Digital business platform elopage adds live shopping feature with Amazon IVS

The bar for online shopping experiences continues to rise as modern shoppers have come to expect more when making purchase decisions. In regards to digital goods, Germany-based SaaS platform elopage provides turnkey solutions that give creators, influencers, freelancers and SMBs a one-stop shop to run their virtual businesses. Established in 2015, the company enables entrepreneurs to monetize digital products and services, such as online courses or information, memberships, and tickets. In March 2022, elopage revamped its platform, adding a live shopping functionality with Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) to achieve high-quality, low-latency streams at scale.

elopage VP of Engineering Kerim Incedayi led the implementation in collaboration with CTO Robert Schwegler. After testing various video conferencing solutions and running into limitations, the team evaluated Amazon IVS. “Any feature that we roll out must provide a stellar user experience. Amazon IVS met all our requirements, with scalability being at the top of the list,” explained Incedayi. “Our initial implementation was completed in days, and we went from prototype to production in two weeks. The integration was very straightforward due the great API of Amazon IVS and streams have performed really well, even through rigorous stress testing.”

Using Amazon IVS to deliver its live streams, elopage allows its users and their audience to stay within the platform during live streams, even as the number of viewers grows. Schwegler noted, “It was important to us to make streaming easy for our users. We didn’t want them to have to complete a bunch of extra steps or sign up for new video conferencing accounts. Amazon IVS allows us to incorporate interactive live video within our platform and deliver high quality content to browsers and mobile devices.”

Added Incedayi, “We already use AWS on our platform, so I’m very familiar with its ecosystem. Now, having services like Amazon IVS and Amazon Chime, and our infrastructure under one roof is quite compelling for our future goals around platform capabilities. We’re constantly accommodating new use cases and look forward to further tapping into the timed metadata and metrics reporting features to continue enhancing our live stream functionality.”

elopage’s initial live commerce feature allows users to populate live streams with timed shoppable links. For example, at the end of a training session, an offer could be displayed upselling viewers to sign up for the next session without leaving the live streaming context. The current integration also includes chat, with the team aiming to incorporate break-out rooms as well as additional community-driven and automation features in the near term.

In addition to using Amazon IVS, elopage has built its main database on Amazon Aurora, and uses numerous other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate. AWS AppSync was key for the team’s accelerated development of its Amazon IVS implementation for the chat function.

For more information about building with interactive live video, visit: https://thinkwithwp.com/ivs/