The issue: too many PDPs look the same

If you're an authorised retailer of consumer brands, you're typically working with the same inputs as everyone else:

• identical or near-identical pack shots and brand imagery
• the same bullet points and spec copy
• similar merchandising conventions (price, variants, reviews, shipping blocks)

And while Shopify is genuinely brilliant for enabling fast, high-quality commerce, it also means many PDPs share a familiar structure out of the box — clean, efficient, and… often visually similar at first contact.

That's where motion (and particularly shoppable video) becomes interesting — not as a shiny add-on, but as a behavioural lever.

1 Motion is a biological shortcut to attention

Humans are tuned to notice movement. It's a survival-level signal: change in the environment might matter.

In digital environments, motion still functions as a powerful attention cue — and the implication for retail is simple:

When you're competing in a visually crowded category (fashion, footwear, beauty, home goods), motion can be the difference between:

2 Dual-process psychology: video influences both fast and slow thinking

A useful framework in consumer psychology is dual-process theory: we operate using two modes.

Product pages need to serve both.

Static images and copy are great for deliberate evaluation, but video carries an edge because it can do both jobs at once:

• it creates an immediate feeling (trust, desire, relevance)
• and it demonstrates details that reduce uncertainty (fit, movement, scale, real use)

In practice, this means video doesn't just "engage" — it can reduce the mental load of buying online.

3 Video reduces uncertainty by increasing "diagnosticity"

One of the biggest barriers to conversion isn't price — it's uncertainty:

Academic work in online product presentation often uses the concept of diagnosticity: how useful the experience is for evaluating the product.

Video can improve diagnosticity because it shows temporal change — what the product does, not just what it is.

For high-consideration or sensory categories (fit and drape, application, texture, scale), that matters enormously.

4 There's real field evidence: product videos can lift sales (and basket)

It's easy to find opinions on video. Harder to find strong causal evidence on real product pages.

One of the most useful pieces of research here is a randomised field experiment on a live fashion retailer site (Kumar & Tan, Management Science). The design is notable because it included switch-on and switch-off periods, strengthening the causal story.

Their headline outcome wasn't just "video increases engagement" — it was commercial impact:

That second result is particularly important. It suggests video can influence basket-building via complementary items — effectively turning the product page into a merchandising surface, not just a conversion step.

5 Interactive and shoppable video: turning attention into action

Video earns attention and reduces uncertainty. Interactivity removes friction.

Traditional PDP journeys often look like this:

Shoppable video collapses that into a single, more natural flow:

What this means in a sea of sameness

If all retailers are using the same core assets and similar templates, then differentiation has to come from experience — not just assortment.

And one of the few assets that is naturally differentiating on a PDP is:

• the way the product is demonstrated
• the context it is placed in
• the confidence the shopper feels
• and the ease of acting when intent peaks

Motion, done well, helps with all four.

Practical guidance: using video without making your PDP noisy

If you're embedding video on product pages, a few principles keep it helpful rather than distracting:

The Zenbundle take: the PDP is the front door — and it's crowded

Here's the part that often gets missed when we talk about PDP optimisation:

you're not optimising a mid-funnel page. You're optimising the first touch.

In Zenbundle's cohort analysis across Shopify retailers, we found that most sessions begin on a product page — and this effect is even stronger for paid traffic.

So here's the explicit link:

If the PDP is where shoppers most often arrive, and if PDPs in authorised retail often look broadly similar at first glance, then differentiation on the product page is no longer optional.

In a sea of sameness, motion is how you stand out —
and the product page is where it matters most.