The eCommerce sector is continuously growing and will evolve until the world ends. The eCommerce trends are also following the same path of transformation, and live video shopping app development is amongst such trends. What is live video shopping? And, why should you invest in a live-streaming shopping app? Here’s a quick guide to answer all your questions!
In the old days, live advertising on TV was likely to be the best marketing technique used by large enterprises and startups. However, with digitization, live video shopping app development replaced those live shopping commercials.
People worldwide today are enjoying live streaming shopping apps more than ever. China’s eCommerce hub already made a whopping revenue of $242 billion in 2020 due to the live video shopping app development.
These video shopping apps offer uniqueness, reliability, and satisfaction to the customers. The customers can conveniently buy any product after discovering the ratings and reviews and getting assistance for their shopping.
Maybe that’s why almost 88% of the people get convinced to shop from an online store after watching their brand’s video.
Need more reasons to invest in live video shopping app development? Here’s what the market for live shopping apps looks like!
- Almost 86% of the marketers agreed that video marketing has helped them generate more quality leads.
- 93% of the businesses worldwide have used live-streaming apps to increase brand awareness.
- 73% of the customers agreed that they would prefer to watch videos of the products/services rather than reading a text or an infographic.
- Experts believe that the live video shopping apps market will reach more than 23 billion dollars.
So, when the world is leveraging the concept of live streaming shopping apps, why should you lag? Hence, to help you make your eCommerce store successful, we have a quick guide demonstrating live video shopping app development! But, first things first.
What is a Live Video Shopping App?
A live video shopping app is an attractive mobile solution for eCommerce that focuses on video content to enhance users’ shopping experience. Shopify describes it as the future of eCommerce, where customers can get in-depth product information while sitting remotely.
These live streaming shopping apps are a digitized version of teleshopping commercials that once dominated the marketing sector. However, with the growth in usage of mobile devices, people, especially the Millenials, felt the need for such live video shopping apps. Furthermore, the global pandemic increased the use of live video shopping apps.
But, that’s not the only reason why the live video shopping app became a huge success for the eCommerce industry! Well, there are many more reasons that have contributed to the success of this phenomenal live stream shopping market.
To name a few, we have:
- Better Engagement
- Easy Rankings on Google
- In-depth Product Information
- Virtual Assistance to Customers
- More Sales and Profits
- Quick Conversions, and more
How to Develop a Live Streaming Shopping App?
Now that you know the term live video shopping apps and their benefits, let’s quickly jump to that main part – developing a live streaming shopping app! Here’s how you can successfully begin with your custom live video shopping app development to enhance your eCommerce store!
1. Identify the Type of App
Identifying the type of app should be your first goal to develop an engaging live streaming shopping app. Every app is associated with one kind of business model. Hence, you should look at what type of live shopping app suits your business.
Here are the four types of live shopping apps that are prominent in the market:
Non-Live Video Shopping App
In this type, the video content is generated and integrated into a social media platform or a website. You can easily record a video and showcase it to the masses with a non-live video shopping app. However, the only drawback is you will not be able to get real-time customer reviews through this shopping app.
Live Video Shopping App
It is one of the most popular and beneficial video shopping apps. You can easily create live sessions of your products/services and showcase them on a live platform. All the queries and reviews can be seen in real-time, thereby offering you the specific scope of your product.
You can easily discuss the discount/loyalty offers associated with that particular product. Besides that, you can also describe the customers’ benefits after using that product/service.
Aggregator Video Shopping App
If you have an aggregator eCommerce model, then an aggregator video shopping app could be your perfect fit! You can easily showcase various products of multiple stores on your online platform while offering them live video functionality.
You can ask for a specific commission for every product sold from your online eCommerce platform. That is a very popular eCommerce model used by businesses worldwide.
Dedicated Live Streaming Shopping App
Finally, we have a dedicated video shopping app that can be used to expand the brand name. As a leading brand, you can use this video shopping app to enhance your customer’s shopping experience.
You can showcase various products/services one at a time and even discuss their great offers with a dedicated app. Besides that, the benefit of reaching far-off areas also makes a dedicated live-streaming shopping app the best for your brand.
Read More: How to Develop an App Like Magnolia?
2. Analyze the Competitors
The next step to proceed with a successful live video shopping app development is to analyze your competitors. We all are aware of the competition prevailing in today’s market. Everything has great competition, from selling a pencil to offering an app development service.
And, to win in such a competitive era, you need to analyze the market and your competitors properly. You should know what plans they are following to generate leads and revenues for their brand.
Hence, to help you win the competition curve, we have listed some of the excellent live streaming apps of 2022!
Amazon Live
When it comes to pampering its customers, Amazon never backs off. This new live streaming shopping concept is one such aspect. The brand has successfully engaged the users with real-time reviews and information of the products using the latest tech stack.
The common technologies utilized by Amazon Live is Java, Perl, and Angular JS. Besides that, it also uses MySQL, Amazon EC2 container service, DynamoDB, and a host of other Amazon frameworks.
Features:
- Live Stream Promotions
- Real-time Customer’s Feedbacks
- Live Information Exchange
- Multi-device Support
Bambuser
Bambuser is another robust eCommerce app luring customers through live streaming shopping. The app uses a mixture of the latest video streaming technologies, including CloudfarerCDN, vMix, AmazonEC2, and other APIs.
Features:
- Audio Descriptions
- Social Sharing
- Spotlight Modules
- Event Alerts
- On-demand Archiving
Taobao
Taobao is also known as the Amazon of China. This eCommerce giant is one of the first platforms to launch video streaming shopping for its customers successfully. The brand works on multiple technology products and services, including reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare CDN, Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), etc.
Features:
- Live Customer Support
- Realtime Product Marketing
- Order Tracking
- Social Commerce
- Picture Search
Alibaba
Lastly, we have Alibaba as one of the pioneers of the eCommerce market that is using live stream shopping. This particular eCommerce giant uses technologies like Java, JS, Nginx, Microsoft Azure, Hibernate, and Polyfil.
Features:
- Live Chat and Support
- Order Tracking
- Social Commerce
- Live Video Shopping
- Easy Returns and Real-time Customer Feedback
3. Decide the Best Features and Tech Stack
Once you have identified your most powerful competitors, you must finalize your product’s best features and tech stack. You can even take the help of market analysis to explore the best features for your app.
For instance, you can ask certain questions like
- How will your app solve the major concerns of your target audience?
- What are the best features of my competitors that are adding to their revenues?
- What technology is majorly used and will remain in the market for years?
Answering those questions will eventually help you select the best features that ensure successful app development.
As a leading mobile app development company, we suggest some essential features for your live streaming shopping app.
Live Streaming Shopping
Live streaming shopping is a must-have engaging feature that allows brands to connect with their audience. Through this feature, you can easily promote your product or give a demo of it in an informative way.
In-app Voice Assistance
Who doesn’t love to get automated assistance while using any application? Hence, to help you enhance your customer experience, we suggest including an AI-based voice assistance feature. It helps your customers seamlessly operate the app using their voice commands.
Interaction Builder
Interacting with the customers is the foremost need of any eCommerce store, and yours is not an exception. Hence, you should include tools such as emojis, voting options, and online bidding to engage your users.
Data Analytics
Getting real-time information about your customers, best-selling products, and successful marketing campaigns is essential for every business. Hence, consider including smart business intelligence modules in your live video shopping app to get useful business insights.
Smart Recommendations
If you want to win the competition curve, including smart recommendations is necessary. Your customers will love it if they get personalized shopping suggestions. That would also increase the chances of conversion and eventually your eCommerce store’s revenue.
Customer Behaviour Tracking
Knowing your customer behavior towards your brand is a must for a successful future marketing strategy. Through this feature, you can understand the real-time feedback of your customers for a specific product/service. You can further know what all products are loved by your customers, or which marketing strategy resulted in great profit.
Digital Payments
Last but not least, try to include an easy purchasing option for your customers. You should list multiple digital payment channels in your live video shopping app to facilitate quick and easy shopping functionality.
Now, to include such robust features in your app, here’s the tech stack that you will need:
Now, to include such robust features in your app, here’s the tech stack that you will need:
- For Messaging and Push Notifications: Twilio and Nexmo
- Data Analytics: Hadoop, IBM, Cisco, BigData, Spark
- Payments: Stripe
- Cloud: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud
- Media Streaming: Nimble Streamer & Wowza Streaming Engine
- Database: MongoDB, Postgres
4. Begin Your App Development with an MVP
MVP stands for a minimum viable product. It is one of the brilliant tools to help businesses explore the best features and tech stack for their app. You can know how a certain feature will perform without actual development through an MVP.
In short, if you do not want to spend an extra budget on development and customizations, you should opt for MVP creation. It is a simple process.
Choose the features you have in your mind, select a design, and that’s all. Our developers and designers at Matellio will frame the best prototype per your expectations. It will educate you on how your app will work with your choice of features.
5. Hiring a Professional Team of App Developers
The next step in live video shopping app development is to hire a perfect team of developers. You must have a dedicated team of professionals ready before beginning your app development. From project managers to designers, app developers, and testers, having a talented team could help you with successful development.
You have two options here: go for freelancers or a professional team from a reputed app development company. Although both options have their perks, choosing a team for a reputable company is always beneficial. But why is that so?
Well, here are a few reasons:
- An experienced app development company offers you talented resources in their field. You will get a comprehensive knowledge of various tools and techniques to enhance your app’s performance.
- Those resources will work on your app. In contrast, freelancers might work partially on your app until they find a new project.
- Not to mention, the legal contracts with a reputed team are always beneficial. It ensures that your project will be completed on a specific date. That might not be the case with freelancers. Hence, always opt for a professional team of developers from an experienced app development company.
Matellio is one such leading app development company that has years-long experience in developing industry-specific apps. We understand that each business has different concerns and try to solve them with our cutting-edge engineering services.
You can easily hire our resources at flexible engagement models to kickstart your live video shopping app development.
6. Testing and Deployment
Finally, after development, it is time to test your app and deploy it on your choice of platform. Testing is considered a crucial step in app development, irrespective of the niche.
With reliable testing services, you can easily detect even the minutest of the bugs that were left unidentified during the development process.
However, many companies often fail to conduct proper app testing despite such importance. As a result, they suffer just after the final launching. We are sure you don’t want such situations for your app! We at Matellio offer reliable testing services for your app project.
You can leverage our manual and automated testing services to ensure that your live streaming shopping app performs smoothly on every platform and device of your choice.
Other Key Factors to Consider for a Successful Live Video Shopping App Development
So, we have already mentioned the crucial aspects you need to consider for successful app development. However, certain aspects that, if not considered, can result in serious issues for your business.
1. Monetization Model
Regardless of its niche and scope, every app should have a monetization model that can help it earn extra revenues. That model can be deployed on your app to help you make money apart from your main revenue model.
Hence, you should also opt for a monetization model for your initial days. Of course, it is no harm in earning something extra from your app. Here are some successful business models that we think could work perfectly for your live video shopping app.
Subscription Models:
You can offer paid subscription models to your customers under this model. They get advanced features and exciting discounts by becoming a paid member of your app.
Paid Advertising
You can use your streaming shopping app as a marketing platform for other third-party companies. They can advertise their products and can offer you an amazing price.
Sponsored Listings
Last but not least, you can adopt a monetization model that involves retailers rather than customers. You can add the products of other retail brands on your app and can earn from their sales. Whenever their item is sold, you can get a specific commission.
2. UI/UX Components
Apart from features, if there is anything that impacts the overall success of your app, it is UI/UX. UI or user interface is how your app looks and performs on different devices. On the other hand, UX is any user’s experience after using your app.
In short, if you lure online visitors, and entice your existing customers, then your revenues will increase automatically. Besides that, you may not need to invest heavily in marketing as your loyal customers will promote your app.
So, you should include UI components like easy functionalities, simple app screens, and easy-to-understand content. You can even use gamification components that are nowadays being adopted by many eCommerce giants for an engaging UI.
Read More: How to Develop a Live Streaming App?
3. Marketing
If you want more customers in today’s competitive era, digital marketing is the only key to success. However, many businesses do not market their product sufficiently. As a result, they do not reach the desired target audience they wish for. That may be due to untimely app development or lack of resources.
However, at Matellio, we make sure to deploy your app on time by providing various experienced resources. We also have a digital marketing team that can offer you the best marketing suggestions. You can easily reach your desired target audience with minimal effort using our tried and tested digital marketing techniques.
4. Next-Gen Tech
Finally, next-gen tech can be your smart move to lure more customers towards your live streaming shopping app. Tech stacks like AI, IoT, ML, and Big Data can surely help you engage your customers most effectively. You can deploy a chatbot, can secure your transactions, run self-trained ML algorithms, and can even get detailed insights from these next-gen technologies.
That’s why we always offer project-specific next-gen technologies to all our customers. You can also benefit from our next-gen offering to make your live video shopping app stand apart from competitors.
What is the Cost to Develop a Live Streaming Shopping App?
So, we are at the most awaited segment of our article – the cost of developing a feature-rich live video shopping app.
Now, calculating the exact cost of your custom app can only be possible by analyzing various factors. The number of resources hired, testing method, and the complexity of the features affect the overall app development cost.
Hence, we suggest you leverage our free 30-minute expert consultation service to discuss your ideas and requirements with our experts. We will analyze all your business needs and offer you the most suitable quote matching your requirements.
How Can Matellio Help?
Live video shopping app development has become the new normal for the eCommerce industry. And, we are the most trusted company when it comes to following the latest market trends. As a leading mobile app development company, we aim to resolve your business concerns with the most effective app development services. We have experts proficient in multiple technologies and tools.
You can also utilize our free market and competitor analysis service to ensure a successful app development. Besides that, our other services, including code review, maintenance and support, and technology consulting, make us the top choice for businesses in eCommerce app development.
So, why wait for your competitors to win when you can start today? Fill out our free consultation form and begin with your live video shopping app development!
Till then, Happy Reading!
