What is live shopping
Live shopping is a streamed event where an influencer, ambassador or spokesperson reviews and talks about a brand’s products in front of live viewers, also known as One-to-many live streaming. This type of advertising strategy is massively popular in the APAC market and has started to gain traction and interest globally.
A live shopping event can take many different forms, but it’s most commonly used to engage with customers on specific products - answering their questions, trying out the products live and giving the audience a personal shopping experience.
The events can be scheduled and hosted by the brand themselves or managed by an influencer as user generated content. The goal of live shopping is to generate viewership, review products and engage with customers to generate brand awareness and influence sales of said products.
Some live stream solutions providers can also create uniquely displayed content, specific for the influencer hosting the live stream event. This further creates a sense of personalization for the customers that have navigated to the brand’s site from a specific influencer or ambassador that they follow.
Other terms associated with live shopping:
Live commerce
Live stream shopping
Live video shopping
The purpose of live shopping solution
At its core, live shopping is a channel dedicated to discovery and conversion acceleration. Prospective customers can see the product in real-time and engage with the host by asking questions, leaving comments, liking, sharing and interacting with a brand in a more personal manner than ever before.
On a deeper level, live shopping is widely recognized for boosting consumer loyalty and enriching the brand’s digital experience. Many brands integrate their in-store experiences into live streaming, making it a key component of their broader brand strategy.
In the typical marketing funnel, generating awareness and then moving the customer through to consideration and purchase often takes a lot of marketing spend across various channels to achieve. Live shopping is aimed at compressing the funnel for more engaged customers to drive purchases with fewer touchpoints and spend. Brands that use this solution often decrease the number of touchpoints to convert a customer by half.
The solution is also an exceptional way to generate new content by repurposing the live stream across the other channels brands use. Short form content can be shared across social channels, full product reviews can be added to PDP (product detail pages), while influencers and ambassadors are able to promote brands they partner with on a deeper level via the affiliate channel.
Using live streaming within the affiliate channel not only helps reduce the risk of investment through the CPA commercial model, but it could also be the key to unlocking scalability. Brands can expand their success by tapping into an ecosystem of influencer partners and influencer subnetworks, allowing for broader reach and impact.
Additional examples of live shopping campaigns:
Hand raiser events
Product launches
Live Q&As
Classes and educational events
Invite-only private shopping events
Scheduled events
Live stream subscription
Organic placements and shared links
How does this solution work and what information does it leverage
This solution uses JavaScript tags to enable the live shopping video on the advertiser’s website. The tag is used on the brand website to allow the solution to be hosted by the brand on their own domain, included as new page element. The tags can be deployed as a plugin through a brand’s existing Awin MasterTag. This functionality allows brands to deploy solutions without needing to involve their internal technical teams, saving time and resources.
The Awin Advertiser MasterTag should be unconditionally appended to every page on the site, including the confirmation page, but excluding any page that displays or processes payment information. Once deployed through the MasterTag, the live shopping partner will have access to the needed website data to properly load their script and deploy campaigns on the brand’s behalf.
Common data points used by live shopping technologies include:
User engagement including time spent, page views and interactions
Website URL
User source
Benefits of using this solution
Higher brand engagement and loyalty.
Increased views, site visits and social interactions.
Deeper partnerships with influencers and ambassadors.
Full funnel enhancement, driving additional traffic, enhancing the shopping journey for those leads, and enhancing sales volume.
More transparent influencer partnerships by turning social viewers into tracking buyers while they are watching the live stream.
Empowering influencers with an extended lifecycle, enhanced narrative, and better product offering.
The livestream subscription model enables incremental growth over time.
Risk-free collaboration on a CPA basis via Awin influencer network or fully managed via Awin influencer subnetworks.
Examples of the solution in action
Previously live - Beauty event
Previously live - Fashion event