Did Live Commerce just hit the Trough of Disillusionment?
Live Commerce took a couple of left hooks to the jaw recently. Both Facebook and TikTok have dropped this feature. YouTube continues to experiment. Instagram seems to be the only consistent play at this point.
Fun Rises in the East
Livestream shopping has become popular in Asia and particularly in China, as TikTok parent company ByteDance has seen sales on Douyin, more than triple year over year. This has experts thinking whether this trend will take off in the Western Hemisphere. If so, should brands start to invest in Live-streaming and Live Commerce capabilities.
Data from eMarketer agrees with this trend -
Two Left Hooks
Well… Meta just announced that it will be shutting down Live Shopping feature on October 1st to focus on Reels. They wrote in the blog post that you will still be able to use Facebook Live to broadcast live events, but you won’t be able to create product playlists or tag products in your Facebook Live videos.
As a small business owner who leverages Facebook considerably, we haven’t given much thought to live streaming or shopping. Perhaps that’s more of an indicator of our target demographic than anything else. Facebook’s demo is already skewing older. Maybe that’s the reason. After all — This feature was designed to give creators and brands an interactive way to sell items, connect with viewers and potentially gain new customers. And Facebook’s primary demo might not be into all that.
Meta said, “If you want to reach and engage people through video, try experimenting with Reels and Reels ads on Facebook and Instagram…. If you have a shop with checkout and want to to host Live Shopping events on Instagram, you can set up Live Shopping on Instagram.”
So, Live Commerce on Instagram is still alive and kicking (for now).
Earlier, TikTok had announced its plans to drop it’s “Shop” feature. The company had reportedly planned to launch TikTok Shop in Germany, France, Italy and Spain in the first half of this year, and then in the U.S. later this year.
So… is this the beginning of the end?
A Glimmer of Hope
Amazon has continued building on its Live success. While exact numbers aren’t available, according to the company’s blog, “tens of millions of customers” watched the streams on Amazon Live and engaged with creators over 100,000 times via its live chat feature.
YouTube continues to experiment in this space. They’ve hosted a couple of Live Commerce events, one for the holidays last year, and another focussed on Beauty influencers earlier this year.
So, perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps this is just the rationalization phase.
Time will tell.
