Analytics to get data about customer activity like number of views on the product video, number of times the video was played, and many more engagement metrics.

What’s next?

If you have any questions or want us to confirm something about your online marketplace or e-commerce use case, book a call with us to get in touch!

 

Sign up for a free sandbox account now to start using api.video and see how all this works in practice!

 

What if you already have a marketplace platform, but your videos are hosted by Azure Media Services? Dive into this blog post for some recommendations on how to tackle migration challenges when moving to a new video platform.