Is vertical video on Amazon a thing?

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Yup. Vertical video on Amazon is now a thing for influencers to use to share product reviews and for shoppers to view. But they are not as easy as uploading the traditional horizontal product reviews. Their default thumbnails aren’t that great, either. And as we know from years of YouTube content, thumbnails do matter. Let me show you the current state.

Here’s how horizontal videos of mine display:

And on product pages, they look like this:

That especially works well when there are several videos in that spot. One horizontal video after another. All part of the Amazon Influencer Program.

Enter vertical video

And now I can upload vertical videos – which certainly have been made popular by TikTok and other platforms. Vertical videos are really not considered mistakes anymore. They used to be. “Hold the phone horizontally already,” people were reminded when shooting video.

And then once it uploads…

The problem with that currently is, though, that the auto thumbnails look horrible as they are being generated as if the vertical videos are actually horizontal videos. Here’s one of my videos discussing oven mitts. Instead of framing up the mitts, it’s focusing on my bald head.

In fact, most of them look like this when it’s me talking to the camera. What’s actually really frustrating here is that when I look at the thumbnail in the back end (below), it looks great. But since it’s vertical, the public thumbnail currently won’t render like that.

When I used my down-facing Webcam Flex, however, and shot just the product on my desk, the framing at least had a chance to be better. That wasn’t a 100 percent thing either.

Recording vertical video

To shoot vertical video with this camera I record in Restream, which is a livestreaming and recording studio that allows me to change the dimensions of my video before I record it. Super easy to use and that ensures I get the framing – at least for the video – that I want to.

When in focus, those thumbnails work, too. Here’s an example of three products where it did:

And in the cases where the thumbnails don’t work, I use this design template (try Canva or Visme). I put a product picture on the top and then simple title them “Christoph’s review.”

That’s easily uploadable after the video has been processed.

And then on the live Amazon site it looks like this:

Much better than the top of my bald head for sure.

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So vertical videos on Amazon are a thing, though they have some formatting issues currently. But, that’s really no different from how it used to be on YouTube before YouTube started serving videos responsibly based on their format.

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