Say you need to back up your PC. You visit Best Buy's website to investigate a FreeAgent Go external hard drive made by Seagate.

You click on a corresponding "product tour" button and are soon watching a stick figure waving his arms at a computer that floats above his desk before flying to his side. The stick figure then sprints off the screen, which says "your desktop environment in your pocket."

At the same time, your spouse is shopping for external hard drives on CircuitCity.com. She clicks on the FreeAgent Go, and the same stick figure summons the same levitating computer into his pocket. Seagate has managed to make its point about mobility to both of you.

That's the primary reason Seagate signed up for "Active Product Tours" from Pleasanton, Calif.-based SellPoint. "There are many competitors in the external hard drive space," says Cristina Martinez, field marketing manager for Scotts Valley, Calif.-based Seagate Technology. "SellPoint helps us differentiate our product offerings and show the value of our products."

Plenty of retailers -- and those who make the products they sell -- have moved beyond basic pictures and text on their e-commerce sites, and online product demos “continue to grow," Martinez says. SellPoint's merchandising solution links manufacturers to retailers through hosted product tours that can include Flash animations, voice and other audio content.

Seagate firmly believes that static displays are dead, but what is especially unique about what it is doing with SellPoint relates to the ease with which a product tour can be added or changed to reach potential customers at a variety of retail websites.

"We want that consistency,” Martinez says. "No matter where it is, we want our consumer to have the same experience, the same message."

SellPoint's retail syndication network includes more than 100 online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco.com, Walmart, OfficeMax, Sears, Staples and Toys “R” Us, as well as comparison sites like Buy.com and PriceZilla.

"We wanted to build a very, very large retail network," says Dennis Marshall, SellPoint's vice president of marketing and product management, "but retailers aren't always easy to extract money from." Therefore, the decision was made to provide the SellPoint product tours for free. "There's no charge for any retailer or any … location to receive all of hosted product content," he says.

Do the magic
Marshall insists integration is easy. "Nothing needs to be installed," he says. "They simply put a couple of lines of JavaScript code onto their web page and the JavaScript code works with ours to do the magic."

SellPoint also addresses the issue of customization, which Marshall says is a sticking point for many retailers. The SellPoint product tours that end up on retail websites are adjusted for branding, style guides and logos: “If you're on a product page at B&H … and you're looking at a SanDisk memory card, it does not look to you like you've left the B&H branded window," he says.

Consumer electronics has been SellPoint's primary product area, but the company is making a push into video games, toys, sporting goods and hardware. "There are a lot of other product categories that would also benefit from this that are increasingly being researched online," Marshall says.

For the most part, Seagate's product tours present a different challenge from those done for camera manufacturers, for example. It's easy to work some captivating action into the tours when you've got flashy screens to turn on and off and lenses to zoom in and out, Marshall says.

What Seagate offers is more of a commodity, "So what we needed to do with that was find a visual way to tell the story of the [products’ attributes], whether it's speed or the ability of the hard drive to resist more bumps or bruises," he says.

Endcap power
Marshall says the look and feel of SellPoint product tours takes its inspiration from the methods that have successful track records in bricks-and-mortar stores. SellPoint executives spent plenty of time walking the aisles to absorb the culture, he says.

"There's nothing like the stopping power of a nice endcap,” says Marshall, who likens an Active Product Tour to a “digital endcap."

Keeping online shoppers engaged longer increases the chance of a sale and reduces the chance that an item will be returned due to a misunderstanding of what to expect, Marshall says.

The average SellPoint tour is watched for more than 2.5 minutes, and a study conducted last year for the company by Coremetrics indicated that the conversion rate among shoppers who viewed SellPoint's tours was 35 percent higher than for those who did not view the tours.

Good product tours tend to be "very succinct and a very distilled essence of what a product is about," Marshall says. Consequently, many retailers also use them as training tools.

"We've found from retailers that this is a favorite way of getting sales reps quickly up to speed on a given product," Marshall says. "They can quickly learn what makes a Canon D20 [camera] different from a Canon DC40."