When eCommerce and Social Media collide
E-commerce has grown rapidly as a fast and convenient purchasing method, but lack of human touch and personalized experience discourages sometimes brands from selling products online. Though pandemic and post-pandemic life continues to accelerate the rise of the digital economy. Due to reductions of offline touchpoints and disruptions to the regular customer journey, social & live shopping has become the long-anticipated solution for brands to fill in this missing gap between online and physical store and humanize digital interactions. Social & live shopping technology has combined the best of the worlds (online shopping & social media) and established itself as one of the key pillars which has been transforming the retail industry. Live Shopping goes global Live streaming is growing globally as a key aspect of e-commerce, where consumers can participate in testing, learning and shopping experience in a way that regular e-commerce doesn’t have the capacity for. It has already proved to be one of the major sales channels in China where live streaming platform Taobao reached 800 million active users by mid 2020. Even though live shopping is still at the early stage of development in Western countries, this sales channel has a long-term potential for the brand and e-commerce platforms. Following success in China, retail brands such as Douglas, Tommy Hilfiger, Louis Vuitton, L’Oreal, Swarovski and many others have piloted their livestreams and some of them have already reported a boost in conversion rate, higher AOV and attraction of million of users at one show.
Our 30 second introduction:
"This technology provides a bridge between e-commerce and social media via video livestreaming. Social & live shopping gives sellers an opportunity to market their products online and customers to enjoy the convenience of online shopping and interact directly with the sellers. As a result, retailers can offer comfort of a personalized experience of online shopping and have a chance to boost the product sales exponentially."
Immersive Storytelling
Most brands have established their online stores just for purchase purposes. It is assumed that awareness and consideration stages are organized somewhere else: social media, third party web page, brick and mortar etc. In post-pandemic life sellers on the internet need to start taking more responsibility for end-to-end relationships with consumers. Through live streaming retailers can tell immersive stories which consumers can emotionally connect with by focusing not only on products but also on brand’s values, interests and culture.
Live streaming can enable e-commerce to become an entertainment destination which will evoke all the emotions that come along with watching a live show: surprise, excitement and anticipation.
Flexibility and Mobility
There is a variety of the livestreaming solutions which support any type of devices (mobile/web), product, business purposes, commission or target audience. The choices are limitless. The key technology choice is which platform or marketplace to use for streaming and providing e-commerce functionality.
As in e-commerce, effective tracking allows to analyze an impact of livestream event and react quickly on the incoming customer data. The operating model of the livestreaming is highly flexible, so it is easy and cost efficient to readjust the content to some other forms (blog, manuscript) or transfer it to other social media channels. While traditional content production requires a set of programs & hardware, livestreaming can be available immediately. All one needs is a right platform, laptop or phone.
Reinforce Brick and Mortar
Besides obvious advantages to the e-commerce, livestream shopping can be also a great tool to reinforce a memorable shopping experience and showcase the best aspects of the products presented inside of the store. Livestreaming can be useful to reaching consumers with a different variety of interests and ensuring that each item is valued correctly. It can act not as end all solution but also as a companion to the physical store by engaging and attracting new domestic audience, promoting new services and connecting with the staff members on a more personal level.
The overall Benefits
Attracting traffic to the store
Promoting services or experiential areas
Possibility to reach new audience
Boosting sales
Analytics tracking
Create a human connection Future Potential
Leveraging data automation for personalization
Extended reality (XR) and machine learning to transform end-user experience
Gamification & Interactivity
What´s next? We will continue to expand on all of the elements discussed here in more detail, as part of our new Digital Retail series. Stay tuned for more insights into our experiences around the future of retail.