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It’s easy to look back at weekends of shopping through rose-tinted glasses, forgetting the endless changing room queues and abandoned baskets in favour of the feel of the fabrics and time spent with friends. Online shopping may have brought ease and convenience, but traditional e-commerce lacks community and experience, leaving shoppers yearning for new retail avenues. With 97 per cent of Gen Z consumers citing social media as their top source of shopping inspiration, the door is open to opportunities that combine convenience with connection.
By adapting to the changing wants and needs of the modern consumer, retailers can create more meaningful digital shopping experiences. Enter live streaming: a subsector of e-commerce that has already taken off in regions like China, generating over $150 billion in the market in 2022, per Euromonitor. In fact, live streaming is expected to make up 20 per cent of e-commerce sales within the next two years.
Live streaming sits at the intersection of e-commerce and entertainment for an engaging audience experience that showcases products in real time. Unlike the bygone era of teleshopping, live streams make use of influencers and other popular figures to move away from forced infomercials and towards more authentic endorsements. For Bonnie Zhao, general manager at AliExpress UK, entertainment is a central component to commerce. “It captures people’s attention, creates emotional connections, and enhances the overall shopping experience,” says Zhao.
The live interaction offered by streams enables audiences to ask questions and receive an immediate response, sparking authentic conversation while maximising the ways audiences interact through social media.
Beyond engagement and entertainment, there are practical benefits for both shoppers and brands. For brands, live streams help to inform decisions around the promotion of popular products by gauging audience preferences; for customers, they enable a greater understanding of the products available for purchase, meaning they are more informed and increasingly likely to be satisfied. In turn, reducing the risk of returns — as well as their costly environmental impact. It is clear that for all parties — customers, brands, retailers, the planet — that the opportunities of live streaming are plentiful.
Live streaming on a global stage
Live streaming has met with huge success in China, which can be partly credited to its role in responding to audiences’ changing media habits — it entertains, simplifies shopping and ultimately allows brands to cut through the noise. “In today’s digital age, consumers are inundated with countless options and distractions, making it challenging for brands to stand out,” says Zhao.
Largely gaining traction in lockdown, the e-commerce innovation capitalised on the 788 million users accessing online via their mobile phones. By recognising that this uptick in online usage was born largely out of a desire for connection and entertainment, live streaming reaches beyond the confines of traditional e-commerce to make shopping an interactive event that taps both influencers and celebrities in the process.
In China, live-streaming events can draw in audiences of hundreds of thousands of people. Often hosted by popular influencers or celebs, they might include interactive games and time-limited offers. The streams are high energy, sometimes even unpredictable, and keep audiences gripped through the possibility of a one-off bargain. As Zhao puts it: “China’s embrace of live-streaming commerce has transformed shopping into an interactive and entertaining experience, driving sales through real-time engagement and influencer marketing.”
Streamlining the shopping experience for the UK market
Overall, e-commerce continues to grow at a rapid rate — with apparel and accessories widely considered the biggest subcategory — but often online shop fronts fail to provide customers with an accurate understanding of the products they are about to purchase. Combatting customer concerns around fit, quality and feel by opening up interactive discourse, live streaming offers the opportunity to showcase apparel in full. And according to Zhao, “It stands as the best way for brands and live-stream hosts to demonstrate product quality and details to consumers.” Clothing has, therefore, emerged as the most popular product category for live-stream shoppers in Europe, according to McKinsey’s 2023 report.
Online retailer AliExpress — already an e-commerce giant — is about to expand its live-stream offering into the UK market along with ‘Choice’, its elevated shopping service for sellers. Choice has been designed to ease cross-border shopping for both merchants and shoppers. The service enables the brand to exercise greater control over product selection and quality while offering a wider selection of stock. By managing consumers’ end-to-end shopping experiences, the retailer has been able to increase customer satisfaction levels.
The UK is the third largest e-commerce market in the world after China, and live streaming presents a global opportunity for retailers. Yet for British shoppers who are new to live streaming, ease and experience are paramount. Ensuring that live streaming becomes an embedded part of the overall purchase journey will help to amplify its benefits and ensure that it can act as an entry point or source of inspiration, sparking new purchases without causing friction. Embedding live streaming into the existing customer journey can create a more holistic customer experience, though brands must be mindful of the stock levels of featured products as well as the ease of checkouts.
For the Chinese market, it’s this holistic experience and the streamlining of social and commerce platforms that drives the live-shopping experience. “Social media features seamlessly intertwine with shopping experiences,” says Zhao. “By leveraging social networks for product discovery, recommendations and peer interactions, Chinese e-commerce platforms create a more engaging and personalised shopping journey.”
Alibaba’s China commerce platforms have further created a feedback loop between consumers and merchants, ensuring that new products reflect the demand of the marketplace. The platform offers the latest product drops, free shipping and free returns with guaranteed delivery times through its Choice service — all making the customer journey as smooth as possible. It also allows customers to shop in their local currency so they don’t accrue any hidden costs while minimising barriers to adoption.
Cultural cut through via community
For all the practical benefits of live streaming, introducing shopping habits takes time. While the adoption of streams is fairly nascent in the West, leaning on influencers and considering how to maximise existing media habits can help to establish a new audience base.
Instead of leading customers into entirely unknown territory, looking to popular culture and capitalising on community is a way of building an audience on ready-made foundations. To tailor its UK offering, AliExpress created a UK Influencer Collective named ‘It Girls by AliExpress’, launched by TV presenter and model Olivia Attwood.
It Girls by AliExpress is an interactive programme that allows influencers to curate their own edits on the AliExpress site. A personalised shop front lets them engage directly with their followers through short videos and self-hosted live streams within the platform. Attwood and fellow Love Island star Kady McDermott are among the various well-known British influencers to have their own shoppable curations. Aside from being able to browse the recommendation channels of their favourite personalities, consumers can purchase items through the It Girls mini shop as well as directly from live streams.
Attwood is working with AliExpress to host live streams and believes their audience will embrace the opportunity to connect in a retail setting where they can effectively shop together. Sharing opinions and style tips, the live stream is an opportunity for hosts to showcase their knowledge and connect with their audience in a new way. It’s this element of live streaming that Attwood looks forward to. “I’m so excited to give my followers the opportunity to engage with me directly in real-time and have a bit of an insight into the things I look for when shopping,” she says.
The new offering from AliExpress seeks to mirror the behaviour of British customers. According to the Vogue Business Index, 22 per cent of consumers in the UK rely on influencers to discover apparel brands, compared with an average of 19 per cent globally; and when considering the region’s underdeveloped live-streaming market — making up just 0.7 per cent of e-commerce sales in 2023, per Euromonitor — tapping well-known talent also helps develop trust. For AliExpress’s Zhao, it’s the authenticity and connection that influencers develop with their followers that makes influencer marketing so impactful. “It leverages the trust and credibility that influencers have built with their followers to drive engagement, brand awareness, and ultimately, sales.”
Meanwhile, feeding into discovery habits and trends contributes to wider community building. As Attwood puts it, “Influencer marketing effectively bridges the gap between brands and consumers by providing recommendations that resonate with people.”
Powered by influencers
From micro-influencers with small but dedicated audiences of less than 100,000 followers to celebrity influencers who boast followings in their millions, the UK is home to a powerful influencer infrastructure. Size aside, influencer talents have built strong relationships with their communities through authentic content that lets people into their lives.
Smaller influencers tend to have extremely loyal fan bases, as they are able to create deeper connections with followers through more personal and authentic content. The deep level of trust they are able to build makes their audiences increasingly susceptible to recommendations and their opinions highly sought after. The tailored and bespoke approach taken by micro-influencers is what makes them invaluable brand advocates; their reach may be smaller but the depth of their connection and engagement is often stronger, which translates to higher conversion rates. According to Zhao, “They often boast higher engagement with harder-to-reach, niche audiences.”
Mid-sized and celebrity influencers can elevate brand visibility to their vast communities. While maintaining an authentic tone of voice built around their personal brands, influencers can also act to spread the message of partnership brands far and wide. Particularly within the fashion and beauty sector, these influencers are style advocates, pushing forward items or trends as their followers look to them for inspiration. Though Zhao cautions that there must be an alignment of values between the two parties: “The most important thing is to work with influencers that reflect and align with your brand values and brand experience.”
AliExpress will continue to work with influencers in the UK market long term, as well as using different collaboration formats like live stream, content creation, affiliate programme and events.
New avenues of connection
The power of connection and the importance of community building isn’t only helpful for shoppers who want to make purchases based on recommendations from those they trust, live streaming equally acts as an opportunity for the influencers involved to develop their own communities, share expertise and generate a closer connection with their following.
For influencers, live streaming offers a chance to diversify their income streams. At the mercy of changing algorithms and social media platforms, the importance of generating alternative revenue streams should not be overlooked in the current economic landscape. This is commended by Attwood who iterates that the financial needs of influencers are the same as all other self-employed individuals. “Diversifying your revenue streams is an important strategy to any businessperson. It provides stability and security as it reduces reliance on any single source of income,” she says.
In 2022, 65 per cent of British influencers were full-time, according to Adobe’s Future of Creativity study, which is a surprising majority considering it being a side hustle to many. Partnering with AliExpress means live streamers receive commission on every purchase made, adding to that all-important income flow that opens the floor to further ventures. “It allows you to showcase the various sides of your personality and interests, which is important for followers,” Attwood adds.
Culture, community and commerce
While live streaming may be in its infancy in the UK, its ability to interact with culture, build communities and streamline commerce makes it an exciting area for growth.
Influencers and their unique skills for creating content that resonates with their audiences means that live streams can be current and culturally relevant to viewers. Influencers are this generation’s celebrities, and with the lines between shopping and entertainment continuing to blur, live streaming sees commerce become entertainment — injecting into a cultural touchpoint.
Harking back to the days when shopping was a way to connect with friends, live streaming builds community and a sense of belonging by connecting audiences through a shared interest in fashion. This incorporates the social element of commerce tailored to modern-era connection.
In a market where 80 per cent of the population makes e-commerce purchases, finding new ways to enhance the shopping experience — reducing the risk of returns, increasing satisfaction, showcasing different product ranges — is an exciting prospect for consumers and brands alike.
Live streaming is breathing new life into the rapidly expanding e-commerce landscape. With its unique ability to combine the practical benefits of online shopping with entertainment and connection, it’s about time more brands tapped in.
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