Enter any Wal-Mart, and what's the first thing you notice? The person who greets you at the door. At other stores, salespeople not only greet you, but they guide you through the store and help you make a purchase.

The same sort of personal touch is an essential part of ecommerce. Personalization and interactivity make customers feel welcome and encourage them to explore an ecommerce website, especially at a time when money is tight. Video of actors walking and talking online can be used to greet customers and direct them to featured products, but can be costly in both money and bandwidth, seriously slowing down the experience for your visitors.

Enter RIVworks, a video delivery service that promotes itself as an affordable, high quality, and easily customizable option for businesspeople on a tight budget. RIVworks was launched in May by many of the same people who brought you Deal4it.com. (Deal4It has been described in previous AuctionBytes articles and is currently being used by 700 eBay sellers who have added video presentations to their listings, and is priced at $19.95/month for up to 1,000 listings.)

RIV stands for Rich Interactive Video, and RIVworks enables ecommerce sellers to add walk-on video clips to their sites for as little as $79 per month. When you load a page, an actor (or you, if you choose the more expensive custom video option) walks into the page and greets the viewer. Not only that, but greetings can be customized to take into account what day it is: "Hi, it's Sunday, and welcome to AuctionBytes," for instance.

How do they do it? In their headquarters and studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, RIVworks' 12 staff people have accumulated 5,000 prerecorded video clips that can be used with a variety of websites and with virtually any product or service. (You can add a demo video to your own Web page and get an idea of how it works by clicking the Demo link on the RIVworks website and entering your site's URL.)

Working with Web-based software, online business owners can develop their own campaigns and design their own video presentations. They can choose a "half body" or a "full body" actor or actress, for instance, or specify whether they should walk into the screen from the left or right. Actors can call attention to buttons, links, or other graphics on the page. The goal of making the technology affordable springs from the founders' roots as eBay sellers themselves.

Ty Ricker, co-founder and vice-president of new business development, worked with the Disney company, where he gained some early experience with video. Jay Jacoby, director of sales and marketing, also worked in media. "What makes our product unique is that each time a visitor comes back to a site, they get a different message," Ricker says. "It brings about greater engagement, which motivates the visitor to take some kind of action."

Hopefully, the surprise of seeing a person walk out from the background of a Web page and greet the viewer won't turn that visitor away. Some people just don't like video or music on Web pages, after all. But advertisers are likely to find the precorded video clips an attractive option. "In this difficult economic market, all the ad agencies have clients whose ad budgets are shrinking and they have to get more and more creative," says Ty.

Even those who don't like audio/video on websites are likely to find the RIVworks clips engaging because the quality is so good. The actors have no backgrounds behind them, so they appear to be "floating" on the page. Their motions are smooth, not jerky or pixelated at all, thanks to a high-speed hosting facility that serves the video from many parts of the country.

"It's a new way of getting shoppers involved with products," says Jacoby.

Prices for RIVworks' prerecorded video presentations range from $79 per month to $799. If you want to create a custom set of 18 videos that specifically refer to your own website and that star either you or an actor, prices can reach $1299 or $1699.

Such costs are still low compared to other options, says Jacoby. "To create your own infomercial costs thousands of dollars," says Jacoby. "We're trying to make video something anyone can put on their Web site."

Even though it's just starting out, RIVworks has its eye on the future. The company hopes to create a video marketplace - an "app store" - for graphic artists who will be able to upload their content or even drag-and-drop video clips onto the RIVworks platform.

But in the end, what makes it exciting for these developers is the feeling that they're providing something new. "We're inventing a new niche," says Ricker.