Live Commerce Archetypes that will help you understand your online shopper better

Live Commerce is dominating the current e-Commerce world. This new tool bridges the gap between a personalised online shopping experience and getting an immediate engaging response from a sales person. Live Commerce brings customers close to the in-person experience without them having to leave their home, even after shopping hours of brick and mortar stores. Convenience is one of the main reasons this trend is exploding, especially since the pandemic hit. Let’s take a look at different archetypes that will help you refine your strategy and understand your customer.

Create the in-store experience online

Shopping online without assistance can be difficult for many reasons, and without anyone there to ask how big something is or what colours it’s available it can lead to cart abandonment. However, with the virtual presence of a shop assistant or influencer, your questions can be answered right there and then in real-time. This is the biggest benefit of Live Commerce – but there’s more. Read all about it here.

3 Live Commerce Archetypes

According to McKinsey live commerce practices should match the degree of a company’s maturity in the field. Companies tend to fall into three basic archetypes:

• Basic: Testing the waters and trying out live streaming

Infrequent streams focused on one to five products and relying on the technology of only one specific social media channel – such as TikTok, Instagram or Facebook – or live streaming through marketplaces like Amazon Live, Taobao or Tmall, and tracking performance with KPIs

• Good: Making live commerce a pillar of e-Commerce

Integrating live streaming into your own website, tracking live streaming performance, making a full-time team responsible for managing the live-commerce channel, and setting up automated performance-marketing campaigns to drive targeted traffic to relevant streams

• Great: Scaling up to an innovative data-driven business

Using multiple channels to frequently livestream in different product categories, using analytics-derived insights and machine learning to develop automated real-time prompts, and having a fully-fledged live-commerce department who have proved they can run livestreams on their own.

Now the question is: how to digest this information? Create a strategy for each of these archetypes, depending of how well they know Live Commerce yet. Ask yourself which product and audience you want to reach. Present them a Live Commerce platform that works so they can start live streaming. Engage with your customers in real-time and increase your sales through interactive shoppable live streams with Whisbi. Our Engage solution is designed to inspire, educate, and entertain customers in a format that allows real-time brand interactions!

The rise of Live Commerce

In our US Retail Research Report we’re elaborating more about The rise of Live Commerce and the evolution of online CX impacting traditional retail. It educates you about the importance of Live Commerce and what online shoppers really think. For example 83% of respondents strongly agree with the fact that their customer experience expectations are higher today than they were a year ago and 77% of consumers say that if there was an option for online real-time assistance during their buying journey, they would be more likely to complete it. Both of these statements are very aligned with what Live Commerce has to offer. 

Consumers nowadays expect fast, personalized and accurate service where they can engage with brands through their preferred online channels (live chat, live broadcasting, live video shopping, one-to-one video consultations, etc.). This is what they value the most when it comes to shopping online. Live Commerce solutions allow consumers to have real-time conversations with brand experts, which humanizes the online shopping world and brings the customer experience to the in-store level. Are you interested in finding out more about trending solutions in e-Commerce? Take a look at our dedicated Trend Report! 

Leading categories in Live Commerce

There are a few categories in Live Commerce that are doing really well like Apparel & Fashion, beauty but also Consumer Electronics, Furnishing & Home Decor and Automobile and local online-to-offline sales. We’re focusing on the last three categories right now, but here’s a full overview: 

An interesting use case about Consumer Electronics is how the world’s biggest technology firm achieved 5X increase in sales for broadcast viewers. This brand achieved incredible results by streaming constantly – that’s how they continuously bring the in-store environment to their customers. Here are some success indicators: 4M+ viewers, 28% engaged viewers, over 127k questions asked and a 5x increase in sales for customers that watched the live stream.

Diving into Furnishing and Home Decor, the best client to showcase our solution is one of the biggest retailers in Spain where we show you how they’ve increased their conversion rate by 50% among other success numbers. In recent months, the COVID-19 crisis has led them to redefine their sales model. The following KPIs were achieved: a +50% conversion rate, 9.1 NPS rating and €500,- average in receipts. 

Regarding the Automotive Industry we’ve got many examples like A1 Group, Hyundai Mexico, Mazda Mexico. Let’s look into how Hyundai Bahrain converted 57% of Whisbi leads into sales. They’ve implemented Whisbi Sell (Lite) and Whisbi Engage to provide their customers with direct communication through a safe and convenient way. They started live streaming and answered any questions customers might have in real-time. This way, they’ve achieved incredible results like: only 24 hours to respond to customer’s inquiries, a 57% closing ratio, 60% test drive conversion rates and a 80% attended call rate. 

Marloes van Vliet

Product Marketing Manager