Does Video on Product Pages Increase Conversion? What the Evidence Shows

The short answer

There is good evidence that product videos can increase sales, but the widely shared figures vary a lot in quality. A few come from controlled experiments, some come from platforms reporting on their own features, and many come from surveys run by companies that sell video. All three are useful if you know which is which. None of them tells you what video will do on your store; only a test does.

Below, the evidence is grouped by strength, from randomised experiments down to surveys, followed by the traps that make video look better or worse than it is, and a simple way to run your own test.

Controlled experiments: the strongest evidence

The clearest study we know of is a randomised field experiment published in Management Science in 2015 by Kumar and Tan. A fashion retailer added videos to a randomly selected set of apparel products. Adding a video was followed by a 14.5% increase in apparel sales and a 28.3% increase in sales of the accessories shown alongside.

Two cautions: it is one retailer in one category, and the videos showed products together, so part of the effect came from customers discovering matching items. It is strong evidence that video can cause more sales, not a number to promise your board.

Lab studies: what kind of video works

Lab studies measure intention to buy rather than purchases, but they help with design. A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology compared a video showing how a product looks with one showing it in use. The usage video had the stronger effect on purchase intention. The practical lesson: show the product doing its job, not just rotating.

Intention is not the same as buying. People in a study know they are being asked, and nothing is at stake. Use lab results to decide what kind of video to make, and use sales data to decide whether it paid off.

Platform data and surveys: useful, but self-reported

Amazon states on its seller blog that product detail pages with their first shoppable video added saw an average 24% increase in sales compared with those without videos. This is Amazon reporting on its own feature, with no published method, so it cannot tell you how much is caused by the video and how much by the kind of seller who adds one. It is still a real signal from a very large catalogue.

Industry surveys are the source of most headline figures. In Wyzowl's 2026 survey, 85% of people said they have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video, and 63% said a short video is how they would most like to learn about a product. These are self-reported answers, gathered by a company that makes videos. They tell you people like video; they do not measure conversion.

Usability research: will people even watch?

In Baymard Institute's product page testing, 41% of users watched product videos. For those who did, the video helped them imagine the product in their own life. The same research found that videos placed far from the image gallery were sometimes not found at all. Placement matters as much as production.

Read that 41% the other way round too: most users did not watch. A video should add to the page, not replace information. Keep the key facts, dimensions and what is in the box in text and images, so shoppers who never press play still get them.

Why the numbers disagree

When one article says video lifts conversion by 20% and another says 80%, it is rarely because one is lying. They are measuring different things:

• Sales versus stated intention versus clicks
• Shoppers who chose to watch versus all visitors to the page
• One retailer and category versus a whole marketplace
• Before-and-after comparisons, where season, price changes and ads also moved, versus random assignment
• Independent research versus figures published by companies that sell video or video features

The watcher trap

Many analytics tools report that visitors who watched a video converted far more often than those who did not. That comparison is almost always flattering. People who press play are usually already more interested, so they would have bought more often anyway. It tells you watchers are good prospects, not that the video made them buy. Only a comparison between randomly chosen pages with and without video separates the two.

How to test it on your own store

If you can, run a clean comparison rather than a before-and-after:

• Pick a group of similar products with steady traffic
• Add video to a random half, and leave the other half unchanged
• Put the video in the image gallery, not below the description
• Run it long enough to cover normal weekly cycles, and avoid launches and sales periods
• Measure add-to-cart and purchase rate, and also returns and support contacts for the same products
• Look at the result per product type; a video may help furniture and do nothing for socks

Do not forget the after-purchase side

Conversion is only half the value. For products that need assembly, a clear instructions video can also reduce returns and support tickets after the sale, which some teams find easier to measure than conversion. Our guide on reducing returns covers that side, and our page on how to reduce support tickets explains how to count them. Manual to Video makes that kind of film from your existing PDF manual. For the pre-purchase brand or explainer film, nine.film, our sister product, makes one from your website.