By Crystal Silvas

A few months from now, expect to see a ton more movement on your favorite retail sites—literally. That’s because smart retailers will be supplementing static thumbnail images with product demonstration videos, and so can you.

Even if you don’t have access to thousands of bucks that can help you create a product-video library, you can still give consumers the video view that they increasingly want and expect. But before I explain how, let’s discuss why.

Why do I think that video is coming really soon to a shopping cart near you? Well, for one thing, YouTube, which didn’t even exist two years ago, is now a Top 10 site. Consumers’ computers have finally caught up with their moving-picture preferences and they expect you to step up and give them what they want: video everywhere they surf or shop.

Phase one of the video revolution, already well under way, consists of retailers repurposing their tv commercials to capture the attention of Web surfers. In phase two, retailers will start using videos to capture additional product sales. A great forerunner of this is tech review site CNET.com. It features a comprehensive collection of video product reviews by type of device, manufacturer and model.

It’s only a matter of time before retailers start using video in a similar fashion, but unlike CNET, you probably don’t have a production team at your disposal. You’ll probably have to get your video content the good old-fashioned way, by linking to it. Perhaps the most efficient way to offer relevant video for the products in your catalog and turn this medium into a valuable sales tool is by partnering with a video-search provider that can push the right clips in front of shoppers while they shop.

Video search, believe it or not, is a completely different animal than standard Web search, which relies on text to find and categorize site content. With video files there is no text. This makes it much more difficult to decipher what a video is about, who posted it and how relevant it is.

Companies that specialize in true, Internet-wide video search overcome these limitations with proprietary methods for finding and classifying video content. Partner with one that can embed video search directly into your product pages, supplying and pushing relevant clips to your shoppers. Then they won’t even have to leave your site.