Live streaming for e-commerce: How to upgrade your shopping experience

Retail's shift from physical stores to e-commerce has led to the emergence of live stream shopping, a trend that combines elements of teleshopping with modern video streaming platforms like Twitch. This innovative approach is gaining popularity in regions such as North America and Europe, with China leading the way after Alibaba launched live stream shopping on its Taobao platform in 2016. The format offers several benefits to retailers, including improved product discovery, greater audience engagement, increased trust, enhanced loyalty, better retention rates, and real-time validation of techniques or products. Various use cases for live video commerce have emerged since then, such as influencer streaming, live auctions, personal shopping for high-end goods, product tutorials and demonstrations, and augmented reality (AR). Additionally, retailers can upgrade their live shopping experience by incorporating widgets, quizzes, live chat features, and notifications. To deliver a competitive live commerce experience, businesses should ensure that their platform is scalable, has low latency delivery, is reliable, and offers simple integrations with existing systems. Ably, a realtime PaaS, can help retailers build custom solutions for live video shopping by providing predictable low latencies, highly scalable infrastructure, compatibility with various languages and frameworks, and reduced build and maintenance costs.