TalkShopLive raises $3M
By the time we met the TalkShopLive team, the COVID-19 pandemic had already upended commerce in the US. US e-commerce sales boomed, expected to reach $794.5B this year. Businesses invested heavily in e-commerce, many for the first time, as they rushed to find alternative revenue streams online. Consumer shopping behaviors changed permanently, with many shopping online for the first time, or shopped new categories online for the first time.
This dramatic shift in purchasing behavior has reinvigorated live shopping. QVC and HSN may seem like oddities for younger consumers, but the numbers don’t lie. Qurate’s (parent company of QVC and HSN) revenue is greater than Shopify, Etsy, Pinterest, Zoom, and Twitter — combined at $11B in 2019.
Content creators and influencers will become marketplaces of their own, and we’re already seeing the tensions today between them and the platforms they work on. Creators want to propagate their content across the web, but social platforms want lock-in, and this has led to some ugly demonetization fights. TalkShopLive (TSL) provides a live streaming, shareable, embeddable commerce platform, and we believe this represents the market’s next logical evolutionary step. TSL’s enablement of video with an embedded buy/checkout button gives creators the power to become market makers in their own right by allowing them to funnel their traffic to wherever they want it to go.
What is Livestream Selling?
Livestream selling takes the convenient, albeit isolating, experience of shopping online and folds in the social elements of shopping at a brick and mortar store. However in this case, customers aren’t interacting with an anonymous store associate. Instead, they’re being pitched by a trusted influencer they already follow in an environment where they’re able to interact with said influencer. Customers not only get to have their questions answered, but they form a stronger emotional connection to the experience overall. Customers who livestream shop are more engaged, more loyal and tend to spend more money. TSL boasts a customer conversion rate that’s nearly 6x the industry average.
Livestream selling has been popular in Asia, specifically in China. Many of us Westerners probably got our first exposure to the phenomenon when Kim Kardashian appeared with Viya, a Chinese celebrity influencer, on Viya’s Taobao channel and proceeded to sell thousands of bottles of perfume in a matter of seconds. Although Kim K’s fame no doubt helped drive demand, Viya is a powerhouse in her own right, having sold $2.8B worth of goods in 2019. And no, you read that correctly, that’s $2.8 Billion with a B.
Why hasn’t Livestream Selling Taken Off in the US?
Social shopping clearly works in other parts of the world, but the closest thing we’ve seen in the US is Instagram’s much maligned “Shop” button. What’s missing here?
The available infrastructure we have that’s responsible for driving direct sales through digital media is broken. There’s too much content that’s being algorithmically throttled, and tracking influencer ROI on impressions vs. sales intent and conversion is murky and inefficient, leading to wasted marketing dollars. Worst of all, shareable video content lacks built-in commerce mechanisms.
At the end of the day, there are too many barriers on both sides of the table. Consumers often have to sift through multiple apps, browsers and payment providers to buy that one product they saw in an ad. Businesses have to navigate a tangle of payment networks, marketplaces and marketing providers just to get their products available online and in front of the right buyers.
TalkShopLive: Just Hit the Button
TSL provides an all in one experience for both buyers and sellers. Businesses are able to create a channel, start a live show, and distribute that stream in a way that’s not dictated by the existing platforms today. Customers can interact directly with the seller, and there’s a built-in purchasing flow that they can go through all without leaving the stream. TSL even helps businesses manage their fulfillment and payout.
Other existing livestream selling providers are focused on driving consumers to download their app. What makes TSL unique is that the streams themselves are platform agnostic, allowing businesses to embed them across any website or social channel, all while retaining the embedded checkout functionality. All customers have to do is click the button to buy, regardless of where they’re viewing the stream.
Outside of TSL’s alignment with the growing livestream selling trend, what really caught our eye was the company’s impressive customer list. They’ve signed major enterprise clients, and have worked with celebrity sellers such as Matthew McConaughey, Alicia Keys, and Garth Brooks. TSL even teamed up with Howie Mandel to create a “Save Small Business” campaign where he highlights small businesses and enables customers to buy their products through TSL’s platform.
The Future is Live
We believe that the future of commerce will be live, and TSL, along with the US market as a whole, is still in the very early innings of this transformation. Customers today are savvy, and value a genuine connection with who they’re buying from, whether it’s a name brand or local business. More importantly, Gen Z and Millennial buyers care about a seller’s buyers and ethics, and TSL can help sellers demonstrate their values and forge stronger ties with their audiences. We’re incredibly excited about TSL’s vision to not only change how big box retailers reach consumers today, but also how small businesses around the country can leverage TSL’s platform to add new revenue streams.
The TSL team has executed extraordinarily well, and has taken full advantage of the opportunity that consumer behavioral changes have granted them. This new round of funding will help TSL continue to build the tools to empower businesses to provide their customers a more intimate and engaging digital shopping experience.
We’re so excited to welcome TalkShopLive to the Fourth Realm family. We’re excited to partner with such a dynamic team, and the business has made incredible strides already since our initial investment. We can’t wait to see how they continue to grow and reshape the buying landscape!
