What is Live Streaming E-Commerce?
Live Streaming E-commerce is promoting and selling products or services through influencer live streams on their own social media channels. Influencers can choose to live stream from the comforts of their homes or shopping malls.
Its also filling the void in the social aspect of online shopping where sellers can bring the shopping experience to life and increase interaction between themselves and consumers.
For marketers and businesses, Live Stream E-Commerce is like infomercials or home shopping network (HSN) without the hefty TV airtime and production costs.
What data is available to show Live Streaming E-Commerce is growing?
In Nov 2019, Alibaba announced a 20 Billion-yuan sale from its live-streaming commerce platform Taobao Live during the Single's day Shopping Festival.
Live Streaming E-Commerce did ~$6 Billion in Sales during the 2020 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.
China is leading the way in Live Streaming E-Commerce with $30 Billion in 2016 and expected to reach $70 Billion by 2021.
Jaiqi Li, One of China's most popular Live-stream E-commerce influencers doing a product demo. Photo Credit - Forbes.
The Live Streaming E-Commerce industry is expected to be valued at $184.27 Billion by 2027 (Tech Jury, 2020)
Millennials are the largest group of consumers of live content, 63% of people ages 18-34 are watching live-streaming content regularly (Neil Patel, 2018)
Companies that use video features grow revenue 49 percent faster than non-video users. (Wordstream, 2020)
Live stream watch time has increased by 250%. (Think with Google, 2020)
Why is Live Streaming E-Commerce growing?
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, millions of consumers were confined to their homes making e-commerce more popular than ever.
Between January and August 2020, the number of live-streamed events hosted increased by 1468% (Uscreen, 2020)
To compensate for business losses, businesses got creative using the latest technologies like live-streaming, augmented reality (AR), hyper-personalization, etc to promote their products/services to their customers.
Live streaming commerce shortens the traditional supply chain, reducing the required steps and time of a product to reach consumers from the manufacturer.
Compared to traditional e-commerce, live-streaming commerce has low return rates as consumers are better informed and can ask questions and make specific questions to learn the products.
For consumers, this helps avoid wrong expectations regarding products because of misleading images or ambiguous descriptions.
For businesses, lower return rates can save costs significantly on after-sales services, logistics, and storage.
How can someone take part in Live Streaming E-Commerce growth?
If you sell on Amazon, you can use recently launched Amazon Live and expect to:
Drive awareness and consideration of your product
Educate shoppers
Connect with shoppers in real-time
Purchases are seamless with one-click so viewers never have to leave the show.
Though the US is yet to catch up on the number of platforms available (like in China) to businesses, someone can use social media Live platforms like Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, etc to connect with their consumers.
But as data is showing live- streaming e-commerce is definitely here to stay.
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