Each of us loves to buy useful things for home, leisure, and so on, and with the development of technology, we can now shop without even leaving home. The e-commerce market is growing tremendously, making it increasingly difficult for companies to retain customers' attention. That's why business owners often need to use additional solutions to boost their sales. Today, we will talk about live streams that can help your online store increase the flow of customers and, therefore, profit.

What Is Live Commerce?

Live commerce lies in combining streams on live streaming platforms and online shopping. Thus, people who watch the stream can purchase the product they like with one click or tap on the screen. The main feature of live commerce is interaction with viewers; they can communicate, ask questions, send requests in real time, and buy online simultaneously.

According to statistics, the live commerce market was estimated to be about $31.7 billion in 2023 and will reach $55 billion by 2026. In addition, in the United States, about 46% of consumers have made purchases through live streams and are ready to continue purchasing goods this way.

Live commerce is a continuation of teleshopping, but, at the same time, it gives businesses much more opportunities. For example, with live selling, you can:

  • advertise your product;
  • add the product’s detailed description;
  • indicate the price and a hidden appeal to buy the product.

Moreover, if you practice discounts on your products, you can tell about them during your streams (this method is perfect for preparing seasonal sales). Finally, for even better customer engagement, you can integrate chatbots that will automatically publish information about the product, discounts, and links to it.

How Your Business Can Benefit from Live Commerce?

The market for online stores multiplies and more and more offline businesses strive to expand onto the web. At the same time, the ability to sell products through live streaming e-commerce just cannot be missed out because, using it, you receive a lot of advantages that are unavailable to those companies that reject this sales method, for example:

  • Increase brand awareness. If you use streams to promote your products, people who watch them will pay more attention to your company over time. In addition, this advertising method is much cheaper than, for example, the usual one on social networks.
  • Improve your customers’ experience. Everyone wants to shop quickly and with good customer service, and live streams will allow you to make their desires come true in the best way.
  • Convert your viewers into real buyers. By running a live stream, you can demonstrate your products to many viewers with minimal time expenses. This way, you can increase your sales many times over.
  • Improve your SEO. If you include relevant keywords in your stream (in the form of text in text description or title or into timecodes if you are going to save your stream after its completion), you can increase your presence on the Internet. Thus, your website will rank higher in search results, meaning more people will check and buy your products.

How to Use Live Сommerce?

Streams dedicated to product or service overviews can help businesses expand their audience's reach through people present on popular streaming platforms. Below, we will present some practical recommendations on how to get the most out of this marketing technique.

What platform should you choose?

The choice is between three options. The first type of platforms where you can implement your livestream marketing strategy are social media platforms with shopping features, such as Instagram and YouTube. The second type is a dedicated live commerce platform, such as Amazon Live, Popshop, TalkShopLive, and ShopShops. They are initially adapted for online shopping and have rich functionality to simplify this process. Finally, you can also use your own Shopify store for streaming by connecting the appropriate module to it. This approach suits online stores based on Shopify with an already-formed audience.

Useful features

Chatbots are one of the most useful additional features you can effectively use in your live streams. As we mentioned above, they can demonstrate the price of a product according to a planned schedule, automate the processing of user requests, and even answer their questions (if pre-configured). In addition to chatbots, you can also benefit from stream transcription (on YouTube) and services that accumulate links (on Instagram). 

Continuous streaming

Finally, you can resort to the continuous live streaming method, which can be easily implemented using the Gyre.pro tool. Thanks to this, you can reach audiences from different time zones without spending the whole day on streams. It is also worth noting that Gyre solves several other problems that may arise for brands or bloggers who use live commerce. In particular, we are talking about:

  • endless possibilities to compile live streams from various ready-made videos;
  • change the order of these videos based on analytical results (that is, leave only content with peak activity and then stream these videos during the hours when there were the most viewers);
  • run up to 8 simultaneous streams for various groups of products/promotions/seasonal sales, etc., to cover several streaming platforms or YouTube only – if you consider this YouTube-only option, it’s better to choose a different topic for each stream. 

Final Thoughts

Now that you have an answer to the question “What is live commerce?” you can quickly implement this method of promoting products and services into your business strategy. This way, you can increase conversions and generally strengthen your presence in search results.