Live Shopping is widely regarded as the future of ecommerce, and has captured the attention of many brands looking to grow their online businesses and increase engagement amongst their customers.
The relative youth of this trend means there is no clear standard yet for how live shopping events should be conducted, which offers endless possibilities, for better or worse. Like any new technology, the adoption curve can seem inscrutable at first, which might put off some of the companies that could benefit the most from a correct (and fast) implementation.
If you’re amongst those companies that could benefit from a well-oiled live shopping machine, we’re here to tell you that this great tool is within reach, and that its benefits might be easier to put into practice than you think. Introducing VTEX Live Shopping App.
Plug and play
The VTEX Live Shopping App makes broadcasting your first event as easy as 1, 2, 3.
- Install the app
The first thing to know is that the VTEX Live Shopping app is already integrated with the VTEX ecosystem. You can ask your VTEX account manager to get it as an add-on to your existing plan or download it directly from the app store and be ready to do your own event in minutes.
- Get your equipment ready
Once installed, the app will walk you through the necessary steps in order to be ready for your first broadcast. This process can be initiated on a laptop or desktop computer connected to an external camera, or directly on a phone which will use its own camera to record, depending on your setup and preference.
- Get your hosts and assets ready
The Streaming Studio included within the app also allows you to share links for co-hosts or influencers that will give them access to the broadcast, but not to the studio admin credentials. Just as easily you can add watermarks, logos, overlays or banners to your broadcast.
VTEX Live Shopping app has incorporated Amazon’s streaming component, called EBS. This allows the backend to be more robust, and allows the app to be an all-in-one solution that doesn’t require any additional subscription to streaming services.
- Pick your layout
The app can even sort out your video layout for you. Worried about engagement and sales if mobile users have fullscreen video? Simply choose ‘top alignment’ inside the horizontal layout menu and your customers will be able to see video, product carousel and chat at the same time without the need to make any changes on your side!
- Implement a promotion strategy
Recently, the app has also gained some functionalities to take advantage of the rising interest in sharing commerce: now, you can set up goals for number of items added to the cart or number of products purchased, and once that goal is reached it automatically triggers a discount for all the buyers.
This hugely incentivises add-to-cart ratio, and drives sales up. The option even lets you add pre-loaded animations to the broadcast, in order to signal the unlocking of the promotion to your buyers, making it a more engaging experience.
Data at your fingertips
The app comes with a metrics dashboard where you can easily check the numbers traditionally associated with video content: such as number of unique viewers, total number of viewers, and average viewers, as well as likes and comments. The tool can also show you if most of your viewers are using mobile or desktop devices to watch the broadcast.
The dashboard also collects the most important metrics to measure the broadcast’s performance: such as number of carts, buyers, and orders, AOV and total value of orders. If the event is produced to promote a particular collection of products, the dashboard can even highlight the number of products and total value sold from said collection.
This information is invaluable from a business perspective, as it can help a company better understand its audience and better target future events in order to maximize their impact and the sales associated with them.
The VTEX team can also help you plan these events: we won’t tell you what to do, but we’re happy to tell you what works best in live shopping and help you find what works even better for you.
Better value for customers, more sales for you
The best part of these alternatives —besides getting more bang for your buck— is the ease with which they can be implemented, without the need to add any hardware or sophisticated processes. This is possible because the VTEX platform it’s built on a cloud architecture in Amazon Web Services, which is one of VTEX’s most trustworthy partners.
The VTEX Live Shopping app enables you —depending on your plan— to ask for the recording of a live shopping stream after it’s done. This produces a video file that can easily be hosted on your website, or be shared with your social media team in order to make the necessary edits, which can greatly help your marketing content.
So: if you were considering the adoption of a Live Shopping strategy, but were concerned about it being hard, or its “limited impact”, hopefully, you now know the great revolution it can represent for your business, as well as the simplicity of implementation that VTEX offers to you.
