Livestream Shopping on Social Media? Think Again.

livestream shopping on social media vs ecommerce sitelivestream shopping on social media vs ecommerce site
Yael Kochman

22/07/2024

Video Commerce

Imagine logging into social media, and it’s that one day that Instagram is down (look on X for trolls and more making memes about this).

Or imagine logging into a live with a brand, all aligned, but having someone slide into your DMs and you not having your notifications turned off.

livestream shopping on social media vs ecommerce site

Livestream Shopping on Social Media Platforms

Hosting livestream shopping on social media might seem easy, given your users are already there , but compounded with the inability to convert, moving a storefront to Instagram Shops or TikTok Shop, and having limited data to measure conversion and retain customers, it becomes an even bigger challenge. 

An article in Spiceworks and Smartly.lo highlighted how brands and retailers should take control of their live commerce directly, versus relying on social media platforms. This is truly what will take it to the next level versus livestream shopping on social media. 

Why Livestream Shopping on Social Media Platforms Isn’t the Best Idea

Social media platforms are engaging, no doubt. That’s why they struggle with how to make themselves more commercially viable, and are eager to integrate live shopping to capture a portion of the transaction and provide end-to-end attribution. 

However, recent challenges by Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and others show that seamlessly integrating the purchase journey on these platforms is proving difficult. Despite this, eBay, and most recently, X, are trying to dabble into the space. However, these platforms are not known for shopping, and to place your inventory on here is not ideally showcasing why a platform on your ecommerce site would be better than livestream shopping on social media. This is where buywith comes in, enabling a seamless integration onto a brand or retailers’ ecommerce platform so that they can have the one thing they need most from their sales: CONTROL. 

livestream shopping on social media vs ecommerce sites

Account for Consumers’ Buying and Learning Behavior on When Livestream Shopping on Social Media

Consumers primarily view social media as a source of entertainment and inspiration, rather than a direct purchasing channel. 

This change is amplified from transactional content to educational and entertaining content. For example, when the founder of BeautyBio (Jamie O’Banion) shares how she founded the brand with her dad in her garage, or when the founder of LiveTinted Deepica Murtyala share how she discovered the lack of a under eye concealer for colored women as an opportunity to start a brand, these are more exciting then simple advertorials. Both were showcased as part of our Ulta Beauty’s live event with buywith, keeping things inspiring and entertaining. 

With respect to education, when trying to emulate movie looks like the summer hit Barbie movie, a livestream with Jouer Cosmetics showcased how celebrity makeup artists can help audiences create movie ready looks. 

While social media would be apt for these too, the short form video content and scroll culture might make hosting such an informative live less relevant on a social platform. Moreover, often times audiences stumble upon social media lives, unprepared to go shopping, and while it might be useful, a pre-registration is much more desirable. When brands host a livestreaming shopping event on an ecommerce site that requires a pre-registration, the users are entering with a much higher intent to purchase and learn about the brand.

Overall, this is why hosting livestream shopping on your ecommerce site is more apt for audiences, where the goal of a brand and retailer is to provide knowledge, introduce the founders, provide inspiration and more, with a more direct connection to the commerce site.

Livestream Shopping on Ecommerce Sites: Changing Priorities in the Current Economic Climate

Marketers are shifting their focus from overall growth to profitability amid the current economic downturn. As a result, brands are looking to enhance their social commerce strategies to improve customer experience and increase revenue streams. Both are solvable with livestream shopping, but the bandwidth and investment needed to do this logistically accurately on a social platform might not be an immediate solution. 

This is where a solution like buywith comes in, enabling control over hosting livestream shopping on your ecommerce site. It alleviates the investment needed for logistics to bring livestream shopping on social media platforms, and is a more economical and practical way to make livestream shopping a sustained marketing strategy moving forward.

video commerce

How to Combine Livestream Shopping and Social Media in One User Journey

While there is the case to run your livestream shopping event on your e-commerce site, the pros of which outweigh the pros of being on a social platform, the two can be combined into one user journey. 

By using the existing customer base on owned social media platforms, one can drive traffic to the e-commerce site by social posts, stories, clickable links, and more. Many brands do this to entice the engaging, entertaining social media platforms to navigate users to their e-commerce site to sign up for their live. This includes SMS marketing, adopted by brands like Beauty Bio, DRMTLGY and even platforms like buywith, where SMS marketing is employed to remind users of lives. Further, Meta’s own WhatsApp, which is adopted by brands like HEWI to drive traffic to the ecommerce site. Fundamentally, having one’s ultimate destination be the e-commerce site ensures that the brand or retailer can have full control over the shopper journey, and associated data and analytics. 

There are some benefits to combining live commerce on ecommerce sites with social media, if the technology at hand provides a seamless replicable experience. For example, buywith’s multi-stream feature enables a live running on an ecommerce site to be duplicated, live, on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and more. In this way, the brand or retailer can benefit with all the pros of running a livestream shopping event on their ecommerce site, with the serendipitous extra outreach to their social media audiences.  

Brands’ Opportunity in Live Shopping on Ecommerce Sites

Brands have an opportunity to take control of the live shopping experience by moving it from social media platforms to their branded e-commerce spaces. This enables brands to enhance the shopping experience, build stronger connections, and fully own customer data and transactions. buywith can step in to enable exactly this 

To find out more about how I can enable brands and retailers discover their potential, see how buywith can help you in getting started with livestream shopping.

Yael Kochman
Chief Marketing Officer at buywith

Yael Kochman is the Chief Marketing Officer at buywith, a leading video commerce platform and creator marketplace. Yael is a retail and commerce innovation expert and marketing leader with over 15 years of extensive experience in marketing and business development. Recognized as among the 100 influential people in retail tech and acknowledged by HubSpot as one of the 59 female marketers to follow, Yael’s remarkable career spans co-founding Re:Tech, an innovation hub for retail tech.

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