Livestream shopping is the next big trend in e-commerce. Much like back in the 90s when TV presenters would advertise a range of products ready for purchase, live streaming works in a similar way.
The host, typically an influencer or celebrity, highlights various products within the stream which viewers can purchase. Not only does it spark lots of online engagement, it also encourages real-time communication, which is highly appealing to today’s tech-savvy customers.
Livestream shopping is rapidly growing in popularity, with around 265 million Chinese shoppers making livestream purchases in 2019 alone. In addition to this, the livestream shopping market is expected to surpass a whopping $25 billion in the US by 2023.
Intrigued to know more, we caught up with Dan Conboy, CEO of Shopify experts Statement, who told us, “It’s a really interesting area because we´ve now seen influencers presenting products on social media networks which allow merchants to sell through those channels. So, you´ve got the authenticity and influencer connections in that community connected to ecommerce.”
With Livestream shopping taking the e-commerce market by storm, we wanted to delve a little deeper to explore how implementing this new feature can benefit brands today.
Brand Awareness
Creating partnerships with famous influencers and celebs means that you can quickly spread brand awareness. If you’re a small business looking to expand quickly, there’s no faster way to get everyone to know your brand than using an influencer to give you a shoutout to their loyal followers.
Fans hold trusted relationships with the influencers they follow, so any brand that they promote, they’re happy in the knowledge that they are high quality. In turn, this means you can spread your brand awareness to millions of people with one single shoutout on social media.
Boost Sales
Much like utilising influencers to promote your product, livestream commerce can instantly boost your sales. By partnering with an influencer or celeb on their social media, they can advertise your products on livestream, generating instant excitement from their followers tempting them to purchase the item. Because it’s live, this is sure to boost your sales instantly and significantly.
Engage Customers
Although online shopping has become widely popular in recent years, people still want the experience of in-store shopping. According to Google, nearly 80% of shoppers will go to the store when they have an item they want to purchase immediately.
Emotion plays an important role in shopping behaviour and there is a human side of in-store shopping that can’t be experienced during online shopping. Livestream commerce allows you to tap into this human interaction that shoppers actively seek out, creating a human-to-human level of engagement, just as in-store shopping does.
