Brands Supersize Sales With eStreamly Shoppable Videos Powered by Amazon IVS

Ecommerce is on track to make up nearly 25 percent of global total retail sales by 2025, with US ecommerce sales alone expected to top $1 trillion for the first time. However, new opportunities have brought new competition and motivated merchants to differentiate their shopping experiences to better inspire purchases. Taking a cue from Asia, live commerce—or shoppable live streaming—is quickly rising in popularity stateside and beyond, fueled by intuitive services like live stream and video ecommerce service eStreamly.

Built using Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions including Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), a managed live streaming solution that is designed to provide quick and easy setup to help users build interactive video experiences, eStreamly helps retailers integrate high-quality live commerce within existing content channels. eStreamly cofounder and CTO Smitha Kommareddi, who decided to use Amazon IVS after a diligent search, said, “I looked at each cloud provider and its offering, but no other solution came close to Amazon IVS. We were able to start using it right away and building on AWS solutions is quite advanced.”

With development underway in early 2021, eStreamly launched a public beta in October and continues to refine its offering. Now it offers advanced and interactive features such as audience polls and options to stream multiple videos simultaneously. eStreamly lets retailers augment their own websites and apps using Amazon IVS to power live streams with high-quality video populated with shoppable links that can be purchased without exiting the stream.

A live stream strategy not only encourages additional purchases. It also helps retailers minimize returns because customers have a better understanding of the product they’re purchasing. “Typical customer conversion for ecommerce is about 3 percent,” said eStreamly cofounder and CEO Nicolas Bailliache, “but with eStreamly, retailers average around 17 percent, and we’ve seen up to 47 percent. That’s exciting, and a testament to the power of an engaged shopper.”

During a recent eStreamly live stream featuring Italian coffee manufacturer Lavazza, 11.1 percent of viewers ultimately made a purchase. These kinds of results are not uncommon. A follow-up live stream conducted by Lavazza further cemented the long-term benefits of providing a live audience with a suite of interactive features that simplify the purchasing process in near real time. As many as 29.4 percent of the viewership made a purchase, while Lavazza saw its audience grow 61 percent after both live streams concluded.

eStreamly leverages the timed metadata feature in Amazon IVS to deliver shoppable links at the appropriate times while also offering chat functionality, audience polling, and graphics overlays. Users can review a performance report after the live stream that provides an overview of audience behavior as well. They can make videos available on demand with shoppable links to drive additional revenue-generating opportunities for customers. All of these are recorded to buckets in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance—using the auto-record-to-Amazon-S3 feature of Amazon IVS. Each video is transcribed for enhanced SEO benefits, making it easy to discover in search engines.

As Kommareddi notes, “The streaming quality our customers receive with Amazon IVS is fantastic; it’s on par with other premium streaming services, and having that level of quality makes a big difference for brands looking to stand out so that they can better capture and convert their audience into customers.”

“There’s a lot of focus on building social media profiles,” added Bailliache. “But in reality, customer conversion is more likely to happen on the site of the merchant. When they can drive traffic to their own sites by offering interesting, unique content, potential customers are going to be more educated about the brand. Conversely, brands can use live stream data to better understand customers and tailor products and content to enhance sales.”

For more information about building live commerce experiences, check out https://thinkwithwp.com/ivs/.