Live Shopping in the U.S. is Booming

Live shopping has been on the rise for a while in China, and it's becoming the next frontier for influencers to gather around. Now it's booming in the United States, with tech giants like Amazon, Instagram and Google all wanting to get a piece of this nascent field.

Carla Stevenné looked nervous as she took part in the first live broadcast.  As a member of the Amazon Live Influencer testing team, she needed to find out what to sell and figure out how to schedule the time assigned to her. Stefani has never tried to sell a product in live broadcast before, let alone spend 60 minutes talking to himself on camera. She looks around her room and a few things stand out, including a waterproof Bluetooth speaker, Crest 3D Whitestrips and a Bluetooth karaoke machine.

"I kept looking at the time for 15 minutes and I thought, 'Oh my God, it's going to be an hour in 45 minutes and I don't know what I'm going to do,'" Steaveni said. Few people watched Stefani's first live broadcast, but after more than 200 attempts, she says an hour of video is far less daunting than she thought, and hundreds of people can watch it at the same time.

2020 is an important year for American tech companies to enter the live shopping arena. Amazon launched Amazon Live for influencers in July, and Instagram and Facebook launched Live shopping in August. Google's R&D department, Area 21, also launched Shoploop, which is not live but offers shoppable stories.

At the same time, smaller startups are continuing their efforts to make live shopping the future of retail. On each platform, live shopping ends up looking like a modern upgrade of TV shopping (QVC), but with the rise of influencers and its replacement of celebrities, they can also get a slice of sales.