How these brands are leveraging livestream shopping to multiply their e-commerce results 🚀
And how you can do it too
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With people living out their best lives on the Internet from the safety and comfort of their homes, everything now has a digital analog – Zoom meetings are the new meetings, online events are the new events — in-person is clearly now the exception rather than the norm.
As far as shopping is concerned, e-commerce is now the main form of commerce, and Instagram is the shopping street – where people browse, window shop, and find things that inspire them to maybe hand out their credit card and make a purchase.
To facilitate that, Instagram added a whole bunch of shopping and commerce features –such as Instagram Shops and the ability to shop inside of Reels and IGTV, to make it closer to a real shopping street.
However, nothing yet on the platform has the same feeling of being in a store with a real sales-person, talking to you about a product live, with the ability to ask questions.
This is where live-shopping comes in, and in this article we’ll share with your the things we’ve learnt about how you can leverage live shopping to multiply your e-commerce results 🚀
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Wait, but what is live shopping?
Simply put, live shopping involves a livestream with an influencer or other presenter, in which they showcase products and talk about them, and the audience can ask questions in the chat.
Most importantly, the audience can directly purchase the products within the livestream, reducing any friction between the impulse and the purchase — leading to live shopping generating $60B in global sales in 2019, and was projected to surpass $170B in 2020 – yes that’s billion with a B – and as of July 2021, social commerce has already surpassed $30B in the US alone.
Two-thirds of Chinese consumers said that they’ve bought products on livestream in the past year – in fact, 20% of e-commerce in China is associated with live shopping – and early movers in the west are racking up sales as well.
McKinsey did a wonderful article on live shopping a few month ago – we highly recommend you to read it as well.
How you can get in on it
Look at your core value
P N Rao, an Indian luxury fashion retailer based in Bangalore, was able to increase its month-on-month sales by 37% with a 2X higher average order value, by engaging its audience all over the country during the 2020 lockdown using livestream shopping sessions with Swirl, an Indian live shopping SaaS.
They generated over 5000 leads by recreating the in-store experience through video consultations, custom styling and store tours. This was a great way for them to replicate their in-person experience online, because they are a brand that normally offers customised services to all their clients, and through live they are able to do that at scale, and from a distance.
Take a deep look inside your brand and take note of the services you offer, and get to the core value of those services — and then figure out how you can replicate them.
Use your community and your influencers
Clinique’s Skin School has been doing many livestreams in the way of “live demos” that are hosted by their Consultants, which are their brand ambassadors, and beauty influencers. They even did one with Emilia Clarke in which she explained her morning skincare routine.
MAC Cosmetics launched their new spring collection “Petal Power” in 2020 on Instagram using a shoppable livestream with their makeup artist and influencer Netta Szekely, using Israeli startup buywith as their platform.
In France, Galleries Lafayette used Swedish tech Bambuser to host a live shopping session with mayadorable, and they did it again with The Kooples as well.
The cool thing with using influencers is that there’s a strong incentive for them to make sure that your livestream session is a success, when a part of their compensation is a % of the sales that they generate.
Influencer campaigns and live shopping go hand in hand. This is because brands can easily take advantage of the reach of influencers to promote their live broadcasts, and create better engagement with their community using a personality that they know and love.
Use influencers to generate buzz, reach a larger audience, and have someone highly charismatic, experienced and incentivised to host your live shopping show and make it a success.
By leveraging their community of influencers and ambassadors, beauty brands can utilise formats such as GRWM (get ready with me), unboxings and tutorials. They can reach a larger pool of people in a more authentic way.
Some brands like MAC Cosmetics have a built-in community of makeup artists that are on the company payroll and also work as their influencers, and brands like Clinique have their ‘consultants’ who serve the same purpose for them, but other brands need to find influencers that can do livestream events for them.
Consider unorthodox options
In Singapore, 70% of livestream purchases are food related — people mostly buy seafood and bubble tea — this sounds crazy, but then you realise that it makes total sense. Selling seafood through livestream enables customers to view what they’re buying and make sure it’s fresh, and selling bubble tea online makes it an impulse purchase, enabled by the friction-free experience of live shopping.
Look into what you’re selling, and see how you can use live shopping to make it make sense for your product. You might find unorthodox ways to implement it.
Many brands have been getting in on it — Douglas Cosmetics, in partnership with Dept launched their live shopping channel DOUGLAS LIVE in March of 2020, making it one of the first German retailers to discover this format. They used Livebuy as their live shopping tech solution.
Walmart did a livestream shopping test on TikTok, and they reported 7x more views than anticipated as well as a 25% follower growth on TikTok. Veepee associated 60% of its sales and traffic to live shopping via Bambuser as well.
Facebook itself realised the potential of this format – in May 2021, Facebook itself launched “Live Shopping Fridays” with brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Sephora, and more – to encourage larger brands to try out live shopping on Facebook.
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The technology behind it
As live shopping becomes more and more popular among brands, it’s also becoming more and more popular among entrepreneurs as a SaaS business. As a result, today there are many options in the form of tech platforms to integrate live shopping into your marketing mix.
There is Bambuser, Swirl, NTWRK, Talkshoplive, Popshop Live, Buywith, Dote, Shop LIT, Livescale, Spockee, Whatnot – it’s a crowded space. Each of these platforms offers live shopping, but they differ in terms of features. For example, Dote offers “Shopping Parties” which is pretty cool.
Another option is Comment Sold – this is pretty cool because it allows your customers to shop by posting comments on Instagram and Facebook. This allows you to bypass Instagram’s checkout limitations, sell through your Facebook News Feed, and make any live stream shoppable.
Bringing it together
Essentially, you have your e-commerce platform, you have your live shopping tech platform, and you have your influencers. You combine them all together with some careful coordination and BOOM — you have a live shopping strategy for your brand.
In conclusion
If you’re not doing livestreams right now, you should have started yesterday. And if you’re not doing live shopping already, it’s not too late to start today 😉
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or hit “reply” on this email to reach out to us. Otherwise, feel free to share this issue with your friends!
Thanks for reading!
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