Shoppertainment and live stream commerce is saving China, so what can it do for your business?

Today, we're going to talk about live streaming once again. We're going to talk about how you can build a business without having a retail outlet, but it does rely on having an online store and online publicity to get the customer to come to your store. When we look at live streaming, it's topical, because the Chinese economy is surviving and some would say thriving in certain pockets down to the efforts of live streaming. I was thinking about that, because today, I was going to go shopping with my daughter. She had pocket money, but she spent it all, and actually, before we went to the shops downtown, she had spent it all online. So, we're now seeing the patterns of spending by young people changing fundamentally, and I don't think it's ever going to come back. Shoppertainment and livestream e-commerce is filling the store gap in the UK, America, and all over the world due to COVID, but it's perhaps in China that it has had the greatest impact. However, I don't think that it's going to be limited to China. I think China is going to show us the way. 

Having lived in China for 13 years myself, I've watched the growth of mobile and the beginnings of live streaming. What's been happening in China, though, recently is that there are different people now becoming spokespeople for companies as well as towns and provinces. In Hubei province, for example, which has 60 million inhabitants, the local provincial government offices are live streaming to endorse and to sell products being made by the companies within their province. They've currently sold some 2 million pounds or 2.5 million dollars worth of goods in one day through this campaign. Actual spokespeople are entering the scene and becoming trade ambassadors for their town and their province. We may well see chambers of commerce in other countries starting to ask their mayors or their provincial or regional officials to start to go online and to promote their region or their town in a way that we haven't seen before, actually even at a product level. 

In China, it doesn't seem to know any bounds. To help us further understand the growth of e-commerce and live streaming in China, I've asked Charles, who is an EastWest Public Relations consultant based in Beijing, to discuss the influence of live streaming. He shares about the rise of Taobao which is pretty much the Amazon of China. It's been the platform with the largest number of live streaming sales, and during COVID, in February, they saw a 719% increase in new sellers. That doesn't mean that everybody's making that much more money, but it does show a migration from the brick and mortar stores to online. I asked Charles, because I think China gives us some clues and lessons about what we can do here in the West to build our business and continue our business in the mobile and the digital era.

According to Charles, live streaming is very popular right now. Data from the Ministry of Commerce shows that in the first quarter of this year, there were more than 4 million live broadcasters on e-commerce in China. This year, under this special situation, live streaming has not only become an important channel for sales, but it also drives new consumption patterns. All kinds of governments, media, institutes, and enterprises have been testing live streaming. They make use of different tactics to sell products and promote their brand, so it's definitely opened the doors for sales and marketing. Live streaming has become a broader space for the development of companies in the beauty, makeup, food, cars, books, home decorations, and digital industry. 

When you go to the Taobao's live broadcast interface, a wide range of options comes into view. At present, live streaming is not only popular but also diversified. In April, professional broadcaster Viya went live on Taobao, and within minutes after the link went on sale, a rocket launch worth 40 million yuan (or 5.6 million dollars) was sold. You may wonder why live streaming does so well. According to Charles, the live streaming process forms a closed loop of information about the goods from selling to buying, which reduces the transaction decision-making time. The presentation and explanation of sellers are lively, highly credible, and to a certain extent, they reduce information imbalance between buyers and sellers. 

Compared to traditional e-commerce, live streaming is more interactive and warm, Charles says. Also, there are more and more technical ways added into live streaming. For example, people can see and view the color of the lipstick through VR technology, which is crazy, right? Your girlfriend or your wife, or if you yourself are a girl don't need to go to the shopping mall. You can just click on the mouse to make a purchase. What's even better is live streaming is becoming incorporated in more and more social platforms, not only on Taobao. You can find it on TikTok, WeChat, and almost all the e-commerce platforms. Anything can be sold through live streaming, even a rocket. So, what's next? Maybe your new home.

As Charles said, 33-year-old Viya sold a $6 million rocket on Taobao, which apparently led Taobao to publicly state that it was not an April Fool's joke. So, it's amazing what can be sold online when the platform is correct. I think that's something now that we can look at here for our businesses, because bricks and mortar may not come back again, because people like my daughter don't believe they have to go to town to go shopping. They shop with their mobile phones on Apple Pay and have things delivered by a courier.

I thought I would look at some of the solutions that we can use for online, not just the broadcasting, but also the integrated commerce. For broadcasting, there are a number. One of the leading ones is called Daycast, which is a small- to medium-sized video platform. They've got streaming solutions which start at a quite reasonable $19 per month. The benefit of using this instead of, for example, the Facebook or YouTube Live is that you get control, and also in some cases, you get the ability to monetize, either to have a payment gateway or to embed APIs for e-commerce. What you also get from them is, by and large, better video quality. When I tried streaming a Zoom call through to Facebook Live, there was a lag in the video and a loss of quality. But on these paid-for platforms, we're getting much higher quality, much less latency.

There's another company called Brightcove based out of Boston, which is one of the older online video platforms. Although it's only 16 years old, it doesn't sound young by this industry's terms. In 2019, they bought Ooyala, which is a name familiar to me, because we actually pitched for Ooyala when I was based in Beijing 10 years ago. Anyway, Brightcove has taken Ooyala out of the market, and it offers an enterprise-grade video broadcasting platform at $499 a month. Another option is IBM Cloud Video which has a basic streaming-for-free service that is supported by IBM Advertising. For $99 a month, you can remove the advertising, get custom branding, have analytics, and content syndication. This is also another way, another solution. The one that I'm using myself is Vimeo which has the livestream platform that it acquired in 2017. This can offer pay-per-view which, of course, now with Zoom, you can also integrate PayPal and you can pay-per-view that way too. Vimeo is $7 a month, but it's blocked in China. The other issue with Vimeo is that there isn't really any traffic to their site.

With Vimeo, IBM, Daycast, or Brightcove, you have the stream, but you don't have the audience, so this is what takes us back to public relations. You're streaming high quality video, maybe with a paywall, so it's great if you've got subscribers already. But if you haven't got subscribers then you've got video and not necessarily viewers which is, of course, why we all go to YouTube or to Facebook for that. Obviously, these are all more about the content, but what if we've got things to sell?

Amazon, the biggest online store in the world, has 780 billion dollars of market cap. It's nearly 50% of all e-commerce in America. In the UK, it's still probably the biggest game in town, according at least to the deliveries we get at my house. If you're a registered Amazon seller, you can download the Amazon Live Creator app. You do need to have what they call an OBS or an Onboard Streaming App to help encode the video. It's very easy to do if you want to use your own camera. You basically download the app, this OBS software, and if you're a registered Amazon seller, you've already got your product, and then you can live stream directly from your Amazon store using the mobile app, so you can use your phone, or a camera with your desktop to film, so it's similar to Taobao.

That's probably the simplest, because then what we've got is for anybody that's in our store, we have the ability to provide them with a live stream and checkout, as well as the logistics that go with that. You can also start your own ad campaigns, which is super useful, and you can apparently set them up very easily, so that seems to be another really good option for anybody that is selling products to get registered with Amazon and to have basically, the store already set up using Amazon and the consumers already within the Amazon Marketplace. What we want to make sure from a PR point of view is that we've got all the ratings that we might need for our Amazon seller products. Ratings are really, really important as we've discussed before. It's a huge part of public relations. The Amazon Live Creator app currently apparently only runs on iOS, not on Android, which is a bit of a problem if you're an Android user. When I had a quick look on the the Apple store at the Amazon app, because I personally don't have an Amazon store, the app's rating is 3.6 out of five. One person said it was a fantastic app and that their sales have increased fivefold since they started streaming on Amazon Live. 

Now, I did find as well an alternative, which is a company founded in 2016 in Quebec, Canada by Virgile Ollivier & Laurent Boutet, and they are partners in a company called Livescale. They work on the Shopify platform to transform the content and e-commerce into a live shopping experience. This is an opportunity to be away from Amazon, use the Shopify platform, and have live shopping, because the product details are imported directly from your Shopify platform, and they're displayed alongside your live streaming video. In Livescale, they've built in a payment system and a shopping cart, which goes straight to your e-commerce. They're saying you can also allow live shopping on video purchase, which means that if you've got someone hesitating at the checkout, you can actually talk to them and negotiate with them, which brings us all the way back to Taobao. It's the complete shopping experience that the Chinese are having online. At the moment, Amazon Live sounds as though it's the closest to Taobao, but Livescale seems to be offering an alternative platform.

I'm interested in this because my wife, who is a Shanghainese, has just ordered a load of Chinese teapots and Chinese pottery, because she wants to be active now that she's in the UK and her residence visa has been sorted out. We don't want to rent space anymore, because that doesn't seem like a particularly bright move in this day and age. Having a website with a shopping cart is okay, but it's not really dynamic. Obviously, teapots are not particularly dynamic in themselves, but we want to rotate them, we want to display them, we want to be able to have people talking about them, product experts talking about them, and we want to be able to engage with people that are coming and looking at buying one of these teapots, but don't know yet what to look for. We should be able to engage with them online and help them to make a decision.

Public relations, of course, will have helped to get people to come and find the store through our media relations through our social media, but public relations now is part of the entire purchase chain. And because public relations bleeds into reviews, user-generated content, and ratings, live shopping and live streaming has to be part of what companies are thinking about when it comes to integrated sales and customer service strategy. Since the customer experience is part of public relations too, I wanted to share these tools and platforms that I've been looking into for my wife's business, prompted by my own daughter's predilection for online shopping. I hope this has been useful for you with a snippet from our correspondent Charles, to give you an insight, a first person review of what's happening in one of the world'd largest consumer markets (if not the largest), and certainly the world's largest mobile consumer market.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

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