Livestream video shopping is the latest elusive “holy grail” in online marketing.
Marketers want it; they’re willing to pay for it … but it may or may not actually exist.
Still, ecommerce brands are starting to experiment with livestream video shopping.
Earlier this month, QVC and the Home Shopping Network announced a partnership with Roku to launch the first free live shopping streams on The Roku Channel and, in September, Walmart Connect debuted an Innovation Partners category that, for the time being, consists entirely of live video shopping integrations.
Another noteworthy contender in the mix is Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, which hosted its third “Pog Picks” live shopping event the days before Thanksgiving.
Twitch has expanded the non-endemic brands on its platform, as in brands beyond the video game studios and electronics manufacturers that typically advertise there, said Adam Harris, global head of the Twitch Brand Partnership Studio, which produces the event.
Twitch’s Pog Picks (“pog,” and acronym for “play of the game,” is gaming slang for something excellent) features a mix of curated products selected by staff and influencers as well as sponsored brand insertions. The items appear in a carousel in the stream. Clicking them typically links out to an Amazon product page. But there’s no policy requirement and some brands do opt to link to their own sites or a different fulfillment option, Harris said.
“If I was to distill down what Pog Picks is, it’s kind of QVC meets Japanese game show,” he said.
Unlike on other live shopping platforms, where brands usually buy time and feature their own talent on the stream, the Brand Partnership Studio cultivates its own stable of creators from the Twitch platform.
“This is a young and very skeptical audience,” Harris said, “and there’s a certain live community environment they expect to see.”
Twitch can also lean on Amazon for features beyond purchasing.
For example, the Brand Partnership Studio is beta testing an Amazon Ads product with livestream shopping partners this season called Rewarded Moments that allows brands to reward groups of users with bonuses – such as a discount, a free sample or an in-game boost on Twitch – in exchange for working together to meet a certain goal.
If, for instance, enough streamers post in the chat about the makeup brands they use, then the whole group could qualify for a L’Oréal discount or Twitch credits.
A marketer might think more transactionally, like offering people a discount if they submit an email address.
“This audience wants to be interactive and part of a community experience,” Harris said, which is also why Twitch produces the event itself and chooses with creators get to be involved. “What we know [about people on Twitch] is that if you frame the offer as, ‘We’re all a part of this and you could win something for the whole community,’ they tend to jump in and do it.”.
But being open is also part of Twitch’s appeal.
The Amazon flagship site has its own live video initiatives that are, no surprise, tied directly to Amazon. Twitch accounts are also shared with Amazon, which makes it easier for users to convert quickly. A brand’s own site or an outside merchant might first need to get customers to fork over their credit card info.
But the fact that Twitch allows brands to link users to a DTC site means that advertisers own that customer data and the direct customer relationship, and this sets Twitch apart from other platforms with live shopping features that keep users inside a walled garden, like Instagram and TikTok.
For Twitch, live shopping is a potentially lucrative enough habit to form that it is not going to sweat where the purchases are happening right now.
“Live shopping is an important part of the behaviors that we want the audience to be exhibiting,” Harris said.
Twitch streamers earn money on the platform primarily from advertising rev shares and in-stream donations of credits, which on Twitch are called “Bits.” Getting more Bits into the system requires people to add credit card deets to their accounts.
“That behavior of spending on the service is something we want to cultivate,” Harris said, “because it leads directly to our creators being able to earn a living doing what they love.”
