“Overall, I think live commerce remains an interesting space for experimentation, but I’ve seen little evidence consumers actually want to see it.” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. “YouTube has been trying various shopping experiments for years and they haven’t yet figure out how to make them work. So I wouldn’t expect too much out of this.”
“Amazon is the largest retailer experimenting with live commerce, but its lackluster content is embarrassing and few Amazon shoppers are even aware it exists,” said Kaziukėnas. “There are also live commerce focused startups, but they tend to lack the selection of products and it’s unclear if there is great demand from users to use separate apps for live commerce,” added Kaziukėnas.
Kaziukėnas, however, isn’t so sure that the U.S. is going to have a livestream shopping revolution similar to what happened overseas. “The idea that e-commerce features popular elsewhere can be transplanted into the U.S. is not always true,” he added.
“Companies in the West haven’t figured out the right formula for content quality, product selection and consumer touch-points to make live streaming work. Either the content is poor, or products are not interesting, or the whole experience lives in a separate app users don’t have,” said Kaziukėnas.