There is a largely untapped resource that most retailers aren’t leveraging to the fullest. I’m talking about shopping haul videos, also called unpacking videos. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this weird phenomenon, let me give you a brief description.

Shopping haul videos are made by people that have been shopping – either at a store, or online – and when they have the goods at home they turn on the camera and record themselves opening up all their goodies. It sounds quirky, right? However, these videos get an amazing number of views and they continue to grow.

Now the nice thing about these videos from a retailer’s point of view is that they are video reviews that feature their products and their stores. They are taken at the time when the shopper is most positive about their purchases, in the afterglow of the buying, before they’ve had an opportunity to be disappointed by them. They are authentic – typically done in their home. So these are authentic, positive video reviews of retailer’s products. Dang!

So how could retailers use shopping haul videos? I think it would be great if they could make the videos viewable on the product pages that are featured in the video. Retailers know the value of videos for improving engagement, yet videos are fairly expensive to produce. With the shopping haul trend, there are millions of videos that have already been produced that retailers can use.

So how do retailers find these videos? A simple search of “[Retailer name] haul” will give you a good start. Then you need someone to watch the video and work out which products are featured. The video can then be embedded in the product page. You could do this now for a few products, test it and see if it helps.

I came up with this idea a few years ago when I first heard about shopping haul videos at the online retailer show in Australia and then heard how popular they were. I had proposed creating a tool to make it easy for retailers (or anyone) to tag these videos and to embed them into product pages. It’s not unlike the recommendations we imbed in product pages now: some supplementary content that helps improve conversions. It could also feature in the search and nav in the same way that we index retailer’s videos as part of our Learning Search offering now.

However my idea has never made it to the top of our priority queue (we have a lot of cool stuff we’re working on). What do you think of it? Have you considered doing something like this? How many shopping haul videos are there for your store?