Livestream shopping is exactly what it sounds like. An influencer, celebrity, or host is paid to live stream their experience in a store to promote the company’s products through a live video. It is like home shopping TV shows from the past where the host would demonstrate the product, think Shamwow, but it is completely live. Because of this, the audience can interact with the host in real-time and these potential customers can ask questions, or comment on the product at hand. From there, the customer can shop directly on the website being live-streamed from.
Livestream shopping was first popularized in China and was a huge success as this country has the largest e-commerce customer base. To make things more interesting, promotions and giveaways are offered to the viewers too. This opens up a wide variety of possibilities for marketing and partnerships by companies to join in and promote their products. Obviously, Livestream shopping would also boost the given companies’ sales, as in China, the most popular Livestream shopping host racked up an incredible 37 million viewers at once. The first 30 minutes of Alibaba’s Singles Day pre-sale in 2020 generated a whopping $7.5 billion in transaction value during the live stream hosted on Taobao Live.
Now, Twitter has joined the craze and Walmart will be its first retailer to test out the new feature. Walmart has been hosting Livestream shopping events across many social media platforms like TikTok and Youtube and will appear on Twitter’s first Livestream shopping experience. As stated previously, this is Walmarts opportunity to promote a “Cyber Deals” event hosted by none other than Jason Derulo. Like any other host, he will introduce the audience of millions to different products, how they work, and show them off in the process. So customers will be able to directly shop from Twitter with products shown during the stream hung up on a banner for easy access. Walmart has surprise guests joining the event to garner even more attention. Walmart has already hosted more than 15 live streams across different platforms and is eager to perform on Twitter this time around.
From a business perspective, this event will help Twitter realize the demand for shopping on Twitter. As the company launched the Shop Module in July, which allowed brands, businesses, and retailers to showcase their products directly from their Twitter profiles like a marketplace. Furthermore, the whole idea of bringing the shopping experience to the customer was one of the driving factors of online shopping success. Livestream shopping takes this a step further by making the whole process an interactive experience while grabbing incredible deals. By combining entertainment with seamless shopping, it is no wonder Livestream shopping has already been a hit and will continue to grow with the onboarding of large tech companies such as Twitter. Livestream shopping can be as complicated or as simple to set up too, a company could pour money in to gather celebrities and run large promotions. Or, it could be a smaller content creator simply shopping with its fanbase. As a business model, the possibilities are endless. And I would like to mention that a recent Livestream shopping event hosted by Walmart on the Meta platform called “Joy. Fully” incorporated technology you could not believe. By using an AR lens, viewers would ultimately pick products that “spark joy” for them by tracking their facial expressions. I believe Livestream shopping will continue to grow rapidly. As the combination of entertainment and shopping and the fact that these can be hosted by macro or micro-celebrities makes it an incredibly versatile business model that will continue to generate revenue and create partnerships across mega brands.
Sources: https://influencermarketinghub.com/glossary/livestream-shopping/
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