Building Community and Fostering Loyalty with Live Shopping

Our own research shows that 78% of global consumers say that the shopping experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Over half (55%) of Gen Zers and 62% of Millennials say they would buy directly from live videos when brands and creators launch new products.

We’ve recently wrapped up our Live Shopping Fridays program that brought more consumer awareness of the experience and encouraged brands to experiment with the format. Clearly there’s a growing demand for this new shopping experience, but what exactly is Live Shopping and what are best practices for brands to consider?

What is Live Shopping

It’s easy to think that Live Shopping is just reinventing home shopping, but Live Shopping is so much more than that. The heart of Live Shopping is the community that comes together around the event. Real-time interaction and conversation between host, viewers and within the audience fosters real community while providing a personal, engaging experience that wasn’t previously available with ecommerce.

Our vision for Live Shopping is founded on the following principles:

• Live Shopping should foster community and two-way communication between brands and their customers
  • We’ve seen the most successful brands use Live Shopping to cultivate an online community by encouraging viewers to ask and answer questions about sizing, fit and styling while presenting. Often a brand’s biggest fans can be as educated as experts, and Live Shopping should provide them a medium to share ideas in real time. Live Shopping is not presenting to viewers rather it's more like co-creating an experience with them. The best Live Shopping hosts take the time to engage with viewers in real time and actively encourage participation from the community and responding to comments.
• Live Shopping should be both educational and entertaining
  • While Live Shopping can be a compelling driver for sales it should first and foremost be viewed as an opportunity to build more authentic relationships between brands and customers. With Live Shopping, hosts have the ability to share their unique brand story, details behind a product’s creation and sourcing and answer questions from the audience. These educational insights have been missing from the traditional ecommerce experience and can be a compelling motivator to purchase. However, great Live Shopping streams aren’t just about driving a sale - they’re also entertaining pieces of content that can help bring a brand to life in new ways. For example, Petco hosted their first live doggie fashion show and used Live Shopping as an innovative way to introduce their customers to in-house brands Youly and Reddy.
• Live Shopping works best as a vehicle for new product releases, exclusives and themed collections
  • Live Shopping provides a limitless opportunity for brands to communicate their unique brand story in new and engaging ways. We’ve found that the most successful Live Shopping streams have a clear direction or call to action for viewers. Effective Live Shopping streams can introduce new products that have just arrived, provide a drop of exclusive inventory only available through the stream, exclusive pricing, limited-time offers or present a curated collection of products around a theme or seasonal moment.

With a better understanding of what Live Shopping is and our key principles, we can better offer guidance to brands that may want to experiment with the format.

How to Get Started

After seeing both small businesses and established brands leverage Live Shopping over the past year we’ve seen a few common best practices that drive success.

Plan

• Identify your host, expert or influencer that will be presenting during your Live Shopping stream and make sure they are educated on the products they are presenting and able to answer potential viewer questions.
• Make sure your shop’s catalog is updated with the products that you’d like to feature and create a playlist in Commerce Manager.
• Don’t forget to plan moments of community engagement throughout your stream. Script questions to ask your audience throughout your presentation and make sure you keep that conversation open.
• Have a clear point of view on what makes your brand or product unique. Live Shopping provides an opportunity to share more details about your brand’s history and approach to products, making sure you’re providing viewers with the context that could compel them to purchase.
• Create a sense of urgency, why should your customers tune into the video now and why should they purchase? Is there a limited amount of inventory? A new collection being introduced for the first time? An offer that you’re only providing now? Try to make sure that each Live Shopping stream has a compelling hook for customers to purchase.
• Ensure that your host can see viewer comments in real time and is prepared to answer any questions that may arise. Often brands will have a second content moderator on hand to reply to comments so that hosts can focus on driving the presentation.

Promote

• Create Events on your business Facebook Page for upcoming events to let shoppers know when you’ll be going live and what they can expect.
• Build a schedule of regular Live Shopping content so that consumers know when they should be tuning in. Plan to go live with consistency and create a schedule that is optimized for your shoppers. Some brands will go live Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon PT or 5PM PT to catch their customers when they have a break from work.
• Tease your Live Shopping event in the places where your customers are already active. Post in any fan Groups you may have, let fans know about upcoming streams on your Facebook Page, offer a behind the scenes preview through Instagram and use email newsletters to increase your audience.
• Use advertising to promote Live Shopping streams before and after your event. Live Shopping streams will live on as video on your Facebook Page after you complete your stream. Use advertising to boost awareness of your content as a follow up to going live.

Test and Learn

• Beyond educating your customers and providing an opportunity to drive sales, Live Shopping also can provide a useful mechanism to source valuable feedback on what products customers want more and less of. We’ve even seen brands use real time voting to inform what products they should create next and in what styles or colors. Use quantitative (sales) and qualitative (comments and engagement) feedback to guide inventory decisions and the content of future Live Shopping streams.
• Test a variety of times for Live Shopping events and hosts to learn what resonates most with your shoppers.
• Be patient with your shoppers as they become more familiar and confident with this new experience. Take the time to explain what you’ll be presenting, how they can engage with the host and what they should expect. Most importantly make sure you are educating shoppers on how they can check out and purchase with Live Shopping.

But what does a good Live Shopping experience really look like? Brands like Walmart, Petco, Sephora, Alleyoop and Zox are innovating with the experience and creating compelling content that is resonating with their customers. We expect Live Shopping to become even more popular in the United States this holiday season as we navigate economic recovery and customers continue to shop online. To get started with Live Shopping learn more here.