Live Shopping Is On The Horizon, Are You Ready?
The next major frontier in eCommerce is Live Shopping. Not thinking about this? Here are the stakes.
There is projected to be a $100B+ Live Shopping business in Asia - in 2020. Yes, this year. Over 1,000 brands in 11.11 last year participated in Live Shopping events. (Rockwater)
In the US, there is nothing like it. Here are the players.
Facebook has announced a major push into Live Shopping by expanding its Instagram and Facebook Checkout features to support live video streaming. They seem the most poised to replicate the success of Alibaba because of Instagram. What they lack has been reliable eCommerce. That's changing - quickly.
Amazon. Of course they will go it alone. Still seems like a side project.
YouTube and Shopify. There are now rumors that Shopify will be teaming up with YouTube to beta test live streaming. Instead of developing its own eCommerce checkout, Google appears to be going the partner route. This is likely part of a much larger roadmap between Google and Shopify that started with Shop Pay integration.
YouTube is a monster and has become synonymous with TV. There is a lot of potential here if done right. Also a lot of potential to not produce much if there isn't great collaboration between the parties.
Andy Row (and others!) posed a question about how new this idea really is: “What is the difference between this and what QVC already does? I can already log into my QVC app and watch what is being sold live on air at that moment. Is this really something new or is it something the platforms are simply copying and rebranding?” The concepts are all the same, but to put it in a true marketplace format is a tremendous difference in scale and potential. QVC is an $11B business total. Last year Alibaba did $63B in live shopping business alone, all online. So there's that.
Andy then asked “Is there an opportunity for Qurate, parent of QVC, HSN, etc, to provide the expertise/ backbone for this initiative?” In theory yes but the problem is scale. Each of the marketplace is going to want to own the infrastructure. Google is looking to team up with Shopify - and may take a partner-agnostic approach. That leaves Qurate on the outside looking into this. They are a content provider, they should take advantage of all these platforms too. For them to be an infrastructure provider is difficult because then you need to have similar compute capacity to FB/Amazon/Google. Not simple.
Simon Assor noted that “Amazon does live streaming black Friday and cyber Monday maybe even prime day as well. They even feature it at the top of the deals page. They have been doing this the last 3 years…it's definitely under the radar for now but it is featured on the most popular shopping days. I believe I've seen livestream featured on the homepage at times. Amazon likes to ease in significant changes. I'm sure they have plenty of data from the last few years of holiday livestreaming. The most important factor is featuring the right products, not every product is made for livestreaming.”
Ricardo Belmar added “It's shocking that live streaming isn't getting more attention in North America. [It’s huge in China and other countries] Small business retailers discovered during the lockdown stages of the pandemic that they could use live streaming and 1:1 video-based selling to keep customer relationships and sales going. It's only a matter of time before bigger brands figure out the best way to implement this.”
Marie-Axelle Loustalot-Forest agrees that this is likely to grow: “Live Shopping will be huge. Especially as we can not or do not want to go to physical stores. The staging opportunities are huge!”
And Victor Castro had so much to say, he wrote his own post on the topic :)
