Why Live Social Shopping is the Biggest Untapped Opportunity for 2025

Hey everybody,?

I hope yesterday was an amazing holiday for everyone who celebrated. While so many are enjoying down time with loved ones, for all the business owners and marketers out there, this is not the time to rest, but the time to amp things up. With today being Black Friday, I want to kick off the biggest sales period of the year with a deep dive into what I believe is a huge untapped opportunity for so many of you. I’m talking about live social shopping.?

If you’re looking for the competitive advantage in the 2025-2030 era, keep reading to learn how you can leverage live shopping to get your slice of the pie in this exploding market.?

Live Shopping is Already Here

Nine years ago during an episode of The #AskGaryVee show, I said that retail and selling stuff on livestream platforms was very real to me. At the time, I was discussing the potential for QVC-like programming on platforms like Meerkat and Periscope. Now, time has passed and the most relevant platforms in society have evolved, but my thesis stands strong: live shopping on social platforms is going to be huge–and it’s already begun.?

I want you to go to Google and type in “Chinese creator makes millions on livestream.” Last year, Zheng Xiang Xiang sold around $14M in goods in just one week on Douyin livestream (Douyin is the version of TikTok available in China, owned by the same parent company, Bytedance). While the company has since implemented some rules to regulate this type of selling, the fact remains: there are tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in live shopping happening right now.?

The good thing for you and I is that 95% of people still haven’t realized it’s happening.

The Early Mover’s Advantage

This has been the story of my career: I pay attention to human behavior and where the attention is, I do my 50 hours of homework, and I move before 95% of people realize something has “hit.” It’s what happened back in my wine business days. When I was helping build my father’s wine business, I stumbled across this thing called “the internet,” and after doing my research, I decided we needed to strike quickly. Everyone said I was crazy and that people would never buy wine online, but I knew I had something massive. I launched winelibrary.com, one of the country’s first e-commerce platforms for alcohol, and helped scale my dad’s business from $4 to $60M.

Then, it happened again. When Google adwords were in their beginning stages, I bought wine-related keywords for mere cents when no one else could see the value in what I was doing… and then it happened again with TikTok. A few years ago, I was yelling to anyone who would listen that they should get on TikTok and strike while the platform was young. I knew that, just like all the big platforms before it, there would be a period of high organic reach before an inevitable decline–it’s the supply and demand of attention. Sure enough, I get comments, emails, and direct messages every day from people telling me how much they wish they listened and joined TikTok when they first heard me say it.

Well, today, I’m saying the same thing about live social shopping. I know that 99% of the people reading this right now are undervaluing live shopping as a part of their 2025 marketing plan. You may have heard of TikTok Shop, or global selling platforms like Whatnot, but have you really dug in? Have you done your 50-100 hours of homework? Will you take the information in this newsletter and act on it, or will you be messaging me in a few months or next year saying, “Gary, I wish I’d listened”??

Right now, you have the opportunity to be an early mover in a lane where most people are still asleep, and just like in poker, when you know you have a winning hand, you go all-in. Live e-commerce shopping has been a huge topic in China for almost a decade now, but I don’t think that people understand that we’re on the tipping point of live shopping in the U.S. I just sense that we’re going to be talking about live shopping in 2025 the way we talk about A.I. now, and the way we talked about blockchain in 2023… Make no mistake, it’s here. The question is what are you going to do about it??

How To Leverage Live Social Shopping

There’s a reason that QVC and HSN still work. There’s clearly something in the entertainment value, shopping impulses and the way we’re wired that makes us enjoy buying from a live environment–and I believe most if not all of the major platforms will be getting in on the game.?

TikTok Shop

Let’s say you have a side business. The fact that you can have no followers on TikTok, go live tomorrow doing a show from your kitchen, and your livestream will start to show up in random people’s For You Page is ridiculous. That’s free awareness and distribution that you’ve not earned yet, but that the app is providing for you. This is a value that is so extraordinary, I can’t stress it enough.?

Whatnot

As many of you know, I own an intellectual property called VeeFriends, my Pokémon-meets-Sesame Street, and I’m building the brand every day. Well, a few weeks ago, in the conference room right next to my office, I sold $150K worth of hoodies, sweatshirts, beanies and socks in four hours on Whatnot. This, my friends, is the power of live social shopping.?

Whatnot in particular has me very excited because of its global capabilities. For those who don’t know, Whatnot is a social marketplace where you can host or join live shows or auctions. Some of you may have tuned in for my last episode of Tea with GaryVee, or some of our recent VeeFriends livestreams, both of which I’ve been hosting on the Whatnot platform. That being said, I’d be humbled if you joined our Black Friday Megastream happening all day today, starting at 12PM ET. It’s gonna be our biggest show yet with four brand new products dropping during the stream: the 2024 VeeFriends Ornaments Mystery Collection, a Christmas Countdown Pin, a Fearless Fairy Retro Tee, and a Driven Dragon Retro Tee. We’ll also be selling discounted Vending Machine bundles direct to consumers for the first time ever. Come hang out with me and the team and get your holiday shopping done during the show!?

Back to the point… whether you’re looking for new ways to engage with your community or venturing into consumer packaged goods, Whatnot is a platform you should be exploring. Especially for those of you with an international community or consumer base, Whatnot is a game-changer because it allows you to sell to a global audience. If you’re from outside of the United States, you can buy seamlessly through the app and it’ll send your purchase directly to you. It also features the ability to bring special guests into your livestreams virtually for a more engaging, interactive experience.?

The Future of Live Shopping

If you ask me, right now, how to make money in the next five years in America out of all the options in the world, live shopping would be at the very top of my list. If you’re a retailer and you have a physical location, like a Main Street, downtown store, you know that “Monday through Friday” is dead because the world is changing – people are doing more online shopping, rents are getting harder to justify, and more.?

In five years, I believe you’ll walk down Main Street and half of these store owners or their employees are going to be doing live shopping. They’re going to turn their stores into studios because the opportunity will be real. I believe retail in 2025 will become multichannel; it’ll be harder to survive just on brick-and-mortar. However, with the explosion of live shopping, you can have a first-mover advantage if you act now.?

As always, I hope you found value in this newsletter. I would love to hear from you. Leave me a comment down below with your thoughts, and don’t forget to join me and the VeeFriends team for the Black Friday Megastream, today at 12PM ET.

• Join the Black Friday Megastream today, November 29th, starting at 12PM ET. Tune in for exclusive VeeFriends product drops and giveaways every 30 minutes! Plus, if it’s your first time joining our Whatnot show, use code VF15 for $15 off your first purchase!
• Purchase a copy of my new book, Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World. Available in hard copy and audiobook!
• Check out my new VeeFriends Cartoons in collaboration with Moonbug on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel!
• My first children’s book is out now! Grab a copy of Meet Me in the Middle for the youngsters in your life!
• Shop the VeeFriends Apparel Collection featuring some of your favorite characters.
• Watch my latest YouTube video: The Top 3 Key Things To Do In Building A Brand In 2025 (And The Worst)

Unfortunately, I have been alerted to some phishing scams attempting to take advantage of my communities. Please, don’t fall for it! I do not have a Telegram and will never message you there. For more information on avoiding scams, read here.