Live Shopping: How to Create Seamless Online Retail Experiences

Consumer behaviours continue to evolve rapidly and brands – as always – are responding. One of the biggest retail shake-ups of the moment is live shopping.

After emerging from successful Chinese sites, its popularity is spreading globally. It now represents a lucrative opportunity for brands with $35 billion of sales projected to be generated by live shopping in the USA by 2024. Indeed, live shopping events may account for as much as 20% of all e-commerce sales by 2026 according to McKinsey, if we follow China’s path.

What is live shopping?

Live shopping combines the convenience of online shopping with the experience of physical shopping, creating an engaging and interactive experience for customers.

Using a live stream or interactive video shopping platform, a customer can interact in real time with retailers, allowing for questions, feedback, and an overall personalised online shopping experience.

Ultimately, live shopping is a great way for retailers to reach more customers, increase sales, and elevate the online shopping experience.

How to create seamless online retail experiences that drive sales

It is not surprising that we and our partners in this space – Retail Marketing Group (RMG) and Smartzer – are seeing more brands wanting to develop digital solutions that:

Create an equally engaging shopping experience on their website as they would in-store
Engage their consumers in a human, emotionally-connected way
Harness the skill, knowledge, and enthusiasm of their advisors and sales team
Create a seamless virtual shopping experience that drives sales by enabling consumers to receive the information, advice, and support that they need to make a purchasing decision and complete the transaction
Build defined communities within their audience

Having worked with RMG and Smartzer on projects that do just this, we’re going to walk you through a recent project to show how the three critical components come together to ensure a successful online retail experience: strategy, tech, and production.

1. Strategy

A leading broadcaster and telecommunications company wanted to reach new routes to market via social channels that also engaged with their retail stores to drive awareness of their new product.

As RMG are content and live commerce specialists within the consumer electronics world that offer an OMNI-channel approach via in-store and video solutions, they offered an end-to-end solution for the client.

The strategy was built to execute two national live shopping broadcasts to increase awareness of the client’s new product. This included pre- and post-event communications, storyboarding and scripting, talent sourcing, audience targeting, and creative direction. RMG also provided project management throughout being the direct point of contact for the client.

A partnership was established with London Filmed to deliver the live production and Smartzer to deliver the live shopping platform. The project was delivered within six weeks.

2. Tech

Smartzer transforms regular live content into shoppable, results-driven experiences. The innovative tool adds a layer of interactivity to live-streamed content, allowing viewers to react, comment, and ask the host questions. When the stream concludes, Smartzer generates valuable data to create a targeted post-event strategy. On average, each viewer generates 44 actionable data points per stream. This data can also be used to retarget consumers through Google Tag Manager and Meta Pixel.

The Smartzer platform was integrated into the client’s strategy via London Filmed, as a neat solution to live stream the client’s live broadcasts to create an interactive, engaging live shopping experience.

3. Production & integration

With the strategy covered by RMG, and with the Smartzer platform onboarded, London Filmed designed, built, and delivered the live events, bringing all the elements together as the live technical production partner.

Working closely with RMG and the client throughout the project, the end result was a seamless, engaging broadcast, which was backed up by the data from the Smartzer platform. To ensure success, London Filmed held five rehearsals with the chosen hosts to make sure they were comfortable with the tech and to optimise camera positions (ensuring each speaker knew where to look and when), lighting and sound. We also rigorously tested the live stream to ensure our primary and backup solution ran smoothly and that any need for redundancy coming into play was seamless. For a broadcast-quality look and feel and seamless transitions during the live shopping event, our graphic design team created digital assets to overlay on the stream.

At the live event, we had a team consisting of Live Stream Technicians, a Director of Photography, Camera Operators, a Production Manager and a Project Manager for a smooth live delivery.

Live shopping: a trend on the rise

Live shopping presents an opportunity for brands – big and small, global and local – to engage with their audience and offer an intuitive way for their audience to shop.

To set yourself up for success, make sure you take care of the strategy, tech, and production and consider working with established teams with experience across omni-channel marketing, brand experience, content creation, tech, and live production. This will ensure you reach your objectives and that every touchpoint with your audience is considered for a successful experience and ROI.

If you have any questions about live shopping or want to discover if it is the right strategy for your brand, get in touch with us.