Live shopping boosts online sales and brings companies closer to their clients online. In this article, we’ll demystify the live shopping experience by explaining how it works, its pros and cons, and how to integrate it into your business strategy.

What’s in this article?

• What’s live shopping?
  
• How does live shopping work in France?
  
• Live shopping’s advantages
  
• Organizing a live shopping session
  
• Successful live shopping
  
• How Stripe Payments can help you
  

What’s live shopping?

Live shopping is an online interactive sales session that uses social media, mobile apps, video conferencing tools, and hosted streaming platforms on ecommerce sites. During a real-time shopping event, viewers attend a virtual demonstration of the products or services that the seller is offering. They can interact with the video by posting comments, emojis, and questions, and then make purchases in just a few clicks.

This new way to sell comes from China and is experiencing explosive growth globally. However, in France, only 3% of the population has participated in this format.

How does live shopping work in France?

In France, live shopping sessions are usually held by companies to promote new items and offerings and to build close relationships with potential customers. It’s an opportunity for businesses to communicate with their community directly.

Most French sellers turn to social networks (specifically Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat) to share live broadcasts. Others use dedicated channels such as YouTube, Zoom, and Twitch. Some companies, such as Orange, choose to integrate a video application on their website to host their own live shopping events.

A brand expert and influencers often lead these experiences. During a streamed real-time session, they:

• Introduce the brand in an engaging way
  
• Demonstrate how products or services work
  
• Invite the audience to interact with the video content
  
• Reply to questions and comments that appear onscreen
  
• Preview new items and offer exclusives to attendees in real time
  

The goal of this format is to encourage prospects’ curiosity and viewer participation, ultimately converting first-time shoppers into true fans. The interactive aspect of live shopping, as opposed to traditional ecommerce, as well as the immediacy of the interactions, increases participants’ confidence in the brand.

Live shopping’s advantages

Live shopping lets you:

• Increase brand visibility
  
• Expand into new markets
  
• Test your products and services in real time and record audience reactions (Are they interested? Is the offer attractive?)
  
• Encourage loyalty among existing customers by giving them special promotions
  
• Increase sales, your repeat purchase rate, and revenue
  
• Build a loyal community by creating direct relationships with your customers
  

In addition, it's fast and free to get started on some of the social media platforms available.

Organizing a live shopping session

To organize a successful live shopping session, you must:

• Select products or services that you’d like to present
  
• Choose the platform, such as a social network, a streaming channel, an integrated application on the website, etc.
  
• Communicate the events’ details to your community (via social media, through your ecommerce site, by email, or text message)
  
• Get a good-quality camera for streaming and make sure you have a reliable internet connection
  
• Stage your products well to reflect your brand’s identity
  
• Pick an engaging host who understands the items and offerings and can demonstrate their use with confidence
  
• Offer exclusives (that are only valid for a limited period of time) to event participants
  

Successful live shopping

Conducting in-depth market research before launching into live shopping is important. Research your target customer base’s location and choose social media platforms accordingly.

Reply politely to viewers’ questions and comments, and don’t hesitate to ask them questions in turn. The goal is to create a flowing and fluid conversation. You can also invite influencers to participate in the demonstration, which would make the live shopping experience especially appealing to attendees.

If possible, provide the opportunity to buy during the event. Connect your online shop to the live feed and place links to the featured products and services to speed up sales. It’s important to offer high-quality customer service. You can also record the broadcast to share it in a replay.

How Stripe Payments can help you

Stripe Payments offers a unified global payment service. It helps all types of companies (from startups to international corporations) to accept payments online, in person and throughout the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your payment experience: create an easy customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours using pre-built payment interfaces, access to more than 125 payment methods and to Link, a wallet designed by Stripe.
  
• Access new markets faster: access customers throughout the entire world while simplifying and reducing cost when managing multi-currency transactions with trans-border payment options available in 195 countries and 135 currencies.
  
• Unify online and in-person payments: create a unified shopping experience, online and in person to personalize interactions, reward customer loyalty and increase revenues.
  
• Improve payment performance: increase revenues using a range of customized payment tools that are easy to configure, including no-code fraud protection tools and advanced features to improve authorization rates.
  
• Become more efficient using a flexible, dependable platform: grow on a platform designed to evolve with you, with a 99.999% uptime rate and unmatched reliability within the industry.
  

Find out how Stripe Payments can help you optimize your online and in-person payments or sign up today.