Online live streams that allow consumers to interact with the brand and with each other promise a shopping experience that revolves not just around searching for products but instead on discovering products together with friends and family while getting all the advantages of online shopping.
“Live” news, “Live” concerts and “Live” sports get the top billing in the world of entertainment & news. Why? Is it the unpredictability of the result, first-hand access to information or simply the thrill of being part of the journey that adds so much value to live events? The correct answer is that it’s a mix of all the above factors. While entertainment, news, and sports have seen significant business models built around “live” events, commerce is where live events are still in their infancy in most countries. However, in the future, given the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones and the adoption of 5G data, “live” shopping is going to play a significant role in driving commerce in India.
In India, we have seen some video shopping models ranging from TV infomercials to video promotions on today’s social media. It is essential to understand that Livestream shopping is much more than one person simply displaying a product online. The easiest way to understand Livestream shopping is to break it down into its constituents – content, commerce, place of Livestream, target audience, and the interactivity framework. Different businesses with varying business models will adopt different combinations of the constituents. In an Indian context, social interactivity with entertainment will lend itself to creating a wide variety of Livestream models. Not only will online businesses adopt live stream shopping, but so will offline.
So, what does shopping in India entail? It’s important to realise that shopping in India is as much about buying products as it is about social interactions and entertainment. Indians like to shop in groups and view shopping as being much beyond just convenience. Given these social preferences, Livestream shopping and its many iterations allow consumers to have interactive and immersive experiences that imbibe the social and entertainment perspective.
So far, online commerce in India has primarily been search based and transactional. However, online live streams that allow consumers to interact with the brand and with each other promise a shopping experience that revolves not just around searching for products but instead on discovering products together with friends and family while getting all the advantages of online shopping.
Offline commerce, 90% of which is still unorganised, provides social interactivity but lacks the shopping experience, product quality and discovery that consumers today demand. Even organised offline commerce needs to evolve to keep consumers coming back in the face of increased competition from new models of commerce. Livestream shopping holds the potential to transform physical stores. In 10 years from now, a durable goods store or a retail store will be more like an amusement park with a string of livestreamers entertaining customers than the current format seen. The very definition of a store, visual merchandising, sales staff and shopping experience will transform. Thereby, Indian consumers will get access to commerce that also includes entertainment.
The question arises as to how might Livestream shopping evolve, especially in India? The answer lies in utilising concepts from other genres that have live events. For example, let’s take a live concert. Shopping experiences in the future may well revolve around a livestreamer entertaining consumers in a capacity that goes much beyond simply describing a product to a consumer. Entertaining the consumer and building a relationship with the consumer that goes beyond a transaction might be the most important in driving brand loyalty. “Breaking News” from live news channels would translate into the latest fashion reaching consumers live from a factory via a Livestream. Taking out ideas from playbooks of other ‘live” industries provides us with ways in which livestreaming may evolve in India in the years to come.
Livestream eCommerce has been surging dramatically in China. According to a recent news report, this industry is estimated to earn $60 billion annually. In 2019, about 37% of the online shoppers in China (265 million people) made Livestream purchases. On Taobao’s 2020 annual Single-Day Global Shopping Festival (November 11th), livestreams accounted for $6 billion in sales (twice the previous year’s amount) – numbers that provide proof of just how much value Livestream shopping can create.
In summary, Livestream shopping will have a significant role to play in Indian commerce. Given Indian shopping habits and broader trends, the ability for businesses to seamlessly embed live shopping into their stack to create value for their consumers will be a key differentiating factor.
Source: Business World
