The Live Shopping / Video Commerce Intersection

The hype around live shopping has been rising for years, but the potential has yet to be realized, at least in Western markets. Why?

There are numerous possible reasons to explain why it has exploded in some markets (Asia), seen modest traction in others (Europe), and has still not seen its potential anywhere near realized in others (North America).

Below we look at the intersection between live shopping + video commerce – specifically shoppable video – to try and discover what might help the overall market reach its potential in the West.

The Live Shopping Boom?

Way back when, HSN (Home Shopping Network) and QVC exploded into the homes of people across the USA and around the world via their cable TV networks. It was like eCommerce before the Internet.

As the rise of giants like eBay, Amazon, and Shopify began in the 2000s, the era of eCommerce kicked off; now, virtually anyone, anywhere can launch their own eCommerce store, with minimal costs and minimal technical inhibitions.

Around 2020-2021, during the ‘work-from-home’ era, everything D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) and eCommerce related took off. Stories out of China emerged, such as the “lipstick king,” who sold $1.7 Billion worth of lipstick in one live-shopping episode on Taobao on Single’s Day (equivalent of Black Friday).

Right around 2022, however, the real world reopened and pent-up demand for IRL experiences (including retail therapy and other similar indulgences) exploded, leaving those companies who had over-invested into eCommerce-only strategies in the lurch.

The beauty and power of in-store, in-person retail experiences revived the need for the physical world, and in subsequent years, much has been made about the potential of live shopping to thread that gap between physical retail and digital eCommerce.

Certain trends around live shopping, such as TikTok Shop, began to gain steam in the USA in the last 18 months. But these social commerce platforms work for certain types of brands, typically in categories such as beauty, who sell more impulsive, lower-priced goods like lipstick to younger generations.

But in no way has the expected ‘Live Shopping Boom’ commenced in the way many expected, which could be categorized as a QVC 2.0 type of trend, where the world’s most notorious and desired brands get into the action in the same way we have already seen in Asia.

The Benefits of Live Shopping for Brands

What makes live shopping so appealing for brands, on the surface, is the exponential upside it opens up.

While more modern day stories focus on the $Billions made in China by the lipstick king and other influencers, a multitude of now-famous entrepreneurs blew up their sales using platforms like HSN and QVC.

• one example is Sara Blakely and Spanx, a company that was valued at $1.2 Billion in 2021

• another more modern example is Beekman 1802, a ‘farm-to-skin’ skincare brand, which has appeared on both HSN and QVC starting around 2018, and is now worth $100s of Millions

Whether it was for power panties or goat-milk skin cream, it was more about the people and the strategies they deployed rather than the product.

Blakely was on QVC 6 – 12 times a month in the early days, and had previously spent 7 years selling fax machines. Ridge and Kilmer-Purcell (Beekman founders) went all in on live shopping, creating a set on their farm and pulling out all the stops to make it grow rapidly.

And that is perhaps where the disconnect is in the West. Brands and entrepreneurs alike see the hype and numbers out of Asia and other places, go themselves through all the motions of setting up live shopping infrastructure and producing content, and then get 15 viewers on the first episode!

From the outside, the benefits of nailing a live shopping strategy seem innumerable:

• 10X conversion rates (compared to traditional eCommerce)
• increased engagement, AOV (Average Order Value), and reviews
• decreased return rates and churn

But in practice, it is a marathon not a sprint. The results are almost never instant and far from guaranteed, a focused strategy and consistent cadence must be developed.

To build up towards the level of expertise and infrastructure required to scale-up live shopping to be a profitable channel requires energy, resources, and capital. Not that the capital required is intensive, but it’s not as simple as flicking on a camera and going live.

Nevertheless, it is the future. And that’s where the intersection of video commerce comes in.

Live Shopping Intersects with Video Commerce

Live shopping is a subset of video commerce, which includes shoppable video and 1:1 video shopping. For the purposes of this post, we focus on shoppable video.

Arguably what is holding live shopping back is a lack of distribution.

In the wave leading up to HSN going from essentially a ‘startup’ to a household name, they were aggressively acquiring cable networks. What is the equivalent of the cable networks in the modern era?

• retail media
• publishers
• connected tv

The combination of these emergent video-content channels can scale up distribution of ‘shoppable’ content via shoppable video.

What is the relationship between video commerce & live shopping specifically?

In the above referenced clip – Live Shopping Crash Course – Marcy McKenna discusses how a typical 30 mins live-streamed shopping video becomes a gold mine for content.

Yes, that content itself (either the whole clip or as a standalone set of multiple videos) can be shared across social, email, or advertising channels, but its true power can be harnessed via shoppable video on the PDPs of the products discussed and across the website.

The inverse also applies.

Starting off with shortened clips discussing various attributes or elements of products – as would typically be seen on social media – can become the ‘training ground’ for launching a full-on live shopping strategy.

Nowadays, there are multiple different types of platforms for live shopping, video commerce, and social commerce, with a degree of overlap between each one.

Shoppable Video

Shoppable Video is an in-frame, ‘popout’ video on a brand’s website that mimics the experience of something like TikTok Shop:

• Open the video from a PDP or Category page (typically)
• See the product card of the featured products(s) in the same frame
• Click ‘Buy Now’ and have it added to the cart of the brand’s site
• All without leaving the video frame on the brand’s website

There are multiple Shoppable Video platforms such as Firework, Bambuser, Videowise, and many more.

Pros & Cons

+ use existing content, get up and running without needing to produce live content

-need to drive traffic to your own site, doesn’t help with distribution

*Conversion rates on Shoppable Videos can generally be about 3X on PDPs vs. static pages

Live Shopping Marketplaces

Live Shopping (or selling) Marketplaces enable brands and entrepreneurs to distribute their live-streamed content across a marketplace of interested buyers.

These are meant to be the modernized versions of HSN or QVC, whereby the audience is built up and can purchase from within the ‘channel,’ or in this case platform:

• live stream via the platform, plus typically the ability to simulcast to other social platforms
• ability for customers to comment, engage, and buy right in the live feed
• platform indexes all live shopping shows for discoverability, builds consumer side of the marketplace for broader distribution

There are multiple Live Shopping Marketplaces such as TalkShopLive, MarketLive, YouTube Shopping and many more.

Pros & Cons

+ get in front of the camera, go live, and engage with the audience/customers in real-time

-even with a low-fi setup, producing live content takes a lot of work and may still not attract a large enough audience at the beginning for it to matter

As mentioned above, conversion rates can be upward of 10X traditional eCommerce pages

Intersection – Shoppable & Live Shopping

Beyond the above-mentioned categories and associated platforms, many of them have crossover capabilities (do both shoppable video and live shopping) and can be like a Swiss-army knife for anything related to video or live commerce.

That’s why it can become overwhelming. If we start from the basics of the content, and we assume that each brand has either one of:

• social media style, short videos (each of which can be automatically made shoppable) about various products, whether produced by the founders, staff, or influencers
• or a piece of long-term, livestreamed content about one or more hero products

Then the possibilities can look as follows; one can be used to form the other, and vice versa.

With this type of structure in place, it becomes much less daunting to get started in the Video or Live Commerce arena.

The content needs to be continually tested, refined, and ultimately spread across different marketing channels to truly find the sweet spot. The below diagram applies for shoppable video; livestream (+simulcasting) marketplaces can be added as additional outlets for distribution as well, as discussed above.

In the above-cited example with Beekman 1802 and how they became a ‘livestream shopping behemoth,’ the following anecdotes were noted about their live-streaming strategy:

• North Star Metric – Engagement (and sustain a viewership of at least 1,000 people)
• Time – 35 to 55 minutes, ideally in the evenings, weekends or the occasional lunch hour
• Influencers – used Influencers to promote the events on their social channels
• Social Media – drive traffic to the livestreams using social
• Email – send out an email 30 mins before the event to the customer database
• Subscribers – sent out an SMS to 3,000 subscribers
• Last 15 mins – the time when the majority of sales are expected to be made

In their case, the major lever of the strategy is livestreaming and driving viewers to that stream. They worked with partners such as QVC and HSN to reach larger audiences for broader distribution.

In the absence of those types of distribution partners – as would be the case for most brands – shoppable video in conjunction with other marketing channels can work to dramatically increase reach.

Thus, the tactics can evolve for each specific brand, based on their strategy, audience, preferred channels, budgets, etc. And the above-mentioned playbook is from a case study that is more than five years old, it is simply meant to illustrate the concepts.

Overall, with the current crop of tools and resources available, now may be the time that live shopping boom kicks off in North America. There are so many variables and unknowns to be able to truly predict what will mainstream it into households everywhere – á la QVC/HSN a few decades ago – but the seeds are in place now for this plant to blossom.