Live shopping: the past, present and future of e-commerce
28th April 2022 What if the human interaction element of in-store shopping could be combined with the convenience of e-commerce? In case you missed it, selling via online livestreams is the newest online shopping craze, following a pattern of Asian trends making waves on the western retail scene. How it started Although live shopping is a relatively new phenomenon in the UK, televised home shopping (i.e., teleshopping) has been popular here since the late 1970s and was even experimented with as early as the 1950s. Shopping channels such as the Home Shopping Network and QVC were introduced to market products to customers at home through live sales pitches and product demonstrations. This remains a popular sales technique in certain subsectors, such as the jewellery market – JTV still broadcasts to 80 million homes in the US. Although many companies may have since moved away from this sales format, favouring the ease and convenience of online ads and one-click online shopping, newer forms of media are bringing a resurgence of the teleshopping format. Shopshops, one of the first interactive live-commerce marketplaces, was created by Liyia Wu in 2015 to connect retail stores with Chinese consumers. The Chinese live-commerce market is now colossal, with an...
