A New Era of Retail is coming

Retailers need to embrace an aura of newness

Retailers recognize that COVID-19 will have a significant impact on their business and it’s time to think through the longer-term implications. According to analysts’ studies, there are key areas where retail execs should be focusing their attention in today’s highly-fluid social, economic environment. They need to restructure their operating models as well as rethink and evolve the clients’ relationship. Retailers have to find a new way to maintain trust in brand, products, and services, reset expectations for today, and recover the customer experience.

For sure e-commerce, chatbots, and mobile apps are offering some small rays of hope in the shutdown, but for all the talk of fashion’s digital transformation, it’s an industry that still runs on brick-and-mortar, meeting and interacting with consumers face-to-face. So they’re not enough to save the industry, and they’re hardly big or profitable enough now to support the whole business. In addition, some aspects of the in-store experience go missing when shopping in the digital world.

So today the fashion sector is proving to be one of the hardest hit as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of jobs likely to be lost and thousands of companies facing a fight to stay afloat.
But there’s a new trend that is offering a glimmer of light. Cue in Live Commerce (or Live Stream Shopping), which enhances the shopping experience and integrate other elements, such as entertainment, social features, and the atmosphere in brick-and-mortar stores.

Live Stream Shopping: the New Retailer Frontier

Live Stream Shopping is a new term used to describe the combination of streaming video and e-commerce, promising to revolutionize the retail industry and consumer shopping habits.
By fusing online retail with live streaming, this solution is bringing consumers one step closer to the in-person experience.

It’s born in China where it has actually become the number one source of revenue per hour, ahead of mobile games, television, radio, videos, and music. In the Eastern market, Live Commerce centers around influencers broadcasting live to millions of viewers and showcasing products, trying them on, and describing them. As an example of its exponential success, China’s top live-streaming celebrity generated roughly US $51 million in sales in a single day.

However, it would be wrong to consider it an exclusive Chinese tendency, on the contrary, Western tech and retail leaders begin to be inspired by this omnichannel retail, social commerce, and mobile commerce innovation and the trend is starting to take off in a much more innovative way. This is because they immediately understand the great impactful and benefits Live Commerce leads with. To mention a few: User Experience /Interactivity/Engagement/Loyalty /Innovative Brand Exposure

How it works

Live streaming refers to online streaming media simultaneously recorded and broadcast in real-time. The greatest part of live streaming is engaging with the audience: instead of guessing at what the consumers want, streamers can use interactive chats. So viewers become an active part of the program, and they are more apt to remain engaged and learn about a product or service: unsurprisingly, it’s been calculated the engagement increase by 600% and conversion rate by 10%.

Watch / Chat / Buy: the mechanism is simple

The brand organizes a Live Stream Shopping to showcase products. The Streamer presents the items offering a friendly pseudo “in-store” shopping experience. Viewers watching the Livestream can easily interact chatting with the Streamer who will respond in real-time, encouraging conversation and engagement. Meanwhile, they can browse the carousel of products, add the items to the shopping cart, and buy without leaving the stream. The result is a huge boost in converting viewers to customers or customers to loyal clients.

Real-time Analytics and Artificial intelligence integration: the Radicalbit Killer Feature

Live commerce performances and real-time analytics are a killer feature of our Live stream shopping Platform: GoLive. It reports information about the audience and their features and KPI concerning the conversion rate and sales trend during and after the live commerce. A sentiment analysis model also could give precious information about the quality of users’ digital content. Data could also drive the best time for launching live commerce, which is its right duration, which influencer chooses for the direct, and so on. Moreover, the Artificial Intelligence integration can derive meaningful conclusions from a massive amount of data helping Brands to give a personal touch to customers’ experiences, like providing error-free and personalized suggestions, segmenting customers with specific algorithms, or predicting their behavior.