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M&S goes live with streaming service Customers can join a Live Shopping broadcast.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA? The idea is pretty simple: give shop assistants a camera and live stream them promoting and explaining the different ranges for your online audience. Pioneered by Chinese retail giant Alibaba back in 2016, the format boomed during lockdown in China, when shop managers decided to do something about unsold stock by giving their assistants a camera and live-streaming to a digital audience. Putting it mildly, the live commerce segment has the potential of becoming a goldmine in retail. The numbers speak for themselves: in two hours of live shopping using JD.com’s app, a Chinese farmer attracted more than 210,000 shoppers and sold over 100 tons of apples. According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, there were more than four million e-commerce live broadcasts hosted in the first quarter of 2020.
HOW DOES IT WORK? M&S has partnered with software company LiSA to allow customers that visit M&S.com to join a live broadcast hosted by a member of staff, who will explain more about the ranges they’re brows-
ing, while taking questions through the live chat function. Online shoppers will have the opportunity to view product demonstrations and buy the products as they watch. The series kicked off on 28 January with a broadcast focusing on the retailer’s activewear brand Goodmove.
WHAT IS M&S SAYING? “It’s a global trend that responds to how customers are using social media – we all know how much more we’re scrolling and engaging with video content – at home, or on the go,” Stephen Langford, Director of M&S.com, said. “Live shopping puts our experts front and centre and gives them the ideal platform to share the M&S point of difference – in terms of both quality, design and innovation features.”
COULD I LIVE-STREAM FROM MY SHOP? Teaming up with a software company should be relatively straightforward for UK retailers, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t work for categories other than clothes retail. According to research by McKinsey, the product categories most
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often showcased in live commerce are apparel and fashion, with a 36% share, followed by beauty products and food, with roughly 7% each.In fact, Walmart piloted a livestream fashion event on TikTok in December 2020 that reached seven times more viewers than expected and enabled it to add 25% to its TikTok follower base.
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