Live shopping platforms are preparing for battle with big tech in 2022

Commerce: Platforms that help creators sell products. There’s also ample room for new entrants. Platforms like PopShop, Whatnot, Huddle and Lit Live are tackling livestream shopping—already a popular phenomenon in China—while others, like The Landing and The Newness, focus on vertical categories such as interior design and beauty, respectively.

Livestreaming as a medium is a conflation of a product as well as as a distribution channel. It exists on a spectrum of being pure entertainment on one-side and a new go-to-market strategies on the other, with different kinds of monetisation models for each side. While western startups have centred around the 'livestreaming as product' theme, China... See more

Already the norm in Asia, Coresight Research predicts that the livestream shopping market is poised to reach $6 billion this year and $25 billion by 2023. In the social media space, Facebook, TikTok and Google-owned YouTube are turning to e-commerce and affiliate marketing as another means of monetizing content creators, whose videos garner hundred... See more

“From the consumer side of things, the appetite for that live content increased right at the same time” as when retailers were attempting to find interactive methods to put products in front of consumers, said Matt Moorut, senior principal analyst at Gartner. “It sort of makes a perfect storm where, from both sides of the equation, there’s more of ... See more

-Livestream commerce is nascent in the U.S., but it’s beginning to take hold. As in non-livestream social commerce, vertical platforms have the most traction. Whatnot, a livestream shopping site for collectibles, is the largest today.