How can I embed YouTube videos into an ezimerchant Professional web site? – ezimerchant

FAQ applies to:

ezimerchant Professional version 4

Using YouTube's embed video feature to easily add video content to your ezimerchant Professional web site.

Video can be a great way to communicate product or company information to your customers. Many suppliers have digital video demonstrations available for their products and with their permission these could be used on your web site to help market the product. You could even make your own videos and add them to the site.

Why use YouTube?

Digital video's are traditionally large in size and if added to your website directly they can increase your web servers monthly traffic usage exponentially and can end up costing you a lot of money in hosting traffic charges. Video is also complicated to prepare and difficult for beginners to insert into a web site. YouTube however eliminates most of these problems. There are many tools available on the web that can help you prepare your video specifically for uploading to YouTube and once the video has been uploaded YouTube provide easy to use tools which can give you simple embedding code which can be used directly in ezimerchant Professional. The best part is that YouYube will supply the bandwidth required to host the video - so it wont cost you a cent!

Where can videos appear on an ezimerchant web site?

Video's can be placed into the following sections of an ezimerchant Professional website..

Content Pages such as Home Page, About Us page etc
Category descriptions
Brief product descriptions (not recommended)
Detailed product descriptions
View cart page - either above or below the cart contents (not recommended!)
As a footer on every page (also not recommended!)

Is there a limit to the number of videos you can add to an ezimerchant Professional website?

You can embed as many videos into ezimerchant as you like. As long as your video is on YouTube you can embed it.

What will the video look like once embedded into an ezimerchant Professional Web Site?

YouTube allows you create custom players. These players can display just a single video or you can create video navigation like in the example below.

The video players can also have the colour scheme changes applied if necessary.

How do I embed video's into ezimerchant Professional?

Prepare and upload your video to YouTube

Before attempting to embed a video into ezimerchant, you have to get your video uploaded to YouTube. Please visit YouTube's Help Centre for more information.

Embed the video into ezimerchant Professional

In the following example I will show you how to add a you tube video into the About Us page of your ezimerchant Professional web site. The same instructions are valid for embedding YouTube video into other areas of your site - such as product or category descriptions.

Obtaining your embed code

Each video on YouTube has embed code. You can see this code on the same page as the video itself. Below is a screenshot of a random YouTube video and circled in red is the location of the Embed code.

You need to locate your video on YouTube and copy the entire embed code into your PC's clipboard memory. (Select the embed code and then Right click -> Copy)

Now that you have the code open ezimerchant Pro and navigate to the 'Add New Pages to your web site' section.

Select the About Us page and click the Edit Page button...

Select the eziHTML editor and then click Edit...

The eziHTML editor should now open and you should see your About Us Page...

Place the flashing cursor where you would like to embed the video and then click on the 'Insert' menu and click 'HTML Snippit'...

Select the sample HTML Snippet and then replace it with your embed code by right clicking and 'Pasting' into the HTML Snippit window and then click OK...

Depending on your browser and Operating System settings you *may* see the following Information box appear...

If you see the above information box simply click OK.

You will now see your About Us page with either the functioning video or a place holder that looks like the following...

Don't worry that you cannot see the video at this stage. Click the Save button and then close the eziHTML editor. After closing the editor click the 'Page has been edited and saved' button. You should now see the YouTube video in the About Us page preview...

You can now close this screen and generate your web site.