Livestream Shopping: Your way to Retail Success
TechsPlace | Gone are the days when offline shopping was an outdoor affair and window shopping was every shopper’s regime. Consumers gradually shifted to online shopping with time. Although initially, it was a huge success, now every time a buyer wants to purchase a product online, a huge amount of time goes into it. Shoppers first read endless customer reviews and boring product descriptions to gather as much information about a product and then shop. This sounds like a tedious over-investing task!
Live Shopping – a new emerging trend has exponentially transformed the ways of shopping. It has overcome the challenges of traditional online shopping while offering an experience that replicates the in-store shopping experience.
What is Livestream Shopping?
Live Video Shopping is an interactive way to sell products, connect directly with shoppers, and gain potential customers, all in real-time. Livestream Shopping enables brands to respond to potential buyers exclusively in real-time. Businesses are thus effectively leveraging live commerce as a consumer engagement strategy by proffering their products in front of a huge online customer base.
Brick-and-mortar stores used to offer unmatched customer service. Buyers could touch and feel products, clarify their doubts and ask questions on the spot. Apart from this, representatives could offer tailored recommendations to buyers. However, local stores have limited reach, and consumers are becoming intimidated when visiting crowded places. The pandemic had a very impact on traditional brick and mortar stores and this pushed many retailers to think of other alternatives replicating the brick and mortar store experience.
With live-stream shopping, brands started tapping into the potential of live selling to enhance their online consumer engagement. Today live video shopping has become captivating for consumers as it breaks geographical limitations.
The goal of live video shopping is to deliver a physical store-like shopping experience exceeding geographical boundaries and improved customer experiences. Today’s shoppers prefer a brand that is transparent and authentic. Therefore, more and more brands are implementing live commerce and engaging their target customers better with their products and services.
Live commerce started in China and has already made more than 10% of the country’s E-commerce sales! The US and European markets are catching up fast, mainly due to high consumer adoption and familiarity with Livestream shopping platforms.
Channelize.io is leading the way in live online shopping that has proven to accelerate customer engagement and retention and increase conversion rates. Simply put, Channelize.io’s live shopping platform allows brands to catch up with customer expectations and enables brands to bring the in-store experience online through live video.
Why should your retail business adopt live streaming shopping?
Live online shopping is here to stay with shoppers still scared to go out and shop and online shopping experiences becoming monotonous and boring. Hence selling products live and directly to shoppers is an impactful way to engage and retain shoppers. It creates better loyalty, brand pull towards your products, and remains an effective tool to interact with your customers more often.
Consider complementing your live shopping strategy with influencer marketing. This will further help you grow your purpose.
Here are some of the reasons why, as sellers, you should opt for live online shopping for your retail business.
- Enhances product information for shoppers
- Connects better with shoppers
- Drives traffic to online stores
- Improves customer engagement and retention
- Improves brand image and awareness
- Builds brand loyalty and credibility
- Improves customer experience and ultimately leads to boost in sales
Here are some strategies that you can adopt to make your Livestream shopping shows successful
Show Customers Behind The Scenes
Taking customers behind the scenes will really help the trust that your buyers have for your brand as you are showing them things that other brands might keep a secret. Like for example, you can show them what happens during the production process of all your products.
Conduct Interviews and Q&A sessions
You can host live interviews or Q&As with your employees to give your customers a chance to meet people who work for you and who create their products.
Additionally, hosting a Q&A session gives you the chance to answer all of your shopper’s questions and queries in real-time even if they live in a different country to you.
Product demonstrations
During Livestream shopping, you can showcase your products and demonstrate their functioning. This gives the audience a clear insight into the working of a product which encourages them to shop.
Wrapping it up
In this new retailing environment, eCommerce brands are under pressure to digitally innovate to compete online. With the online shift expected to be permanent, the race is on for retailers to develop a commerce strategy and start exploring popular new channels, like live-streaming shopping.
This article is contributed by guest author on techsplace.com.