Live Video E-Commerce

Live Video E-commerce has become an absolute necessity since the COVID crisis of 2020 emerged. During the summer of 2020, Simplur clients who had brick-and-mortar stores were able to rely almost exclusively on their WooCommerce stores to generate between 20x and 100x the sales they had in 2019.

But their e-commerce success didn’t necessarily keep them connected to their customer base. We needed a way to combine e-commerce and video for them. Simplur engineered a live video e-commerce solution that enabled our clients to keep connected to their communities while generating sales figures that exceeded their expectations.

Usually, visitors to a site may come in through a video showing just one product, and the economics of the visit indicate an all-or-nothing bet they can convert the sale for that one product.

With Simplur’s live video e-commerce solution, our clients have been able to sell far more products per visit – sometimes up to 10 different products on a single visit. That fundamentally changes the economics of online marketing. Even if sales just double per visit, that allows for much higher spending to obtain visitors.

After realizing this opportunity to shift the economics of a user session, we converted the technology we developed to work for pre-recorded videos. That allows our clients to pre-record their presentations and make them available to stream anytime.

Our solution focuses on a few core principles:

1. The customers must be able to view all the products in a presentation without leaving the video page.
2. All products can be added to the cart without leaving the video page.
3. The products are shown next to the video while they are being discussed so no scrolling is necessary.
4. The user can choose to view the products on their own page and easily come back to the same spot in the video.
5. The cart link is always available and checkout is snappy and secure.

You can see all of these in the following 2 images. In the “Freestanding Spider Web Pumpkin Patch”, notice the product being discussed is next to the video. In the next image, you can see how the product changes along with the video to represent the next item being discussed, the Baby Safari pattern.

The solution integrates perfectly with WooCommerce, but the technology we use for it is the lightning fast Gatsby headless WordPress solution developed for Simplur. In most cases, we can set up the system within a few days for existing WooCommerce users with an online store.

To learn more about this live video e-commerce solution, please check out the following talk given by one of our developers, Muhammad Muhsin, for the 2020 WP Agency Summit.