How Screwfix multiplied video coverage across its best-selling products
Background
Video could drive sales, but managing it by hand didn't scale
Screwfix is always looking for solutions that move its commercial numbers, and helping shoppers decide is one of the surest ways to help them buy. Its customers range from tradespeople who know exactly what they need to home improvers tackling a job for the first time. For both, a short clip of a tool in use answers their questions faster, and more vividly, than a spec sheet can. And the convenient place to watch it is the product page itself, not a brand's own channel.
Screwfix had already made a start with product video. "Before Syncle, we had video on around 5% of our products," says Phil Carline, Group Head of E-Commerce at Kingfisher, Screwfix's parent group. That was enough to show what video could do for shoppers. Almost all of it came from suppliers, loaded into the product database alongside the rest of the content they provided.
Getting more videos meant asking suppliers product by product and taking whatever came back, and not every supplier had video to share. "The manual sourcing had just run into its limits. And at that volume, neither the process nor the video itself was particularly impactful," Phil explains.
At group level, Kingfisher had set a clear ambition: grow video volume substantially, and go beyond traditional vendor videos to influencer content, reviews and how-to guides that show a product in use rather than on a shelf. The catch was doing it at scale without rebuilding the product database or the systems behind it. Most importantly, any new approach would be judged on one thing: whether it lifted conversion and sales.
Challenge
More video, without losing control of what goes live
Scaling video across a range the size of Screwfix's raised two questions. The first was volume: where would enough relevant video come from, across categories as different as power tools, plumbing fittings and lighting? Chasing it supplier by supplier would never get coverage past single digits.
The second was control. A trade retailer can't have a poor-quality or off-brand video sitting on a product page. For Kingfisher, the condition for adopting any automated approach was being able to set the rules.
We needed to know that we could decide what gets through. If a video doesn’t meet the bar, it shouldn’t appear on the site.
Solution
Thousands of product pages enriched with video within weeks
Screwfix's range runs to more than 58,000 products, from power tools and fixings to plumbing, electrical and building supplies. Any video solution had to find relevant content across that breadth, not just in the easy categories, and prove that shoppers would respond.
Syncle connected Screwfix's catalogue to its pool of video from brands, creators and reviewers and matched videos to the right product pages automatically. Within weeks, thousands of products that had never had video had it. From the start, Screwfix tracked the KPIs that matter to the business: conversion rate, add-to-cart, time on site and other engagement metrics. "Every metric we tracked showed a positive impact," Phil says. The results were significant enough to roll video out across the full range.
On top of the positive metrics, one more thing made the decision easy: control. Every video passes through curation rules agreed with Screwfix before it reaches the site. "Knowing those rules could be set meant we could be sure that poor or inappropriate videos wouldn't appear," Phil explains. "And the question every ecommerce team asks about third-party content, what it does to site speed, turned out to be a non-issue: no impact."
Results
Every metric moved in the right direction
Coverage rose almost immediately, from around 5% to roughly a fifth of the range, and has held between 18% and 28% since, depending on the exact range at the time. Because the best-selling products were covered first, the share of traffic that now meets a video on the product page is well above that figure.
Conversion rates got a boost, and shoppers who watched video came back to the site more often.
Phil and his team already knew how much video matters to shoppers, so the positive results were what they expected. What surprised Phil was the breadth. Video turned up across very different categories, from power tools to fixings to lighting, and it was the practical how-to content that landed hardest. Videos showing how to use a tool or fix a common problem speak directly to shoppers who aren't confident doing the job themselves, which is exactly where Screwfix's online customers need the most help.
This depth and quantity of video, at this quality, would never have been possible if we’d tried to do it manually. Now our customers get the help we always wanted to give them, right there on the product page.
Development plans
Taking video to more products and more channels
With video now established across the range, Screwfix is looking at where else it can do the same job. The Screwfix app is the obvious next step: a growing share of customers order there, and the video that now sits on the website belongs in that experience too. The other direction is depth: more products, more categories and more of the practical how-to content that resonated most, so that whatever a customer is trying to fix or build, the product page shows them how.
Further out, Screwfix is preparing for a shift in how people shop. AI assistants and agents increasingly read product content on a shopper's behalf, and the richer that content is, the easier a product is for them to find and understand. Screwfix sees Syncle as the partner to explore what part video can play in that.
Video has become a core part of our product content. Customers use it, it works, and it’s made a real difference to the online experience. The collaboration with Syncle has made it easy, and we’re looking forward to taking it further.
*Results for screwfix.com over one full year, September 2025 to August 2026.
