Getly
Getly listings can carry video alongside the images. On 14 September 2026, 373 of 5,672 live listings do — 6.6%, or roughly one in fifteen.
For products a buyer cannot touch, open or try before paying, one in fifteen is low. It is worth understanding why before concluding that everyone else is making a mistake.
Not every product has anything to film
The honest first reason is that video suits some categories and not others.
A coloring book is fully described by two still images: a cover and a sample page. Filming it adds nothing a photograph does not already say. The same is true of most print-ready PDFs, most wallpaper packs, and most icon sets — the product is visual and static, and stills are the correct medium.
Video earns its place where the product does something. A template that reflows. A preset applied to a photograph, before and after. A tool with an interface. An animation. A sound. In those cases a still is a screenshot of one frame of the thing, and the buyer has to imagine the rest.
The second reason is effort, and it is real
Making a decent thirty-second clip is a different skill from making the product. A seller who can build a beautiful template may have no editing software, no screen recorder they trust, and no idea what to do about audio.
That friction is why the number is 6.6% and not 40%. It is also why it is an opportunity: in categories where video genuinely helps, the listing that has one is competing against fourteen that do not.
What a useful product video contains
Not a trailer. Three things, in under forty seconds:
- The thing, working. Open it, use it, show the output. No logo animation at the front — the buyer is deciding in the first three seconds whether to keep watching.
- The range. If it ships twelve variants, show several. The unanswered pre-purchase question is almost always "is the rest as good as the cover".
- The scale. Scroll the file. Let the buyer see how much there is. This is the one thing images are worst at.
No voiceover is needed and often none is better — a large share of buyers watch with sound off, and a silent clip that works is better than a narrated one that requires audio.
The weight question
Across the catalogue the median MP4 is 16 MB, against 1.3 MB for a PDF and 1.9 MB for a PNG. Video is by a wide margin the heaviest thing on a product page.
That is worth respecting on a mobile connection. Short and compressed beats long and pristine, because the video that matters is the one that actually plays before the buyer scrolls past.
Where to start
If your product does something, film it doing it, badly, with whatever you have. A rough screen recording that shows the product working outperforms no video at all by a distance, and it can be replaced later.
If your product is a still image or a printable document, do not bother. Spend the time on a second sample image instead — half of all listings carry exactly one image, and the second one is cheaper to make and more likely to be looked at.
