Dive Brief:

• Hero, a virtual shopping platform, has introduced a "Stories" feature, the company announced on Thursday. The tool allows brands to create short-form, shoppable videos highlighting their products that can be shared within their online store.

• The feature enables store employees and product experts to shoot short videos within the Hero app, tag the products featured and, if approved by the brand, share them on product pages. Head office teams can track the sales, engagement and other metrics associated with the content, the company said.

• So far, brands with early access to the feature have found that shoppers who view stories are up to 52% less likely to leave the website, five times more likely to come back and 2.5 times more likely to look at more product pages, per the announcement.

Dive Insight:

Hero joins other established tech companies experimenting with shoppable videos. Hero's Stories feature is driven in part by consumer feedback that the company collected about what consumers want from their online shopping experience. 

According to the company survey of about 1,500 consumers, the company found that shoppers wanted short, relevant videos, more product experts than influencers and the ability to visualize products in an authentic way. Hero's survey showed that 64% found the inability to see products up close as they would in person was their least favorite aspect of online shopping. 

"Static product images and boring text descriptions simply aren't cutting it," the company wrote in its announcement. "Today's shoppers want to see real video content about their favorite products, from experts who know them best."

Hero isn't the only company that sees promise in short-form shoppable videos. Throughout the past year or so, other companies have also been experimenting with short-form videos.

Last year, Google introduced shoppable video ads for YouTube and saw some early success with underwear brand Aerie. A month after rolling out that feature, Google debuted Shoploop, a video shopping platform that lets users discover and buy goods through 90 second or less videos. Shopify launched a TikTok channel last October to allow merchants to connect TikTok for Business accounts with Shopify, and announced a collaboration with the social network to create new commerce features together.