Do product videos increase sales?

Almost every video studio has a slide that says video "boosts conversion by" some large percentage. Most of those numbers come from one of two places: surveys of marketers, or comparisons between people who chose to watch a video and people who didn't. Neither tells you what the video did on its own. People who press play were often more interested to begin with.

So this article starts with the two studies we found that compared with and without in a way that holds up. Only then does it turn to the surveys, and it says plainly what each kind of evidence can and can't tell you.

The cleanest test: videos added at random

In 2015, Anuj Kumar and Yinliang Tan published a randomised field experiment in Management Science. A mid-sized US fashion retailer added short product videos to randomly chosen items on its live website. The researchers then compared sales of those items with similar items that had no video.

The random choice is what makes this study useful. The retailer didn't pick its best sellers for the videos, so a difference in sales can fairly be put down to the video.

What they found: adding a video was followed by a 14.5% increase in sales of the clothing shown, and a 28.3% increase in sales of the matching accessories that appeared in the same video. The researchers estimated the retailer's extra profit at about six times what the videos cost to make.

Two details matter more than the headline numbers:

• The second product sold too. Most of the extra accessory sales came from people seeing the two products used together. For software, the closest parallel is a video that shows two features working together, so people discover the one they didn't come for.
• It was clothing, not software. A dress is hard to judge from a photo, and so is an app from a screenshot. That is a good reason to think the effect carries over, but it is not proof. Your numbers will be your own.

The biggest sample: 48,500 crowdfunding pitches

A year earlier, Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School looked at over 48,500 Kickstarter projects for the Journal of Business Venturing (2014). He treated a pitch video as a sign that the founders had prepared properly, alongside early updates and a pitch free of spelling mistakes.

Holding everything else constant, for an average project, not including a video decreased the chance of success by 26%. In the same sample, 86% of projects had a video anyway, so leaving it out meant standing out for the wrong reason.

This is an association, not an experiment. Founders who make a video may also write better pitches and set better goals. But it is a very large, real-world sample in which strangers decided whether to pay based on one page, which is close to what happens on a pricing page or a store listing.

What marketers and buyers report in 2026

Surveys can't isolate cause, but they show where things are heading. Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing 2026 surveyed 266 marketers and consumers in late 2025:

• 83% of video marketers said video had directly increased sales, 85% said it had generated leads, and 93% said it had increased people's understanding of their product or service.
• 96% of consumers said they had watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service, and 85% said a video had convinced them to buy.
• 80% said they had bought or downloaded an app after watching a demo of it.

HubSpot's State of Marketing Report 2026 points the same way: marketers named short-form video as the content format with the best return (49%), ahead of long-form video (29%) and live streaming (25%).

Read these with care. They are self-reported, people who already use video are more likely to answer a video survey, and Wyzowl is itself a video studio. The share of Wyzowl's marketers who said video gives a good return also fell from 93% to 82% in a single year. A survey shows direction, not a number to put in a forecast.

Why a video can move a buyer

Put the studies and the surveys side by side and a few plain reasons come through:

• It shows the product working. A product page mostly describes. A video shows the before and after, which is what Kumar and Tan call a virtual product experience. For software, where the value is in a flow rather than a single screen, that matters a lot.
• It matches how people say they want to learn. In Wyzowl's 2026 survey, 63% of consumers said they would most like to learn about a product by watching a short video. Only 12% chose reading an article.
• It answers questions early. 57% of Wyzowl's video marketers said video had reduced the number of support questions they get.
• One film travels. The same cut can sit on your homepage, in a sales email, in a release post and on social media, in the shape each one needs.

What a video won't do

Being honest about the limits will save you money:

• It won't fix the offer. If the product doesn't solve a real problem, or the price is wrong, a better video only helps people find that out faster.
• It only works if people see it. Wistia's State of Video Report 2026 found that videos on homepages, video galleries and product pages get the highest play rates, and that viewers generally get about halfway through. Put the video where decisions are made, and put the point early.
• It won't measure itself. If you want to know what your video does, compare. Run the page with and without it as an A/B test if your tools allow it, or at least compare the same weeks before and after.

If you're weighing up the budget, read what a product video costs and why. If you sell software, explainer videos for SaaS goes into what the film itself should show.

Sources

1. Kumar, A. and Tan, Y. (2015). The Demand Effects of Joint Product Advertising in Online Videos. Management Science 61(8), 1921–1937. doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2086
2. Mollick, E. (2014). The dynamics of crowdfunding: An exploratory study. Journal of Business Venturing 29(1), 1–16. doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.06.005
3. Wyzowl (2026). State of Video Marketing 2026. wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics
4. HubSpot (2026). State of Marketing Report 2026, as published on HubSpot's marketing statistics page. hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
5. Wistia (2026). State of Video Report 2026. wistia.com/learn/marketing/video-marketing-statistics