Dusseldorf Anyone who clicks the “Live” button on the Douglas perfumery chain’s website feels as though they have been transferred to the program overview of a shopping channel. During the Christmas season there were up to six video sales shows a day, there were make-up tips with the model Sylvie Meis, and the crystal heiress Victoria Swarovski praised her new cosmetics collection.
In just one year, live shopping for Douglas has developed from an experiment into an important sales channel. The number of viewers for the shows rose to more than 1.2 million last year. And the most important thing is: you generate sales. In some shows, almost every second viewer bought the advertised goods with a direct click.
Douglas is thus banking on one of the most exciting future trends in retail. In China, live shopping is already an estimated 300 billion US dollars a year. On October 20, 2021, influencer Austin Li – also known as Lipstick King – sold goods worth the equivalent of $ 1.7 billion in a single, twelve-hour live broadcast.
German retailers are still a long way from these dimensions. But more and more companies are discovering the new technology. Not only Douglas, Tchibo or Media Markt organize sales shows. Even furniture stores such as XXXLutz and Höffner, the Hagebau markets or the discounter Lidl are experimenting with live videos as a sales channel.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Because the potential is huge. “We are assuming that five to ten percent of sales in e-commerce in Germany will be made through live shopping in five years’ time,” says Tim Thiele, e-commerce expert at the management consultancy Alixpartners. Based on the projections of the retail research institute IFH for the development of online retail, that would be a market volume of up to 14 billion euros – in Germany alone.
Technical problems endanger the brand
According to a survey by Alixpartners, 42 percent of Germans can already relate to the term live shopping. But only nine percent of those surveyed have actually taken part in such an event. For comparison: According to the same survey, more than 80 percent of Chinese people made purchases via live streams in the past year.
One of the drivers for the development in Germany is Alex von Harsdorf, founder of Livebuy. His company offers a complete platform with which retailers can offer live sales shows on their website, including a chat function for users and a direct connection to their web shop. Livebuy now looks after 30 retailers, including Douglas, Tchibo, Lego and Sport-Scheck.
“The topic is gaining enormous momentum, there is an increasing number of dealers who deal with it,” observed von Harsdorf. Companies are taking the development in China as a model. On November 11th alone, the day of the Chinese Singles’ Day sales event, Livebuy held 50 live shows for its customers in Germany. In the whole of 2021 there were around 1000.
“The hurdle for retailers is relatively low, they can get started with little effort,” says Anna Holz, e-commerce expert at Diconium, an agency for digital transformation. It is very important to be authentic, to address the customer directly. “Then it becomes human in the relationship with the customer, you can make a brand approachable,” she says.
But it also warns against not taking the technical challenge seriously. “When live shopping is done well, it looks easy, but there is a lot of effort behind it,” warns Holz. If the technical problems are too big, there is not only the risk that customers will be angry and never return. “If it doesn’t work, the brand risks suffering.”
Experts see Douglas as a role model in Germany
According to the expert, Douglas is doing an exemplary job. “You not only have a very professional studio, but also an analysis team that can measure customer behavior and evaluate the data,” explains Holz.
The perfumery retailer only started using live shopping with the first lockdown in March 2020. Initially via Youtube, but there was no direct link to the webshop. For this reason, Douglas has been relying on Livebuy technology for over a year.
Since then, the business has exploded. The retailer is already using live shopping in eight countries, and the number is expected to grow to 18 by the summer.
“We have a lot of traffic on our site and know our customers very well. Of course, our more than 47 million customer cards also help us here, ”says Yassin Hamdaoui, who heads the Social Commerce and Data Management division at Douglas. “That’s why we can play out the video content in a very targeted manner.”
Media-Markt-Saturn made its first steps with the new technology in 2016 and has now also set up its own team that has produced four to five live shopping programs per month, and even up to ten live shopping programs a month in the run-up to Christmas. “We are very satisfied with the experiences we have made so far,” emphasized a company spokesman.
Lidl presents Barbara Meier’s collection
This also applies to the reach, the community is getting bigger and bigger. Streams with strong topics and products are attended by more than 1,000 customers at the same time, while innovation shows, in which, for example, new cell phones are presented, often have more than 2,000.
In contrast, the discounter Lidl is still more in the experimental phase. The company organized a unique live shopping event with sustainable fashion from the “Mini-Me” collection of the former top model winner Barbara Meier. On a Sunday in 30 minutes each morning, noon and evening, customers had the opportunity to get to know the collection and order it in advance. The designer also reported from her everyday family life.
Experts are rather skeptical of such individual projects. “The decisive factor is regularity, only then can I build up a customer base,” says consultant Thiele. In order to do that well, a longer breath is necessary. Success does not show itself in just a few weeks.
“Anyone who thinks they can generate huge sales with just two live shows is wrong,” said Douglas manager Hamdaoui. “It is important to offer shows and videos regularly and thus to create a lot of content.”
“The next challenge for dealers is to create the processes and structures to scale the topic and increase sales potential,” says technology provider von Harsdorf. You might get one live stream per month on a project basis. “But if you want to do this regularly, you need special specialists and departments who don’t do anything else,” advises the Livebuy founder.
Influencers and manufacturers produce their own videos
Douglas is already one step further. In order to offer the audience a larger and varied selection of video content, the company is building a platform on which influencers and brand manufacturers can upload videos themselves – of course, controlled and advised by the Douglas team.
For example, there is already a regular make-up master class there today by the cosmetics manufacturer Mac with Sylvie Meis. Influencer and cosmetics retailer Kylie Jenner also addresses customers exclusively via video. And already eleven Douglas employees give beauty tips by video on their part-time jobs as “creators”.
“We don’t just want to inform, we also want to entertain,” explains Douglas manager Hamdaoui. “The entertainment factor is very important in live shopping.” In this way, Douglas can now better reach a younger target group that has grown up with video content through social networks such as Instagram. Almost half of the customers there are between 16 and 30 – an age group that is otherwise in short supply in the Douglas perfumeries.
And then they are usually easy to persuade to buy. “The advantage is that customers switch on when they intend to buy, and therefore the probability of generating good sales is high,” says e-commerce expert Holz. “Sometimes up to 50 percent of viewers also make a purchase.”
More: How James Bond can fuel sales on Amazon’s Marketplace