With majority of global shoppers wanting their brands to become more digitally innovative, live commerce is used by 78% of businesses for building stronger connections with their audience. Brands that have adopted livestream selling have seen a 30% increase in their conversion rates. This is ten times higher than conventional eCommerce results. Meanwhile, another study reports that selling of luxury goods via livestream produced conversation rates of 70%. 

Benefits of Live Shopping

Here are some of the key advantages that live commerce brings.

Better Engagement

Making your content stand out can be challenging. Your customers are constantly bombarded with ads. Brands have to keep their audience engaged, keeping in mind their dwindling attention spans and higher demand for personalized experiences.  Video content definitely has higher engagement rates than most mediums of content—people are twice as likely to share video content with their friends than any other type of content. Live shopping also enables users to chat with you in real time. These factors have to be considered if you want higher engagement rates that will result in more sales.

Rapid sales increase

A live shopping event done well can expose your product and brand to a multitude of people in just a few minutes. And when your viewers are enjoying what they see, they are most likely to invite others to join in.  In 2020, a celebrity jeweler was able to sell $120,000 worth of gold-colored vacuum sealers in five seconds while on the video shopping platform NTWRK. It’s clearly proof of the powers of live retailing. So, if you do your live shopping right, the rewards will be bountiful.

Heightened brand awareness 

You need to get in front of your target audience if you want to build brand awareness effectively. This is exactly what live shopping networks are good for, quite literally. Your audience will likely remember you if they get to know you via the interactive nature of live streams. If you want to make things even better, have an influencer or a celebrity host your live shopping event. This can help make your business popular among customers and improve your brand recall.

Prompt for impulse buying

Getting customers to purchase something out of impulse is good for business. In order to make this happen, you need to fully immerse them into a digital shopping experience. Live shopping helps in triggering this need. The audience will see any others on the live broadcast buying a product. The need is intensified if said product is only discounted until the live event lasts. And if the person promoting it is someone they look up to, then you have a sure sale on your hands.

Live shopping grew exponentially in 2022 and gave birth to trends that businesses should work on to achieve all the way to 2023. Here are the current trends that can give you a clearer idea of what’s ahead in live commerce.

One-to-one Shopping Experiences

If streaming and selling to a broad is not aligned with your brand, you can explore one-to-one live shopping, where each consumer is directly connected with a product-matched specialist. They will get to have personalized consultations and talk to an in-store specialist who can focus on them. This works best for selling luxury items or purchases that require more consideration. It also presents an easier opportunity to upsell. This is fairly easy to set up and sellers will be able to track customer satisfaction easily. It’s cheaper to run too, especially in cases where other streams are making use of influencers. One-to-one live shopping became more popular during the pandemic, which is not surprising, since consumers were looking for new ways to shop.  Its popularity still continues because consumers have come to love the flexibility. They no longer have to drive to physical store locations or turn the internet upside down to find their products. They can just connect right away with experts who know the products well and are trained specifically to sell them.

Influencer Marketing

Using influencer in live streams initially started out and became popular in Asia. Streams from the famous “Singles Day” in China were hosted by household names such as Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift. The results were record-breaking—Kim sold 150,000 perfumes in the first nine minutes of the stream. Eventually, live streams featuring influencers also became popular elsewhere. For example, Shopify’s recent collaboration with TikTok enabled users to purchase items featured in livestreams, as well as engage with others in a live chat. They can also interact with their hosts in real-time. Influencer marketing is successful in live shopping because it creates a genuine connection between the host and the consumer. 

Product Launches

Live shopping is also a memorable and engaging way to launch a product or campaign. Introducing a product through a livestream is effective in creating a buzz and tracking your engagement. It also presents an opportunity to maximize influencer marketing. 

Omnichannel Retailing

Omnichannel retailing is a multichannel sales approach that focuses on creating a seamless customer experience, whether the customer is shopping at a physical store or through a mobile device or computer.  This helps establish a unified experience that connects the physical and the digital, which is what live commerce is essentially - the merging of physical and digital simultaneously. In this, retailers have to ensure that customers will get the same amount of engagement and attentiveness when shopping digitally, just like the ones they would get when visiting a physical store. The omnichannel strategy was a result of the forced closures of stores during the pandemic. And even now that we are gradually emerging from it, consumer behaviors and preferences have changed. This is why retailers must aim to maximize the value of each store visit when consumers do opt to do their shopping in-store.

AR and VR Shopping

The augmented reality and virtual reality market has already made its presence felt. It garnered $28 billion in 2021 and is expected to make more than $450 billion by 2030. Retailers such as Ray-Ban, Macy’s, and Sephora, have already adopted AR/VR into their retail strategy. Recently, Sephora came up with a “Virtual Artist” feature that made use of AR to provide consumers “virtual makeovers.” Huge spending potential is a result of the intersection of live commerce with AR/VR. Shopify stated that adding video can help increase conversion rates by over 60% compared to buyers interacting with just images. Brands that added 3D content to their stores also expect an average of 94% conversion rate increase. Both AR and VR can take live shopping to the next level. There are key differences that should be kept in mind, however. While AR extends the user’s surroundings by putting in digital elements to a live view (using a smartphone camera), VR is a more immersive experience since it replaces a real-life environment with a simulated version. In this regard, AR is arguably one step ahead of VR since it provides customers with a physical, real-world environment. Here, they can see both the real world and virtual objects. This would be useful if a customer shopping on a furniture website wants to see what a sofa would look like in their home or office. There are retailers who have live commerce solutions that can connect their customers to an in-store advisor via video. The advisor can help them see the sofa displayed in real-time. AR/VR can help reduce friction in the customer’s journey. And because the customer can visualize the product before making the purchase, it increases their confidence in the store. The technologies bridge the gap between physical stores and online shopping.

Intersection With Social Commerce 

Social commerce is expected to grow three times faster than traditional commerce globally. It’s predicted to reach a massive $1.2 trillion by 2025. 62% of this growth will be driven by millennials. With the younger generation of consumers gravitating towards shopping on social apps, platforms are already working on integrating live shopping into their strategy. This was started by Chinese apps like Taobao, which earned over $400 billion in sales from live video streaming in 2021. However, apps like Instagram and TikTok are catching up quickly. Not only is TikTok heavy on influencer marketing for its live feature, it also partnered with popular retailers for streams. In 2020, TikTok collaborated with Walmart for an hour-long holiday shop-along. This event helped increase Walmart’s follower base by 25%. Shopping on social channels unifies and adds value to the live commerce experience. Consumers don’t have to leave their favorite apps to go shopping and can just add items to the basket as they watch.

Convenience Shopping

Convenience shopping is another significant trend in live commerce. It combines the excitement of physical shopping with the convenience of online commerce. As a result of the pandemic, many traditional stores got creative and transformed their retail spaces into distribution hubs or concept stores. This makes it more convenient for customers to discover new products and brands. They can watch live streams to research about the products in real-time, engage with the larger community, and complete the purchase right from the live stream itself. In this regard, live shopping is upgrading the quality of customer experience, satisfaction, and education for brands. This helps build trust with the audience and establish ever-lasting relationships with them.

Voice of Customer Solutions

Integration of a voice of customer (VoC) solution allows brands to collect customer feedback in a timely manner. This provides insight into their needs, expectations, experiences, as well as pain points in this continuously evolving marketplace. Brands can include VoC as part of their live shopping experiences by deploying surveys on their website or post-purchase via email, SMS, or even bot. These methods enable ecommerce professionals to gather targeted insights to help them adjust their strategies to improve shopping experiences and help boost their conversion rates.

Final Thoughts

What makes live shopping click is the dose of personal touch and human connection it brings to digital commerce, which were  missing in traditional online shopping. Live shopping is more than just a trend—it’s a win-win strategy that benefits both retailers and customers. 

Marketing automation AI Enhanced shipping options Augmented reality for product visualization  Voice search