Live shopping, sales or communication tool?

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A panel discussion dedicated to the experience between Leifheit Italia and A. Capaldo Spa. Organized by Bronet Service and moderated by diyandgarden.com editor Giulia Arrigoni.

It is called Live Shopping or even Livestream Shopping and it is the latest frontier animating e-commerce. It has as its ancestor the famous infomercial but, Live Shopping, combines modern technologies that enable web-based shopping and the most current forms of communication.

Live Shopping has been talked about for a few years now, since 2016 to be precise, the year of the birth of Chinese-driven live coincided with the opening of Alibaba’s Taobao Live platform. It is currently widespread in China, accounting for – according to Statista’s estimates – 60 percent of the global Live market, which, by 2022, reached the remarkable figure of $284 billion. The United States follows at a distance with a 20 percent share and Japan with another 10 percent. The missing 10% represents all the rest of the world.

What about Italy? According to a report compiled by VTEX, Italy’s live shopping market has reached a value of 1.5 billion euros in 2022.

Target? Young and very young, it seems 70% are in the 18- to 34-year-old category, much of Gen Z and Millennials.

Locations? On the eCommerce sites of manufacturers and distributors but also through social and marketplace platforms

Bronet, Leifheit Italia and A.Capaldo. Live Shopping in the Making

The national experience of Live Shopping in Home Improvement is in its infancy. We count the trials of Leroy Merlin (last in chronological order, the Christmas one) and the one of Bronet Service Agency, organized in July 2022 at the IperbriKo sign, with very positive outcomes and the birth of the two new influencers “EleeVale.”

Experience that was repeated first with Leifheit alone and recently with the addition of A. Capaldo, who, under the Progress banner, started a series of initiatives that began just shortly after the last CLab.

After the above introduction by TEN-diyandgarden director Giulia Arrigoni, the protagonists, gathered in the Caserta offices of Bronet Service Agency, exchanged reflections and opinions on the experience made and about the validity and future opportunity of a new tool, for Italy and our sector.

“When Leifheit and Bronet proposed to us to organize something along these lines,” explains Sergio Capaldo, general manager of A.Capaldo Spa, “we accepted with interest. Just enough time to get organized, and between September and October we started with the first videos, and although it was not an actual Live, we interpreted it as a kind of “rehearsal” to get organized in that direction. Certainly the young target audience, which seems to be the main user of Live, is not, at least in Italy, representative of those who actually buy goods for home maintenance and renovation, but they represent the customers of tomorrow and, therefore, it is good to think about it in time.”

A statement also endorsed by Luigi De Pascale, Progress marketing manager which speaks of an “experimentation that hinted at a future of opportunity,” as well as Anna Maria Pagliuca, category manager always by A. Capaldo, emphasized how the experience has led “to testing rotations on items that we thought were less appealing than what was on offer.”

Read on, the panel discussion continues with:

• Live Shopping as a marketing tool
• Live Shopping as a reputational tool
• Live Shopping. The node of payments
• Live Shopping, a new sales channel or support for eCommerce to the physical store?
• The role of influencers in live shopping
• Live shopping: which and how many products?