prabhu
Online video and online shopping don’t tend to mesh overly well beyond adverts or trailers. Some businesses have been creative with the likes of tutorial videos for their products online, particularly when it comes to DIY products, but generally, video isn’t used much to sell online. Now, however, a bubbling trend could change all of that.
Stats from several platforms are indicating that live video is becoming a very real point of sales for a growing crowd of online sellers. Whether it’s more casual showings or professional-tier shows, as we’ve seen in China on platforms like Taobao, live shopping is proving to be engaging and a good way of converting online viewers into online buyers.
Building on the Mass Live Streaming Adoption
To the chagrin of many a retail analyst, live shopping hasn’t yet become mainstream in Western countries. It’s been a multi-billion platform in China and pockets of East Asia for many years. Yet, live streaming is tremendously popular in the UK. According to YouGov stats, 51 per cent of British adults have watched a live stream, with Facebook Live being the most popular go-to platform.
Facebook Live is particularly popular with 45-to-54-year-olds, and then, there are the dedicated live streaming platforms that continue to be a go-to source for entertainment in the UK. These platforms have helped to normalise live streaming as a method of online engagement, even encouraging goliaths like Netflix to spend inordinate sums of money to tap into going live.
As with Netflix, such trends of live streaming engagement have had other entertainment platforms embrace the tech to create new products that tap into this trend. In one of the more novel deployments, UK bingo has now gone live. Each day, there are scheduled live bingo shows for people across the country to tune into and enjoy. In these, everyone plays the game being live-streamed in real time, just like in the platform’s live casino games like Sakura Fortune Live.
Ushering the Next Phase of eCommerce
With total retail sales in the UK sitting at around £480 billion, already around 27 per cent take place online. British shoppers are very accustomed to placing their orders online and waiting a few days to get the goods. Now, bubbling away as a niche for now, live commerce is offering an even more engaging and entertaining approach to buying products online.
According to the figures from a popular live shopping platform, which has seen a 180% year-on-year rise in live revenue, the next big step towards even more growth for live-stream-powered shopping is discovery eCommerce. Key to this will be the For You Page (FYP). The platform hopes that the FYP scroll for everyone will become more and more like a personalised shopping aisle, giving users swift access to the products that they’re not only proven to be interested in, but might be happy to discover.
Live streaming and eCommerce are tremendously popular in the UK, and the next step looks to be live shopping. Right now, there are a couple of potential winners in this race, with one leveraging a personalised scroll on an immensely popular social platform to steer even more to live shopping. In the coming years, we’ll see if live shopping can truly take off and go mainstream in the UK.
