Livestreaming might be gaining momentum this year, given the surge in digitally enabled commerce once Covid-19 shut down stores. One estimate from Coresight Research expects the livestreaming e-commerce market to reach $25 billion in the U.S. by 2023, even as China continues devouring video commerce content.
In the past year alone, China’s livestreaming e-commerce market nearly doubled from $63 billion to $125 billion across major platforms, according to Coresight founder and CEO Deborah Weinswig.
The potential of livestreaming may actually make the most sense for retailers with large brick-and-mortar presences. These merchants might want to leverage livestreaming technology to improve areas that are failing within the physical space, according to Jeffrey Rayport, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
“Retailers who own a lot of bricks-and-mortar have to figure out a way to get a return on those existing assets,” Rayport said during a webinar Wednesday. “One way of doing it is to identify the very small percentage of people on the floors of mall stores, department stores and big boxes who actually are capable of selling items in a compelling way on platforms like brands.”
Sheri Hensley, co-founder of women’s apparel seller Pink Coconut Boutique with her husband Mic Hensley, said in the webinar that the company’s livestreaming channel has been so successful that one live show can generate more sales than its one brick-and-mortar store in Olive Branch, Miss., could bring in throughout a whole month.
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“The thing about the live videos, is that we’re going to our vendors and we have open access to all their inventory,” Hensley said. “I will go live tonight [Sept. 30] with 115 items and this is probably worth $500,000 or more right here if we were to sell it all, of course.”
The retailer employs two different fit models to show off the apparel during the streams, which are hosted on its mobile app, Instagram and Facebook. Hensley actually served as the model for the boutique’s inaugural livestream in a private Facebook group in 2017, as the company started familiarizing itself with the medium.
Hensley noted that the success of the platform is leading the company to start selling men’s clothes.
Pink Coconut Boutique leverages CommentSold, a digital commerce solution provider that offers social selling and live selling platforms to SMBs, to empower these livestreaming capabilities.
CommentSold CEO Brandon Kruse started the company after his wife, Amanda, had more success scaling her newly opened women’s apparel e-commerce business through Facebook than she did through other online platforms.
“She really put herself in this community of affiliate people that she was curating product,” Kruse said. “These people started looking to her for advice and consumer her content on a daily basis. They were watching her stories and they were watching her videos and publishing every day. They were just one- or two-minute videos about products and…where you might wear them and the business started growing very rapidly.”
Within the first three months, Amanda’s clothing business generated approximately $30,000 in sales. With Facebook Live launching just around that time and with more retailers experimenting with the video feature, Kruse was inspired to build a platform that could make the process easier so that buying from livestreams didn’t rely solely on comments or likes.
Rayport noted that the growing popularity of livestreaming in the U.S. is the direct result of the confluence of two trends: the rapid growth of e-commerce and social media.
“The simple way of saying this is that ‘Old habits die hard,’ but my current theory of what’s going on is that new habits die hard, meaning the changes in online retail behavior among consumers and changes in usage of social and digital media platforms by consumers, are now coming together to create something quite extraordinary,” Rayport said. “I think what we’re discovering is that the collision of these two trends of retail and social—what we’re coming out with in terms of the ‘new normal’ for e-commerce could potentially look dramatically different than the version of e-commerce coming into it.”
Rayport noted that livestreaming’s intersection of e-commerce and social interaction is much more compelling than the typical e-commerce purchases in that it brings back the traditional “town square” shopping feel that makes online retail intimate for consumers.
“If QVC was a broadcast model, livestreaming is very much an interaction model,” Rayport said. “The interaction model means that I’m not just enjoying getting to know a host, I’m actually kind of joining a family. Hence, my willingness if I’ve had a good experience buying three things to start to see the owner as a friend. We’re talking about an enormously powerful dynamic.”
Hensley seconded the community aspect as the chief reason shoppers keep coming back to the livestreams, even if they’re not buying anything.
“We have women in the group that show up for every live video—and we use terminology like ‘butter’ for a certain fabric on top,” said Hensley. “So a couple of the women play a drinking game where they agree to take a shot every time we say ‘butter.’ It’s hilarious. The other night, one of our models was out at a restaurant and two husbands walked up and introduced themselves because the wives were scared to, and said, ‘We’re now competing with Netflix because you’re better than anything going on Netflix. My wife won’t watch anything with me on Netflix and now she’s got me watching Mic and Sheri.’”
CommentSold sees significant client, spending growth throughout 2020
Since the beginning of the year, CommentSold has seen a 270 percent increase in the number of retailers using its platform to sell via livestream and a 50 percent increase in spend per viewer.
CommenSold’s recent innovations might have something to do with that growth. CommentSold-powered apps allow retailers to concurrently livestream sales on their own app, their Facebook page and their Facebook group, as well as curate and recommend complementary products, send push notifications to shoppers and prerecord videos for product demonstrations.
“Imagine you’re looking at a comment box and you’re seeing comments come in from multiple different platforms, whether your own mobile app or your Facebook or the website where they may be watching live,” Kruse said. “We’re actually changing and highlighting those comments differently based on the value of the customer. So for example, if Jeffrey wants to jump on Sheri’s livestream today, it would show up that Jeffrey is a new customer. This is the first time he’s ever watched and he would likely get a shout-out even though there’s 2,000 people watching, which I think is the first step in building that bond of the recurrence of watching livestreams every day and buying into it.”
CommentSold recently launched Live Replay within its mobile app, giving retailers a means to generate additional revenues by making their previous livestream videos available to shoppers on demand. It also expanded its platform by launching branded mobile apps for all eligible merchant customers.
With Live Replay, previously recorded live sales appear like story cards at the top of a retailer’s CommentSold-powered app. Shoppers can scroll through and tap to view and shop any previously recorded livestreams.