Why Aren't You Doing Live Shopping on Your Store Yet? (Top Brands are Going Live Every Week!)

Jay Myers: Claudio. I don't normally do this, this is a rare occasion. You are coming on for a second appearance in a relatively short time because about a month ago, you and I were chatting, we had a call, we have calls every now and then, and you started showing me the live shopping. Functionality of Videowise.

And then I started looking into some of the data. You shared some of the data, which was mind blowing. I started looking into some of the data about the effects of live video and I was like, Claudio, you gotta come back on. So here we are. First of all, welcome back. Thanks for coming on again.

Claudiu Cioba: Thank you, Jay.

Jay Myers: I know you're on vacation, I think, with the family, but you snuck into a room somewhere in the corner there of the house to join.

But I super thankful. So, you know, I know that brands, using Videowise, they're seeing, well, I think you've posted over 25% higher conversion. They have 20, 20% higher a OV average order value when they use a video. Videowise has almost no impact on site speed. But now live shopping is huge in Asia.

Other parts of the world starting to become big in America. But I St You've said that brands that lean into it now you think are gonna lead the next two to three years of growth. So I want someone listening to this episode to come out of it understanding, a, how they can leverage live video, how they can use it.

Is it hard? Is it easy? What tools do they need? How to get started? Let's dive into, first gimme the, because in case someone didn't listen to your first episode, tell me a little bit about video-wise, the platform, and then let's get into some live shopping topics.

Claudiu Cioba: Absolutely Jay. So just a very high level overview of Videowise. Videowise is an e-commerce video platform. We are dedicated, we're dedicated video platform towards brands and retailers. With the sole purpose of increasing revenue and adding incremental revenue to these brands. So we optimize conversions through shoppable videos on site, on PDPs homepage, landing pages on their mobile apps, email flows.

So it's an omni-channel approach that increases conversion rate, revenue per session, and average order value, seeing about 10 to 35% increase in conversion rates on average. And we add significant incremental revenue through live shopping for these brands. The platform has a lot more solutions like our very own AI studio, where we produce in bulk AI videos and images for different use cases like ads or look books or product one eighties.

And we also have our own splicing system where we divide videos into different pieces of content like problem, value proposition, close up, and allow agencies or brands to really index. Easily find scenes or particular moments within their content as a complete video platform. We offer multiple solutions, but the one that we're here to talk about today is live shopping Now.

Live shopping is we are not reinventing live shopping. What we're doing is mainly perfecting an existing sales channel that is live shopping. Live shopping has been around for multiple years. It has always been the subject of this is the next big thing in e-commerce. In the beginning, I really didn't believe that this was the next big thing.

But what I came to be convinced of. Is the fact that this is a proper sales channel, like you can actually add tons of incremental revenue to your business if you leverage live shopping. There's so much opportunity there, and it's such a version territory for brands that they have to explore, especially when they feel like they are plateauing or they're at a stage where they're mostly finding new opportunities and they're opening up new sales channels.

I can say without a doubt that live shopping is one of those channels that where you can see a lot of numbers popping. And it's not just for product launches or for special occasions. The most successful brands that we see are doing it on a regular basis simply after trying it out. And in this episode, I will be presenting some case studies and some brands that are extremely successful. I can't name a lot of, I, there are some names that I can say, there are some numbers that I can say without saying names. But I, and I will even drop some links that people can check out as well. But I'll also be I'm also gonna talk about our playbook for live shopping.

We've developed an internal playbook to maximize revenue and growth coming from this sales channel called live shopping.

Jay Myers: Awesome. I'm, so, I, my, my head is going in 10 different directions right now, and I'm just trying to think, okay, where should we start? 'Cause a, we've got the holidays coming up. I'm thinking, man, this would be an amazing way to run some promotions, do some live events for the holidays. You sent me a link the other day.

You're like, Hey Jay, you wanna see how easy it is to join live shopping? And so like, the potential to bring guests on. Let's, I wanna get into all of that, maybe. I think most people listening are just intimidated right off the bat When they hear live shopping, they think, oh, this is hard. I might need special equipment.

This is gonna take, it's huge setup. I'm, I am not an expert in video at all. So before we get into some of the cool things you can do with it, I think we need to show, like, you, you had a live stream up and running in literally seconds, but like, what would someone need to do from. Zero to a live stream running on their store.

Just explain that in detail from like, right now someone had, doesn't even use Videowise, doesn't, you know, has never done live shopping at all the whole process,

Claudiu Cioba: So there are only two things that you actually need. Number one is a stable internet connection. You need a reliable internet connection. Number two, you need a device with a camera. And the preferred device is the phone. All you need is the phone. You know,

Jay Myers: So just like an iPhone. Or an Android or

Claudiu Cioba: Everyone doesn't matter.

Any of any mobile device, even a tablet. But iPhones and some of these recent Androids, they have really good back cameras. And I would highly recommend that they can be as good as a DSLR. You can tell sometimes, but Videowise works with any camera regardless, even if it's a professional camera or a phone.

And when it comes to live shopping, the most successful brands that we, that, that are streaming through Videowise and that are selling online through Videowise, they use an iPhone. That's all they do. They have an iPhone, they put it on a stand, and then they have a location. Most of the time it's inside their store or in a special corner in their warehouse.

And that's where they have a background with their products or they have a clothing rack. They, they just wanna showcase different products that are on sale during that stream. So it's quite easy to go live in terms of the actual technical setup. It's even easier. All you have to do, like Videowise, is free to install.

And you can purchase live shopping by talking to our team. And we we even have very low pricing starting at just $49. But one special offer that I want to include is everyone that's coming from this podcast is we will give away two live shows for free. So anyone that's hearing about video, eyes and live shopping in this podcast, just book a meeting with us directly on the website and just mention that you've heard about Videowise in the Shopify 1% podcast from Jay. And you'll have two free live shows that you can do with Videowise. You'll have our full support. This way you can see how it works. You can feel it

Jay Myers: Yeah. Get a feel for it.

Claudiu Cioba: Exactly and gain that conviction. So setup is seamless. It's really easy. We work on Shopify, on Commerce Cloud, on Magento, so we have direct integrations with some of the largest platforms, but also on custom retailers. We're working right now with some retailers as well. So super easy setup. You don't need to overthink it, obviously, if you wanna put a production budget behind it.

You, you can do that. And a lot of brands do that when they stream regularly, they want, you know, some nice backgrounds, but it's usually just some boots, you know, everything that just fits in a vertical format. The majority of the audience is watching from a phone. So you just want like this vertical booth, which is pretty thin and you're trying to make the most out of your real estate on screen.

So going live is very easy. There's no hustle to it.

Jay Myers: sorry. Does Videowise create a specific landing page on your store, or does it embed it on any page you want? Or where does it live? And then how do you send a link to your phone to click to start recording or how does that work?

Claudiu Cioba: Sure. So setting it up, you can you have a moderator screen inside, video-wise and on your store you have a dedicated live shopping page where you can see all of the upcoming shows that you schedule when you're, the live shows that are currently happening and the previously recorded show so that people can watch the recordings.

Those recordings are very important. Also, on this page we have a wait for. Customer to RSVP. So any visitor can RSVP and they will leave their email, their phone number and agree to your privacy and terms. And you can collect all of this information. This is a super important part of live shopping, which is the promotion part, and collecting information, communicating to the users prior to a day or an hour before you go live.

Live and also at the moment when you are live. So, we do offer that page on the site. We also offer it in dedicated mobile apps. So it can be a a native mobile app or it can be a tap cart type of mobile app, or a fuego or reactive. We can put live streams in there and you can have your own live shopping page inside your mobile app as well.

So it's really easy. However, when we actually go live. We go live on multiple channels at once. This is called simulcasting. So we go live on the site, then we go live on your social channels, on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on X, on Twitch. We go live everywhere. So you want to have an omnichannel presence because the more presence you have, the more eng engage, the more audience will actually see that live.

And it's more, the more likely you are to generate more revenue. And one thing that we do that's very special is we are. Capable of selling live on your site and on Instagram. Instagram, like we are able to do social commerce, like true social commerce. A lot of live, live streaming apps, they just are, they're just able to sell live on the site and they don't truly leverage the Instagram audience, which majority of brands, that's where they have the biggest following is on Instagram.

We have

Jay Myers: does that work on Instagram? Like how do you actually buy it?

Claudiu Cioba: Yeah, it's actually pretty cool. During a livestream event the moderator, somebody, usually there are two people in live minimum. One is the person in front of the camera and one is the person behind the camera. The moderator that Moderat is the show. The moderator is able to highlight certain products at different moments during the live stream when the person in front is showing those products or is wearing them or talking about them.

Whenever a moderator highlights a product on the site, they appear as a shoppable product. Visitors can and viewers can click and instantly purchase. So checkout can happen instantly, and you can even customize it. If you want people to go to the PDP and just view the live stream in the quarter, you can do that.

Or you can just have like straight to checkout, like just buy now. Fast. On Instagram, you don't have the same control that we have on the site because on the site we control the entire platform. On Instagram, we can only stream it. We found a really interesting way to, to perform a transaction on Instagram.

Whenever the moderator highlights a product on the screen, on top of the stream, we show the product photo and a small code underneath it, so let's say P zero one, and you can highlight three products. You have P zero one, P zero two, P zero three, and then there's a sticky comment on Instagram that says, comment the code of the product. To purchase it. So viewers will just enter inside the comment section P zero one if they wanna purchase that product. And what Videowise does it automatically sends a DM on behalf of the brand with a link to the PDP of that product, the person that commented so that they can benefit from the discount and.

Jay Myers: engagement, which is good for the algorithm. Starts pump pumping it up in the people's feeds.

Claudiu Cioba: Exactly. The Instagram social commerce part is, has been I would say a gold mine for our brands simply because. of our brands and most Shopify brands, if not all, they have such a huge Instagram following especially the ones at the upmarket. And whenever you go live on Instagram, you will be first inside, you know, in that list of those story bubbles.

So we always recommend going live as, as often as possible because you're gonna be able to leverage that audience from Instagram and you're gonna be able to generate revenue from it. Almost none of the brands do it right now. They don't even know that they could do this. So it's something that we do.

They don't even know that they can leverage their Instagram audience in this way, and they could go live and actually incentivize that Instagram audience to make purchases from those live streams. And we even track with a cookie system, we track all of the revenue and all of the attribution that's coming from Instagram.

And we have a full understanding of even what users purchase from Instagram. We also know, okay, these are, this is my loyal audience from Instagram, and you can repurpose that loyal audience and retarget them further on. We would love to do the same with TikTok. TikTok is very I would say it's a very difficult environment to do the same thing.

We almost did it, it's still in beta, but they just have a varied closed ecosystem where they don't have the same versatility that Instagram and Meta has when it comes to their developer program.

Jay Myers: Well, and they're also trying to a little bit own the live shopping experience

Claudiu Cioba: on TikTok shop. Yes, especially on TikTok shop. TikTok shop is a great environment. It's closed even according to their own terms of use. You cannot simulcast while you're live on TikTok shop. But we actually found a workaround. So we've been collaborating with, very successfully with TikTok shop agencies.

And these agencies were very smart. They already had the production booth set up for streaming. They already had a talent in front of the camera that was doing the live stream. And all. They started doing two things. Some of them started using the second phone and started streaming on site, on Instagram.

While, but just from a different device or they had a

Jay Myers: And that doesn't violate the terms. It's a se it's a second stream. Yeah,

Claudiu Cioba: I would say that, I would say that one is a big gray, that one with a second phone, but. The straight up one that doesn't violate the terms is they either came in with a new talent, so they had two talents at the same time talking, they're just like pretty close to each other so that they wouldn't like far away enough so that they wouldn't hear each other or they would reuse the same talent immediately after the TikTok shop live was done, they just like, let's start a new one on Instagram and on the website.

So they, the talent for two hours, one hour on shop, one hour on Instagram, on the.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Claudiu Cioba: They managed to, I I think one agency was increasing revenue by 40%, the revenue generated for the clients that they were working with. So a super easy way to leverage other channels outside of TikTok shop with the same talent.

And I mean, you already have the setup done, why wouldn't you leverage it? So this is a really cool thing that we've seen people creatively. Capabilities and leverage them outside of.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I imagine it's one of those things where, you know, in the early days, I say early days, like, you know, like 10 years ago it was Shopify versus Amazon. Right? But really, the best brands never saw it that way. They saw it like, well, I have a strategy for Amazon and I have a strategy for Shopify.

It's just another channel. It's not Shopify versus Amazon. And so, like, I feel like the best brands, it's not live stream on your site versus TikTok. I think it's another channel. And having a good strategy for TikTok shop and for your site and having the two work together, I think is the key.

Do you have any recommendations around that, like acquiring visitors through TikTok shop and then somehow moving them to your site? Because like, one of the things I was worry about with TikTok shop is they can like a creator who has a lot of influence. Can completely drive the sale and they might not ever visit your site.

Like it might just be that you're a creator. I watch you on TikTok shop. I see the product, I buy the product comes to me, but I never visit your site once. And there's a little bit of a threat there, a little bit, and I don't know if it's a real or not, but where you don't own that relationship.

It's not first party, right? And so like. It's a bit scary. The rug could get pulled out from you if all these creators are maybe move on to someone else and I don't know. I'm not saying it's,

Claudiu Cioba: You are making a good point. You're making a good point. That's why TikTok Shop has its own terms of use. Where you can't simultaneously stream on your website and on TikTok shop, you're not, they will penalize you. Like they, you're gonna receive penalties if you actually and even, you know, get to a ban if you start doing these things.

So our strategy and the way that we've seen certain TikTok shop agencies do, it's just go around it. It's like, okay. We'll play your game, but then we will separately or immediately after we stop the live, we're gonna go live. Since we already have the production team in place, we will just go live and continue the live on Instagram and on the site.

And this way you don't violate any of their terms. You're sticking to their rules. But you're also taking advantage of your website audience, of your and of your Instagram following, which again, a lot of brands neglect, like

Jay Myers: Yeah,

Claudiu Cioba: the biggest brands have hundreds of thousands, if not you know, over a million followers.

And that's a lot of people. And if you can communicate to them even days ahead, which I'm gonna get into a separate topic of how important, that's very important for live streaming, which is preparing for live streaming and then promote properly promoting the event. Like, I would consider that one of the most important things that, and one of the most important parts even more important than the live stream itself.

Just because if you prepare really well and you can drive a lot of people to watch your live stream and join even if your production is not that good or your talent, you will still have a high volume to convert from. So preparing is, in my opinion, more important than the show itself.

Jay Myers: Well, let's talk about that. What are some of the steps that someone should do? They're going, they wanna host a live stream. What do you recommend they do to prepare for the most successful livestream?

Claudiu Cioba: I hope I don't forget about any of them. So I will try to to mention a few. When it comes to Instagram, like definitely promoting the live stream on socials, on all social channels, and you have to start promoting it maybe at least a week before the show starts, even two weeks sometimes, depending on how big the offer is and how.

Special of an occasion. You have, if you're streaming regularly, you're gonna just gonna promote it maybe every few days in advance. But if you have like a big black Friday sale that just happens once a year and it's like, okay, this is our Black Friday, or this is our Christmas sale or our Halloween special.

Okay, now we gotta promote that at least maybe a couple of weeks or more in advance and just like keep on promoting it and building hype towards the event the event. And you keep on like teasing them, oh, we're gonna have this discount, or this, and these products are gonna be on on promotion. So Instagram and socials are very important.

You start promoting it either on your Instagram stories because they're gonna appear over there on the top. Some Instagram posts. The second thing is email. Email is extremely important. You already have a loyal audience. You've gotta promote the event. In your email, you, I would, if it's a big event, do a dedicated email.

Right. If it's not that big, just have it part of your emails like, we're live every single Friday. You know, get the best discounts on, on, you know, every Friday. Then you have

Jay Myers: and can,

Claudiu Cioba: Go ahead.

Jay Myers: I was gonna say, can you do giveaways and stuff too? Like I would say, I would send an email saying, we're doing a live stream. We're gonna be featuring some new products. We're gonna be giving away five, or, I don't know, something like that.

Claudiu Cioba: Of course you can. Yeah, of course you can. Of course you can. We actually collect the email addresses and the information for everyone that joins the chat, the live chat. So as soon as they join the live chat. I mean, it's also for safety reasons, even though we have an AI that moderates the chat and it removes any profanity.

It even has auto replies as a chat bot.

Jay Myers: Well,

Claudiu Cioba: still want to collect that information from people that are in, that are super engaged with your live stream, because that's a really loyal customer base that you have over there, and you want to stay close to that customer base and continue to sell to that customer base.

So email and SMS are very crucial. We even have email and SMS RSVPs built in. To Videowise that we send on your behalf. And you can programmatically change the variables that get sent out and you can also change the duration before the show, after the show. So preparing is mostly on your sales channels which is email, SMS, and on your marketing channels, email, sms, and then social media. long as people know about it, you would love to, you would, I would highly recommend having RSVP activated on that livestream page and also having on your homepage, the fact that you're going live like a section we're live on this period, RSVP here to not miss out on the giveaway or on the special discounts.

Part of the preparation. And then obviously the live show happens. And another important part that I'm gonna get into, which is as important as the live stream. So I believe preparation is more important than as important as the live stream is how you continue to sell after the show is done.

So what another another big thing is live streams continue to sell even after they're done. A live show will have maybe one, two hours, three hours, depending on on, on the brand and on the purpose of the show. But what we've noticed is that. A big chunk of revenue will come after the show is done and some of the smartest brands in the space that are our clients that are going live and that leverage live shopping to its fullest potential.

Like they're pushing our platform. The limits they sell more after the live show is done from the live show than during the live show. And I'm gonna share some of the techniques that they use and how they leverage our platform and how they leverage marketing tactics to bring people back and have them purchase.

So,

Jay Myers: yeah, let's hear it like, is that through replays or is that through email drip campaigns going on after, or what,

Claudiu Cioba: It is a

Jay Myers: that success from?

Claudiu Cioba: It is a combination of multiple tactics. So number one, what I mentioned when you're preparing for the show, you have RSVP on people leave their information. Yes, we wanna be notified. When you're going live, you're collecting all that data, then you're starting to collect the data from people that are already inside the live and they're commenting and they're engaged in the chat.

Then you got people from Instagram that have purchased and so forth. So you're starting to collect a big pool of audience and you got a big, a lot of information for every, we actually keep all of that information in a dedicated part in our platform called Audience. And you can even segment it and you can start syncing that with Klaviyo flows.

So what brands do is yes, we do keep the recordings. So they keep the recordings on the page, and then for the next five days, usually a week or a week, about a week or so, they start doing a drip campaign with email and with SMS, Hey, in, you know, in case you missed our live show, the discount is still available.

And they put some urgency. We still have the discount available for the next 24 hours or for the next 48 hours. And they, maybe they do a series of two emails where they follow up and they just. But get people to come back to watch the live show. And that's been working like a charm. I would say that for certain brands that have high a OV, and I'm actually gonna, I have one example of a brand that has a really high A OV, I can't mention their name, but this was the brand that surprised video.

I was like, this surprised our entire company, this brand had the highest revenue from live shopping that we've ever seen. And. And in five weeks they've made over $1 million from live shopping in just five weeks. It,

Jay Myers: the a OV of their product? Like what's

Claudiu Cioba: that is the thing. They have very high a OV, so very high A OV.

And this was the product where we even thought we had an internal bug, because during the live show, yes, there was revenue, but it wasn't, I would say it wasn't even like 20% of like that million. It was like 200 something thousand. People were purchasing after. Why? Because the live streams were very short.

They were in one hour. The product was super high, a OV. And then we started thinking it's like, I don't think there's a bug in the app. People don't just impulse buy these high a OV products, but they do come back. And when we started looking at the data, when purchases happen and we tracked everyone that joined the live stream.

We, we tracked everyone from Instagram. We tracked everyone from the site. We noticed that the same people started opening up those Flavio emails and the same people came back. Then they purchased the product where they left products in the cart and they completed the purchases in the next seven days.

So we even have this as part of our analytics, where you can see the transactions that are happening during live, and then all of the other transactions that are happening from the same people that joined the live stream that you're retargeting. After the stream was done and the re the recording I think this brand had about 3000 hours of watch time during live, but then they had an additional 600 from recording.

So they came back and people still watched the con. Yes, it's pretty, it's really high. And we are starting to see this as a pattern where sure, people will join the live but a lot of people are gonna just purchase after it's done. They're gonna come back because maybe they're not gonna watch the full live, they're gonna be engaged for a portion of it, and maybe they don't have time right now.

Or it's, if it's a high a OV, like this brand. They're decision on the spot. It's not an impulse bite to drop product. Think about it for a second, but then they're gonna end up purchasing it and coming back, let me let see the livestream again, where they presented the product and yes, they're gonna complete the purchase.

So this has been a very successful tactic.

Jay Myers: kinda makes sense to me that a higher priced item would see a bigger increase in success from just a regular product page. Like I imagine a $9 item on a product page might see X conversion and you may be see a little bit of a bump on a live stream, but. Everything large. If I'm buying a $800 camera or a $3,000 drone or something, like seeing someone with it, holding it, touching it, turning it on, I always go and watch a YouTube video on it.

Always. Like, I'll never buy like a expensive electronic device without watching three reviews and someone, and then I make the purchase. So this kind of is like. Baking that all into one experience. You're seeing them holding it, they're reviewing it, they're talking about it, they're turning it on, and the buy button is right there.

So like I, I kind of get why a higher price item would see a bigger jump in increase from a, from the product page

Claudiu Cioba: The only difference is that this brand was an apparel brand. It wasn't even electronics. So they're apparel, but they have very crazy expensive apparel,

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Claudiu Cioba: And very high a OV on it. And this, the production was very I would say cheap. Just two people, two women in front of the camera on like this iPhone stand that's very thin.

And they were in a warehouse and they just had like a clothing rack behind them. That's it.

Jay Myers: Okay. So let's talk about the production a bit. What have you seen? If that works, is it just unboxing and talking about a product and going through the features? Is it bringing a customer on? I know you can send a link to someone and they can join, so you could, as a brand, you don't even have to have them in your studio.

Right? You can. You can send a link to, if you've got a raving fan customer and you say, Hey, would you like to actually be on a live stream? Maybe you could bring a different customer in every 10 minutes or something. I don't know. Like what? What? Have you seen That works?

Claudiu Cioba: So the feature that you're mentioning is called Mul multi-host, where you can have a webinar type of an event where you can have multiple people. Simultaneously join the live stream and be in front of the camera, almost like what we're doing over here with a podcast or like a Google Meet where you have multiple participants,

Jay Myers: But it's still in the, but it's still in the vertical feed,

Claudiu Cioba: Yes, we have we've developed some smart layouts where we can even highlight a speaker or it automatically highlights the one, the person who's talking, or you have different layouts of thumbnails and a main one showing up. That's the primary speaker. So yes, it'll still try to show all of the participants.

Right now we have a maximum of six just because it's not a conference tool, it's not a tool for conferences. It's still dedicated for live shopping. But what. What we've seen work for this feature is particularly more educational live streams where beauty brands would invite different doctors or different specialists to talk about different skin conditions or just consultancy type of educational content.

So they wouldn't necessarily create these live streams to sell, but they would set, they would create these live streams mostly to engage with their existing audience. Obviously there was a product over there that you could buy because they were talking about it and while they were talking it's like, oh, we have this product at 40%, and they were like over there highlighted.

But they use this multi-host functionality to bring in guests, to bring in brand ambassadors. We've seen this with a fitness app where they brought in. A celebrity on the stream. It was an, a celebrity athlete. And we, I can't say these names yet because I'm not allowed to, but even though it's publicly we can talk a lot about it.

But these are some of the techniques of how they use that moldy house capability just to bring in guests, and it's mostly for educational type of content.

Jay Myers: To me. I, that, I mean, that makes my mind just went to, I was listening to a diary of the CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett the other day, and they had a brain doctor on, and he was talking about all the different things that. Help your brain for sleep, for alertness, for different things. And he was talking about, some of it was just things like garlic that you could buy in the store, but some of it was actual, these like supplements and different things.

And I went to Google and I Googled and wanted to like buy a certain thing, but it would actually be awesome if I could see the, I could see an implication for this for certain podcasts that are, f like it wouldn't work on this one 'cause we're not selling a physical product or anything. But there's definitely use cases and I could see the impulse is right when I was watching it that I wanted to buy it.

So like, it makes sense. I think it would be killer to have. Customers on, 'cause like, I mean the, I know the effect of UGC, like user generated content. When a customer submits a video of them talking about it. And like, I mentioned this before on the last time you were on, like we use Videowise. My brother has a Shopify store and it's all user generated.

We actually did a test on his Facebook ads. We put all. UGC videos. And then we put a bunch that an agency made, and his CAC is about five times higher. So that's worse on the videos and the ads that this agency he found made versus just the iPhone videos of a customer holding up talking about his product.

So now if you could blend that in with live video, like bring these custom customers in to. Talk about like if, and I know there's a bit of a risk there 'cause some customers are

Claudiu Cioba: Yeah.

Jay Myers: maybe good on camera, but like, you just give like a three to five minute segment, you line 'em up like this would be killer over the holidays.

Like, would that be too complicated to do?

Claudiu Cioba: It would not. It's very easy for us to send an invitation to somebody to join. They would just get, we just get an email and you just send an invitation over somebody's email and they just join from that email. They don't need to install any software or anything.

Jay Myers: Can you control when they, okay. There's a waiting room. Okay.

Claudiu Cioba: yes.

We have a waiting room system, and you can see even their camera and you can communicate, you can talk to them. It's like, Hey, your camera's not good. Like, maybe change it and then join. So we do have

Jay Myers: Here's my big idea. I could find six customers. Maybe actually I would find 12 customers that are awesome customers. They've left five star reviews. I'd filter by reviews, like go by long, just, you know, find raving customers, reach out to them, ask if they wanna be on a live, I'm gonna give them a hundred dollars credit or something to thank them.

I send them all the link. I tell them each to join at 1, 1 0 5, 1 10, 1 15. I have someone managing coming in for five minutes. I talk to them about what they like about the product. Why did you buy it? It could be like some skin lotion. They talk about how it's impacted and my eyes are puffy right now 'cause I had an allergic reaction.

I could talk about how it's helped my eyes. I think that would be killer. You need two people to moderate the waiting room. But has anyone tried that?

Claudiu Cioba: no, I've never heard of anyone trying it. I think this would be a premier if anyone would do it. But I can tell you that different brands of different sizes use different strategies. So when you're a small brand, the founder might go live or like they're gonna, they're gonna, they really want to engage with the audience.

And they're trying to get more followers that they're trying to get attention, right. So they're gonna have more time as brands get bigger. They might just do like select events,

Like a, a product drop or a special live with a trivia for a launch, for a product launch. So they might just do it for special occasions or they might just go full educational, more for like customer retention or they, you know, they want to stay engaged with the audience.

But let me shoot an idea over to you. Something that's actually more killer that we've seen somebody do, which is. A lot of brands have ambassador programs and they're working with big influencers, and a lot of the times these influencers have more followers than you have as a brand. So what we've seen some brands do is they actually have the influencer go live from their account, and we can actually connect the livestream to the influencer's account.

Jay Myers: Can you, okay.

Claudiu Cioba: yeah, so we

Jay Myers: see where you're going

Claudiu Cioba: stream to the influencer account. The influencer starts selling.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Claudiu Cioba: A percentage of an affiliate commission out of all of the live sales, and we've seen one brand do this with a dozen people.

Jay Myers: Can you push to multiple profiles at once?

Claudiu Cioba: Yes, you can create multiple live streams and they would be the ones live streaming.

And this was an insane workflow. Now we're trying to simplify

Jay Myers: That's awesome.

Claudiu Cioba: 'cause you actually had to create a dozen different shows in our app rather than one show. So we had to create like different shows each with its own host and with its own streaming keys from Instagram.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Claudiu Cioba: But I believe that leveraging your big ambassadors and your big influencers to go live and sell your product live.

I think that's killer simply because you're touching on social proof. It's not you selling, it's somebody else selling your product for you. They can have a small disclaimer and they're saying, yes, we are, you know, we're brand ambassadors, or this is an affiliate sale. But they're leveraging their own Instagram and they have that social proof they're not selling on your behalf.

And they're very incentivized too. Because they know they're gonna get a great cut and you're able to reach a broader audience, not from like one one Instagram post or two, but they're actually going live. And when an influencer goes live, you know that they're gonna appear on the top of the screen in that, on that Instagram like bubble section,

Jay Myers: that's huge. And if you could bring any of them into the live stream too, if they're open to it, it would just be icing on the cake. Like

Claudiu Cioba: hundred percent.

Jay Myers: that is killer. It's funny, I'm definitely not. An influencer like some of these ones, but we did recently hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers, so it's thank you to all our listeners who are subscribed.

But now something interesting has started happening as I've started getting people reaching out. Asking to post their video on my YouTube channel and they'll say, we'll pay you a thousand dollars to post this video. We'll pay you 500 to post this video. And I haven't accepted any of the offers, but it's it is, the value is your followers.

And when you have millions of followers, or even hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands, it doesn't even have to be that many. And if you can work out a, they get 10% of sales or 20% of sales, like that's a win-win. Right.

Claudiu Cioba: I mean, Jay think about, sorry to interrupt you, but just think about think about of all of these celebrity brands, what if one celebrity goes live and starts selling? Like, they don't even have to sell, they just have to talk about the product. People will just buy it. Yeah. I don't know. Think about a Kardashian.

Think about, you know, these, like, we're talking like these big giants on. It would be huge. Like during that live event, they would just sell like crazy. Like those products would just drop, especially if there's a special offer behind them. I think they would make so much money just from one live, I don't know, 30, maybe even like 30 minutes.

And then if you can put those recordings on the website as well so that the website visitors continue to purchase and continue to watch that content. Yeah. The ROI and the incremental revenue is significant and I think that's what. Made me a believer in live shopping after we started building it.

Like it's nothing. I don't know if it's the next big thing. I can't answer to that question, but one thing that I know for sure is that this is an undeniable sales channel. Like it absolutely works. And if you wanna make the most out of it, you're gonna leverage your influencers, your brand ambassadors, which you already have relationships with, like you're already working with them, you're already doing that.

It's I believe that it's one of those channels that cannot be missed for any brand that's trying to add revenue to their pipeline. Like this is it. This is a channel where all you need is one or two people and go live at least once a week or every now and then. If you have special product drops and you would see a lot of revenue added.

Jay Myers: Yeah. Do you see consistency being important? Do you see brands every Tuesday at 9:00 PM go live, that kind of a

Claudiu Cioba: Yes, we have that. Yes, we have that. We have that. A lot of apparel brands do that, especially like fast fashion apparel brands. Like they always have new collections and they're, and they're dropping it and they just have models trying it on and presenting, like the dress, the shirts, the skirts, like this is the new collection.

Every single week or every two weeks, they have like these specials, new collection, the summer special. Now we have the fall collection. And yes, we do see that on a regular basis. And we also see the educational sessions on a regular basis where every week they're gonna have some sort of a guest and they discuss about a particular topic that is interesting for their audience.

Jay Myers: Makes sense. And then the replays, what's the best practice there? So obviously if you just went live, you wanna have the replay available, probably not forever. For like, or do you see people having like a library of all the replays or just the

Claudiu Cioba: That's what our.

Jay Myers: what does that look like?

Claudiu Cioba: With us, you can keep all the replays and on that live, live streaming page that you can generate with Videowise on your site. You can display all of your replays in a categorized way, or you can just choose which ones you wanna show. And it'll just generate a gallery so that anyone can watch the replays.

I think that the best part of of the replay is the fact that we can generate short form video out of it, and then you can leverage that short form video and repurpose it as shoppable videos or repurpose it into ads because we know the exact timestamp when a product is being presented in a show.

Because it's highlighted, the product is actually highlighted, so we know that the time. Stamp and we can generate, I don't know, maybe a hundred videos if it's a hundred products that are being shown in livestream, and all of a sudden you've got videos for all of your product pages with an actual person wearing the actual product.

One thing that we know from our ab tests is if you're gonna use video in the first or second position on your PDP in the product gallery. Just product presentation videos. I know we always see a conversion rate increase just because you're putting video instead of a static image or first or second position.

You can also use these videos as autoplay video presentations on your collection pages, and we've seen higher click-through rates on the collection page. And you can use them as social proof as well. 'cause it's, here's how the product looks, here's it on a real person. So repurposing the content from the recording, I think adds a lot of value.

To, to the brand.

Jay Myers: Can you do that all in Videowise, or do you slice it and dice it in another tool?

Claudiu Cioba: Now we can

Jay Myers: You can pick your spots and then obviously then push that into the Videowise, like carousels

Claudiu Cioba: in our library. Yes.

Jay Myers: but then also

Claudiu Cioba: a creative library. Yeah, we have a creative library. And

Jay Myers: Right. Okay. And then from there it

Claudiu Cioba: videos in the library. Yes. And it's gonna push it in a folder.

Jay Myers: And you can download from there.

Right? It could use them as like Instagram ads and whatever else. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. I always think like when you create one piece of content, how much. More can you get out of it? Like this one blog post will turn into seven or eight reels. A video, a blog post. Sorry, this podcast. That's blog. You know, like that's the whole thing.

You take one, how many times can you slice the apple, right? So that, I love that. I guess the only nuance would be is if you mention specific coupon codes or offers in there, and if they're time sensitive, you wouldn't want them to show forever. So like, you'd maybe want to think about that as you plan your content, if it's evergreen or if it's time sensitive.

And then the evergreen ones can stay there forever.

Claudiu Cioba: Yeah I see brands rarely mention the actual coupon code during the live stream, simply because we have a sticky banner, like a rolling text type of banner that shows you where you can put a coupon code that's sticky during the live stream. So, that always stays on as part of the interface. But indeed, if they want evergreen content, they would have to be careful, you know, what, how they talk about the product.

Is it just for now for livestream or are we gonna repurpose this content?

Jay Myers: yeah. And then if you're doing it about a specific product, letting it live on that product page forever would probably be a good idea too. 'cause if it's an in-depth. If someone's looking at, if I'm, look, if I'm looking at that drone I wanna buy, I can see a live stream from last week, rather than leaving the site and going to YouTube or you know, and maybe not coming back.

Right. So

Claudiu Cioba: I mean, one of the things that we've we've added this quarter is we heavily invested in AI throughout our platform. And one really cool AI feature is just changing the voice, changing the words actually that you're saying. So we can actually edit videos and we can we have a text transcript and you can just edit that text transcript with different words and.

It's

Jay Myers: No, and change it.

Claudiu Cioba: change. Yeah. So it's pretty cool. AI is amazing what it's capable of doing today, and it's getting just better and better.

Jay Myers: yeah, it's mind blowing. You won't even need real people in those lives soon.

Claudiu Cioba: We've actually seen experiments with AI generated live streams, streamers. So they're, they have like, AI generated avatars that would behave and talk somewhat in real time.

Jay Myers: Oh, I believe it.

Claudiu Cioba: I know it's, I still believe in authenticity in this, in, in the world of ai. That's upcoming. I believe authenticity will win.

So we're gonna see a big flooding of AI avatars and. Almost in near indistinguishable characters that are gonna appear online. But then authenticity is gonna become just more valuable because all the small guys and everyone that doesn't have any funding, they're gonna start using ai. And AI is gonna start looking like, oh, this is a cheap option.

Because the authentic option is actually gonna be a lot more expensive, so, so buying a celebrity, working with an ambassador, having somebody talk, you know, for you. Be that's very authentic and it's just gonna be more expensive than AI generated content.

Jay Myers: Can you load in a prerecorded video and have it feed as live, or does it literally have to be live?

Claudiu Cioba: Yes, you can. So, man, there's so much functionality depth in our platform that I forgot about this one. Yes, you can. You can prerecord video, and this has been even a high engaging tactic. Like, look, you have a YouTube channel, right? One thing that we've seen brands that are big on YouTube and already have existing YouTube channels, and I highly recommend that you try this yourself.

You can load your podcasts, like preload all of these episodes and just go live with one of them every day. Just make them go live

Jay Myers: Rather than just uploading the video.

Claudiu Cioba: yes, so you still upload it, but you also take the podcast and load it and make it go live every day. You can also schedule it in our platform. You can just like schedule all of these events

Jay Myers: 'cause it bumps up in the feed then, right?

Claudiu Cioba: That's it. Every, you can do it on LinkedIn, you can do it everywhere, because every time you're live, all these social media platforms, they bump all this content that's live all the way to the top. So whenever like this podcast, for example, if you're gonna put it on LinkedIn, you can just put it as a recording to go live and you can have an episode every week go live.

Almost like two times a week because LinkedIn is gonna bump it up. Some people have seen the episode, some don't. But what's more important in this world where we're all fighting for attention is that your name and the name of the show is always gonna be there when I'm gonna wanna open LinkedIn.

I'm just gonna see, okay, Shopify 1% is live. Is this a recording or is it really live? I don't know. I'm gonna click on it. So I will definitely engage with that content just to see what's it about. Will I be able to tell if it's a recording? Probably not only unless you want to specify. Replay, like have a replay badge on top of it, on the video production if you want that.

But the fact that you're being bumped at the top is super valuable because you're staying top of mind to your audience. They're gonna see you every time they open that app and they're gonna engage with that content A like. A bit of viewing they're just gonna see our face over and over again. And I believe that for brands as well as for SaaS, staying top of mind for your audience is extremely important

They might not be ready to buy now, but they will be ready to buy soon.

And when they are, you're gonna be on top, you know, top of their mind, and they're gonna consider you.

Jay Myers: Great, Claudio. Now I can't publish this episode because everyone's gonna know this trick. They're gonna hack it, and then everyone's gonna be live. No, I, that is such a, that's such a killer trick that. I think people could definitely take advantage right now because you're right. Like every time I log into Instagram, if someone's live, it's at the top.

YouTube. If someone's live, it's at the top. So I love it. Okay, now all of this, so someone wants to get into live streaming, like be real here. What is the, actually just need an iPhone and a $49 license to Videowise and they could be live. Is that it like.

Claudiu Cioba: That is our cheapest plan. It's for the long tail of Shopify, for the smallest brands to get started, like 49. Just gives you a taste of how it is. Then our subscription bumps from like, 2 99 all the way, you know, 5 99, 7 99. That was like the, and our PR. Our pricing is based on minutes streamed, so we take no commissions out of your sales.

We don't care how many sales you do, the more the better for you. You can have as many concurrent viewers as you want. We just track the minutes streamed, which is also our exact cost of production. So it's just aligned with our cost of operation just to maintain fair pricing. If you wanna go live, you have two free live shows on the house.

Just book a meeting directly on video and just mention during the meeting that you heard about this offer during the Shopify.

Jay Myers: I'll make sure to include that in the show notes as well too. That's very generous. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's something that, you know what? Everyone should experiment with it, even if you're camera shy. And to be honest I go on, I watch a lot of live streams. I pop onto whatnot all the time and watch, and these it's people in their basement, they're on their kitchen table, they're showing their products.

They're in there. Off their room where they're packing orders, opening up boxes, showing what's in this month's shipment or different things like that. And like that's what sells. You're right, it is authenticity. It's not polished, highly edited, great lighting. That almost is almost worse to be honest.

Like, 'cause it comes across as like. Too polished and salesy versus just you, the founder showing it. So I really wanted to get cloudy on here because when we chatted a month ago, I got so excited and I just knew our listeners can try this and they can take advantage of it. So this has been super helpful, Claudia.

We're just Videowise.com and hit up the contact on there. Mention Shopify 1% and they'll set you up. For your first two live streams free.

Claudiu Cioba: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me again, Jay. I really appreciate it.

Jay Myers: thank you. I know you're on vacation with the family, so I'll let you get back. This has been awesome, Claudio. Thank you so much.

Claudiu Cioba: Absolutely, Jay. Thank you.