Search Engine of Independent Retailers and Small Business Resources

If you haven’t come across one of these virtual characters while surfing the Internet… (first, let me congratulate you on having a life) …then you probably don’t do a lot of surfing. These virtual site hosts from Oddcast.com are the most popular tool in their inventory. Oddcast touts acquiring more than 8,000 customers and being responsible for enormous clickthrough and sales increases from the several big name testimonials provided on their site.

I’ve poked around a few forums using our DesktopForumManager software and have found mixed reviews. Obviously a very unscientific study with not a whole lot of time dedicated to it. But, it appears that the larger majority seems to be in favor of the virtual site hosts if, and that’s a big ‘IF’, like any other tool, it is used appropriately. For example, a few people mentioned that they would be ideal for a children’s site of some kind. One example of note would be www.Ebooks4Tots.com.

We’ve used SitePal on a site where no matter what I printed, or how I stated it, customers just didn’t pay attention to our shipping policy. I added a SitePal character (using my own voice narrative) to explain the shipping policy and I had no further issues. I allowed controls for volume or mute and did not lose any business as a result. In fact, our orders increased.

Speaking of the voices; if someone were to use SitePal, I’d recommend using your own voice. It makes it more personal and customers are more responsive to a personal message.

However, in this day and age of YouTube (free video hosting), webcams, and inexpensive user friendly editors, it might be more effective for business owners to produce their own videos. Whether it’s a simple introduction of yourself and your business philosophy, or a complete tour of your business operations. If you want a video on your site, it’s too easy to just do it yourself. You’ll not only save the cost of SitePal hosting, but you’ll also not compromise the load time of your pages if you host your video on YouTube or Google because the video is served from their servers. Sitepal’s videos are remotely hosted as well, it just seems they take a bit longer to load. Not enough to be overly concerned. You’d have to try it yourself, and they do offer a free trial making it ideal to test on your own site.