Over at ComparisonEngines, I introduce Smarter video reviews. The tight integration of these reviews in Smarter’s search listings present an attractive opportunity for smart merchants.

If I were a retailer of a no-name manufacturer/brand of a popular product, say IP phones, I’d create honest video reviews of all of my products mentioning that they are great alternatives to the major manufacturer/brand models. I’d then submit the video reviews to Expo TV (which powers Smarter’s video reviews) and wait for them to show up on Smarter.

Now when someone does a search for IP phones and lands on a page with 100s of products, because of how tightly Smarter has integrated these video reviews, I have a feeling a high percentage of browsers will click to view the reviews. If you’re the only person who has a review (or in the future, if you’re the person with the highest rated reviews), you’ll potentially get a good amount of views. Well, right under the video review is your product as Smarter has integrated the videos on a product level. While you haven’t necessarily driven the user to your store (this would only happen if you were the sole retailer of the product, otherwise the user gets the normal comparison engine page listing multiple retailers), you’ve at least made sure the user is aware of your set of products.

There are lots of other more creative uses to get traffic and sales from these video product reviews, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

Think of a video review as a product attribute on Google Base…when someone sorts by an attribute on Base, only the merchants that listed that attribute in their data feed are included in the search results. When someone clicks on Video Reviews on Smarter because they are overwhelmed by the choices in a category, only the associated products show up right under the video review and above all the other product listings.