Are you a digital marketer looking to boost sales manifold without exhausting your marketing budget? Live stream shopping is an innovative digital marketing phenomenon making headlines. It is similar to conventional home shopping, where a host demonstrates how to use a product, promotes the product, and encourages people to buy it while sitting at home. Live stream shopping thrives on engagement, and as the name implies, it’s completely live!
In this Article:
🛍️ What is Live Stream Shopping?
Live stream shopping, also referred to as live commerce, is an online shopping format that allows viewers to buy products online while interacting with the host in real time. The difference between live stream shopping and traditional online shopping is that the former is live, unedited, and harnesses the power of real-time interaction between the host and the viewers. Potential customers simply tune in to the live show, ask questions or share comments, and review the product in real time. These live shows are usually streamed on famous live commerce platforms like Amazon and Taobao and social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
To make these live shows even more interesting, the hosts add promotions and giveaways, but they usually add a certain time constraint to generate FOMO. In this sense, live stream shopping becomes especially effective because of the sense of urgency it creates, emphasizing the scarcity or the limited availability of the products.
🛒 Why Live Stream Shopping?
Live stream shopping offers several benefits over traditional online shopping.
🔖 Engagement-Rich
Heightened engagement through personalized marketing is a key benefit offered by live stream shopping. Increasing sales is not always the objective of the brands; it’s the opportunity to connect with the customers and establish long-term relationships with them that matters. Live streams add the human touch to your products and offerings, help build trust, and establish a brand personality amongst your potential customers. This then enhances the credibility and authenticity of the brand.
🔖 Commercially-Viable
You can literally sell anything over live streams. From makeup items to apparel, furniture, houses, and even cars, live stream shopping can work like magic for all product categories.
🔖 Cost-Effective
It is also cost-effective. You don’t need heavy upfront investment to set up physical outlets or e-commerce stores to sell the products. Nor do you need to spend hefty bucks on marketing and advertising to promote the products. All you need is a camera (connected to a computer or your smartphone) and a live streaming platform to start selling online.
🔖 Quicker Conversions
Live stream shopping is largely engaging and entertaining. So, the viewers tend to stick and watch for a longer duration. This then accelerates the consumers’ decision-making journey from awareness to conversion.
🔖 Improved Discoverability
Live selling is one of the fastest and easiest ways to push website traffic and improve the brand’s discoverability. Whether you host a live stream shopping event on your own website or on a third-party live shopping patform like Amazon Live, you ultimately increase your web traffic.
🔖 Greater Brand Appeal
Live stream shopping augments brand appeal and enhances differentiation. Executed properly, live stream shopping can significantly increase the traffic to the website.
📢 What do you need for Live Stream Shopping?
🏷️ Product
First things first – decide which products you want to sell. If you’re a digital marketer, you’ll already have a portfolio of products to sell. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’ll want to promote and sell the products that’ll get you more commissions. And if you’re an individual content creator, you’ll sell the products that best resonate with your audience. From fashion items to home décor stuff, electronic gadgets, home furniture, and even expensive items like cars, live stream shopping can work for literally any product.
If you’re considering venturing into live stream sales but are unsure about sourcing products, Amazon merch on demand could be your ideal solution. Particularly beneficial for newcomers, this platform eliminates concerns about order shipping, handling, and even customer service as Amazon takes care of the entire process.
🏷️ Host
Anyone can host a live stream shopping show. But influencers and celebrities are generally good at doing so. The host should have a charismatic personality, be well-versed with the product attributes and functionalities, and be especially effective in selling the products. Anyone with the convincing power to encourage the viewers into impulsive buying can host the live stream shopping show.
🏷️ Content
Once you have the products sorted, you need to devise a content plan for how to feature these products and sell them live. How will you build excitement during the show? Perhaps through raffles and giveaways. How will you attract and retain viewership? Certainly, through promotional offers and building an urgency amongst the audience.
🏷️ Platform
Finally, you need a reliable live streaming platform that will allow you to live broadcast your shopping videos. OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution that allows you to broadcast real-time videos on multiple social media platforms and the web simultaneously. OneStream Studio has a built-in Live Shopping feature that allows you to showcase your products and sell them during live streams. You can add product tags, prices, images and videos, and even product links to redirect your viewers for direct purchasing. You can interact with your viewers through cross-platform Live Unified Chat and respond to all incoming messages using a single window.
👉 Tips for Live Stream Shopping
📌 Promote your live show; build hype before and after the show
📌 Engage with your audience; take questions and ask for suggestions
📌 Offer promotions and discounts; create urgency and FOMO
📌 Immerse your viewers; use image galleries, product specifications, and videos
📌 Emphasise your call-to-action; buy, buy, buy!
📌 Ask your viewers to like and share your live stream
📌 Highlight product features and functionalities; conduct live product demos
📌 Collaborate with influencers; encash their appeal
📌 Add an aspect of entertainment; run polls and host giveaways
Read More: Create Shoppable Live Stream on Amazon Live Creator with OneStream Live
🎯 How can OneStream help?
✅ Multistream on 45+ social media platforms simultaneously
✅ Embed your live selling shows on your website
✅ Create a personalized webpage for streaming your live sales videos
✅ Pre-record your live show and schedule your live streams
✅ Stream with multiple hosts
✅ Add creative overlays to increase the visual appeal
✅ Brand your live streams using logos, banners, and tickers
Live stream shopping is transforming the online shopping experience. It is also revolutionizing how brands engage with their customers. For Gen Zs and the millennials, live stream shopping is a given. And as Gen X embraces social media slowly and steadily, the potential users of live stream shopping is only bound to increase in the coming years. So while live stream shopping is relatively still in its infancy, the metrics all point in the same direction: up!
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OneStream Live is a cloud-based live streaming solution to create, schedule, and multistream professional-looking live streams across 45+ social media platforms and the web simultaneously. For content-related queries and feedback, write to us at [email protected]. You’re also welcome to Write for Us!
