One the top trends that Mercator is forecasting for 2022 is the rapid growth of social commerce. As long as commerce has been around, it has always been a community activity, beginning with marketplaces and town squares, then main street shops and shopping malls. What e-commerce has given us in terms of convenience it has also taken away from us in terms our ability to shop in a community environment. Not surprisingly, the hottest trend in e-commerce right now is live streaming. Why? It gives us that interaction we want with both the store and other shoppers. Think about what shopping would be like in a Zoom meeting. If you’ve ever watched a home shopping channel like QVC or HSN, think about what your experience would be like if you could talk to the product hosts and see comments from other shoppers in real time.
This trend is evolving very quickly, with big media and commerce players both trying to position themselves to provide the best shopping experience for their users. Klarna bought Inspirock to enable travelers to search Klarna’s database of over 600,000 merchants and add curated shopping stops to their travel itineraries. TikTok announced a deal with Shopify that will enable TikTok users to add commerce links to their videos. YouTube has announce a video shopping series that will pilot this holiday shopping season. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated our adoption of video meeting platforms as a way to maintain our in-person gatherings in a socially-distanced and COVID-safe manner. We used video meetings for everything from client conferences to social events and family visits. Live streaming commerce is the digital equivalent of meeting your friends at the mall, and it’s ready to become the Next Big Thing. According to this article in CTech, during the first day of Alibaba Group’s annual shopping festival, two Chinese star streamers Li Jiaqi and Viya sold 18,905,825,280 yuan of goods in less than a day ($2.96B). Considering that Amazon sales averaged $1 billion per day in 2020, the potential of live stream commerce is huge.
Overview by Don Apgar, Director, Merchant Services Advisory Practice at Mercator Advisory Group
