Commerce: The evolution of the shopping show
Social media stars are trying to get you to buy, not just follow or watch, said Mark Bergen and Lucas Shaw in Bloomberg.com. This week, YouTube took its first step toward becoming “a shopping destination,” with a livestreaming event in which celebrities, including the chef Gordon Ramsay, pitched products from brands like Verizon, Samsung, and Walmart. Previous efforts at bringing the QVC model to livestream video have “mostly floundered in the U.S.,” but YouTube is “banking on the influence of its stars,” many of whom already sell merchandise through links on their channels. Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat have also recently debuted similar features involving live product reviews from top influencers. They are betting live e-commerce will eventually catch on as it has in China, where “Lipstick King” Li Jiaqi sold $1.9 billion of goods in one day at Alibaba’s annual shopping extravaganza last month.
The digital shopping experience is interactive and hyperactive, said Jacob Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. “I’m sitting on my couch, staring at my phone as I watch Noah Thomas, a pitchman wearing glasses like Willy Wonka’s, sell a pair of Adidas sneakers” on the 3-year-old livestream platform Ntwrk. Its streams are like frenetic, “extended infomercials,” during which viewers can comment and ask questions while hosts “scramble around makeshift studios.” That still may be preferable to the influencer-driven model currently on social media, said Jeva Lange in TheWeek.com. At least QVC and HSN are transparent about their hawking. “There’s something shady about intending to use social media to check on your friends only to end up with an impulsively purchased National Parks T-shirt.” With QVC— and now livestreamed shopping—you’ll never be “blindsided by its premise.”
There’s still one big holdup for most of these platforms, said Julia Gray in MorningBrew .com: The lack of one-click shopping. “As it stands, most purchasing involves clicking out of the livestream, toggling over to a retailer’s website, adding in your contact and payment info.” It’s an effort—and why many shoppers just skip over to Amazon. The video platform Firework says “90 percent of its sales occur after livestreams end.”
The main forces driving this are, as usual, greed and fear, said Shira Ovide in The New York Times. Google is worried that more Americans are skipping searches to go straight to Amazon, while Facebook frets about “Apple’s new data-privacy rules eating into their advertising sales.” We might not like “shopping where we chat with our Facebook gardening groups,” but corporate interests will probably “change our habits by sheer force of their will.”