It’s October 2024 and tension is running high in the MasterChef kitchen in Cape Town. This isn’t because a fresh set of amateur cooks is stepping up to dazzle the judges. Rather, the kitchen is filled with social media celebrities, chefs and media personalities getting ready to host a 90-minute live shopping show. This Pick n Pay asap! event was streamed live on pnp.co.za, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and saw the hosts showcasing their cooking skills and encouraging viewers at home to make purchases while they watch. Customers had access to a range of “Unreal Deals” in the live online video by clicking on a pop-up and then adding the item to cart.
Known as livestream social commerce, livestream selling or shoppable video, retailers can now make it even easier for customers to bag the items they want. And viewers can ask the hosts questions as they go along. According to McKinsey, China is the most mature of all live-commerce markets, with a market size of 2.27 trillion yuan in 2021. The US is another major player, with the live ecommerce market size expected to double over the next three years, from $31.7 billion in 2023 to $67.8 billion in 2026, Statista data shows.
Vincent Viviers, co-head of omnichannel at Pick n Pay, says it’s seen a shift in customer behaviour, particularly when it comes to how they interact with the retailer digitally and in physical stores. “We know that customers are spending more time shopping online and that their media consumption habits have changed, so we wanted to tap into this trend.”
The future of retail
“Social is big, video is big and, as we’ve seen in other markets across Asia and the US, live shopping events present new and fresh ways for us to connect with our customers.” He adds that the shows are similar to infomercials of the ‘90s and early 2000s, except that it’s unscripted, live, and informal. “Mistakes happen, which I think makes the content more relatable.” And when you combine fun content with great deals, things like Twinkies and toilet paper suddenly become a lot more exciting, he says.
Live shopping is about more than just a transaction, it’s about engagement, says Joy Des Fountain, a tech entrepreneur and the CEO of media technology company Aptivate. She says when customers watch a livestream shopping event, engagement rates increase by between 24% and 60%, which means that viewers aren’t just watching – they’re asking questions and getting more involved. And shoppable and live stream videos often feature multiple items, and, as a result, it’s seeing basket sizes growing by up to 25%, she says.
“There’s so much video content that’s already been produced and invested in, which typically goes to waste shortly after you share it.”
The first asap! event, held in Johannesburg in August, was also successful, says Viviers, adding that almost nothing went according to plan. But a look at the numbers from the maiden livestream doesn’t give any indication of this. Thousands of people watched live and the content had millions of impressions, with over 200% growth in shopping overnight. The Cape Town live show saw 75% growth in active users joining from Pick n Pay’s website and the show directly drove 158% growth in sales from the previous live event.
“The positive response makes me think that we’re onto something here,” Viviers says. “Now the challenge is to learn from these experiences and build it out over time. This is not a once-off thing. Our ambition is to keep doing this and host events a few times a year.” But he admits that increasing the viewership numbers will take some time.
Des Fountain says she was feeling nervous at the asap! event because Aptivate – which also works with brands like Clicks, Faithful to Nature and Sealand – provided the tech layer that enabled the interactive, live shopping. Aptivate manages the video content, handles integrations, and adds interactive shopping features and tracks performance, she says.
Over the course of the last decade, she’s seen more and more people watching and sharing videos, not only to be entertained, but also to be educated. In response, brands have started developing video strategies. Much of this content lives on social media, but there is often a disconnect between videos and sales. If a customer sees something they like on a video posted by a retailer on social media, they will need to leave the social platform and navigate to the online store to make a purchase.
Instant gratification
Aptivate does this by connecting live video and shoppable video interfaces with a client’s existing ecommerce infrastructure. The technical foundation of this features extensive APIs and hooks that allow for custom functionality, making it adaptable to complex integration requirements and capable of handling complex business logic, high-traffic scenarios and integrations with existing enterprise systems. “While technical implementations can be complex, our modular architecture and deep integration expertise enables us to tackle challenges ranging from custom checkout flows to specialised inventory management,” she says.
Aptivate’s technology makes it possible to execute any call to action – add to cart, download a discount code, complete a form from the video itself, and it won’t slow your site down, she claims. Pick n Pay can now create short clips from the content shot during their livestream cooking shows and make this into interactive, engaging video assets that can be posted on its website or incorporated into PR and advertising campaigns. In this way, video content has an impact beyond one post or swipe because you can use it in different places, in different ways. “This is where what we do really makes an impact, because there’s so much video content that’s already been produced and invested in, which typically goes to waste shortly after you share it.”
One of the big benefits of these videos being live and unscripted is that it adds an extra layer of authenticity, which has been lacking from a lot of social content, says Des Fountain. We all know those influencers who promote a particular skincare brand one day, and another the next. Savvy customers can see through this, she says, and retailers must start thinking about partnering with influencers who align with their values and develop relationships with these people in a way that is less like a one night stand and more like a marriage. When you’re working with familiar personalities and you host regular events – say, every second Monday at 7pm – you also form relationships with your customers. According to Coresight Research, regularly scheduled live shopping events make it easier for brands to build a solid base of repeat viewers.
While Dion Chang, the founder of Flux Trends, acknowledges that the rise of livestream social commerce is exciting, he believes there is still a way to go before it really hits the mainstream. This is, in part, because South Africa doesn’t have the same volume of customers as they do in the US, China, India and Indonesia. “I think we’ve still got some catching up to do making the switch between ecommerce and social commerce. We’ll get there, but I don’t believe that South Africans are going to see someone going ‘live’ and then sit there with their credit cards hoping to pick up some amazing products. At least, not right now.”
Today, customers want retailers to be everything, everywhere, all at once, says Chang. As such, whatever your strategy, the focus needs to be on the customer experience. “You get one chance, maybe two, to earn customer trust. Which is why you must be sure that anything you do is done well,” he says. For those dipping their toe into the live shopping space, he adds, it’s essential to get the supply chain and logistics side of things right so that you deliver quickly and efficiently or the instant gratification that comes with this kind of thing will be short-lived.
“We’re only just getting started with this,” says Pick n Pay’s Viviers. “As a team, we’re very agile and hungry to experiment with new things. It’s an exciting opportunity to be a pioneer in this space.” So, does he expect the country’s other big retailers to soon start doing something similar with livestream commerce and shoppable video? He isn’t worried about that. “For me, it would be a massive pat on the back if other retailers expanded their video strategies to incorporate this in the coming months. And if it doesn’t come off the way we expect it to, oh well, at least we gave it a good shot and tried to do something different.”
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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