What are the best live stream apps to have on your Shopify in 2023?
You're committed to growing your business and your Shopify website is at the heart of that strategy. How do you make sure you install the best apps on your Shopify to make it the spearhead of your sales strategy?
Why live stream can impact your business?
Increase the rate of positive customer reviews
Live streaming to showcase your products is booming. Live stream or live shopping on Shopify is a dream that came true.
As Shopify itself says, 2023 will be C2C or not.
Anyway, showcasing products live to a community and live chatting is a resolutely modern strategy: brands used to invest in a top-down communication without giving the possibility of any feedback from consumers. These days are gone.
Consumers have taken the lead from the creation of social networks: brands become objects of love or controversy, but in any case new subjects of conversation. Communities are created, conversations are born, comments allow us to understand a brand new data: the feeling of consumers towards brands.
This feeling, sometimes quantified in likes, sometimes expressed in words via comments or private messages, becomes a real challenge for marketers. It is now possible to capitalize on users' feelings in a different way.
The dialogue has in any case opened the way and finally supported the idea that consumers want to give their opinion. They want to be listened to, sometimes to get feedback from the brand. They want to be taken into account.
Sometimes they want to express their dissatisfaction. Positive or negative opinions, these comments are useful to build the brand's reputation and to consolidate or weaken its future sales.
Often, the brand's silence in the face of customer feedback will be perceived poorly. Customers may wonder why the brand isn't responding, is a team just reading the feedback, or worse: does the brand really care what consumers think?
Speaking up during a live stream on its Shopify site is one way to get in front of all these annoyances. By humanizing the relationship, the company is already making it clear that a genuine team stands behind the brand.
By opening up the dialogue, the chat space becomes a safe place to collect customer feedback and reduce the number of potentially negative comments that could have been left elsewhere.
The live chat allows to limit the negative customer reviews left thanks to apps such as Yotpo, Truspilot, Google reviews, Judge.me... By creating a friendly moment, the brand will even be able to increase the number of positive reviews.
Live stream: an easy-to-learn innovation
More and more Shopify sites can now break new ground with augmented reality ("AR"), videos and 3D images on product pages. But it's not always easy to get the hang of and requires a fairly large in-house team.
In a live shopping event, the brand is able to implement a modern means of communication without necessarily involving many people in a team.
The live stream then becomes a replay and shoppable videos can be extracted to complete the product pages without additional work.
Improve customer loyalty
It's hard to acquire a customer, but maintaining their purchases for months or even years is also a big deal.
Customers will disengage from a brand for several reasons :
- They don't really know the brand's story
- The brand provides products or services of low quality compared to what is expected
- The brand does not renew itself much
- The brand uses a communication message to which customers are not sensitive
- The brand does not interact with its customers
However, building customer loyalty costs less and can ensure the company's profitability and sustainability. It is therefore important for the company to invest in tools to keep this loyalty.
If reward programs stimulate repurchase, they do not consolidate the link between customer and brand.
To nurture brand loyalty, the human connection becomes the strategic element that small brands need: during a Shopify live stream,time spent listening to a host representing a brand turns into brand attachment.
In the live stream on a Shopify website, viewers come to forget that they are talking with a brand: they end up feeling like they are chatting with someone they know and like.
Thus, by liking a brand's representatives, team or founder, customers naturally come to like the brand, and brand awareness will make them to prefer the brand over competitors for a future purchase.
Decrease the number of product returns and refunds
Products returns, exchanges or refunds, are a real nuisance for e-retailers and affect their peace of mind.
Not only do they cause a great disappointment: the company has not been able to satisfy the customer, but they obviously lead to a loss of turnover and a waste of time in terms of management.
You have to check the quality of the returning goods, restock them, refund the customer, update your accounting. And wondering why the customer has returned the goods.
The live stream commerce allows to lower these backorders: many merchants are indeed delighted to get sales at any price. But isn't it better to make sales that are not sent back to the brand?
You'll better not to close a deal at all than to close a bad deal, forced or made without having the information needed to buy.
Thus, many products are returned because of a lack of information or because the information is interpreted differently by customers. Customers may have forgotten to read that the item size is smaller, or that the color is not quite the same as on the picture because the picture has been edited.
These questions and doubts that can easily be cleared up during a live shopping session.
Finally, during the live stream on Shopify, the merchant can also answer new questions that he would not have thought of in real time.
Requirements to run your live stream with an app on shopify
Here's your checklist to make sure you're ready to startlive streaming:
- Go simple by choosing a Shopify-supported app that can be downloaded from the Shopify app marketplace: developers who submit an app there are subject to very strict rules and regular checks by Shopify teams.
In other words, the marketplace is a safe place to find serious, quality technical add-ons for your Shopify business. In addition, the marketplace allows you to access apps that are designed to perfectly match your Shopify theme - Choose an app that doesn't weigh down your site: it's not easy to know what you're really installing on your site with some apps.
Some plugins will leave extra code even when uninstalled and others will add to the load time of your site. - Download an app that allows you to create a custom page for a seamless experience. The best experience for your customers is one that is frictionless and where the customer never feels like they are leaving your site to go somewhere else.
With some live shopping experiences, your customers will have to leave your Shopify or feel like they are leaving. So choose an app that allows you to keep your users on your site with a fully immersive experience.
Live Me Up
Live Me Up provides a technically powerful and easy to manage live shopping tool. Capterra’s and Shopify’s reviews guide give it excellent feedback (more than 4/5) on how easy it is to use and how the team is there to support you step by step in creating a customized live shopping page on your site.
The pros :
- No latency in the live, true live in real time
- No performance loss for the site
- Remote live chat moderation
- Advanced performance analysis dashboard
With Live Me Up code on your Shopify site, break your sales records, not your website.🤩
The cons :
- A fully native integration for Shopify only so far, Prestashop and Woo-commerce require support by the technical team
- A team speaking English and French, no other languages supported for the moment
Channelize
Channelize provides a live shopping platform on your site to create engaging experiences with your community.
The pros:
- Full-screen lives
- Chat moderation
- Performance analysis dashboard
The cons :
- Limited number of lives and number of viewers
- Inability to customize your Live Shopping page
- Slightly delayed live (not 100% real time)
Firework
Firework places the video tool at the core of your marketing strategy, rather for mature companies since the pricing start at $2499/month.
The pros :
- Customer tracking
- Performance analysis dashboard
- Shoppable videos
The cons:
- No customizable interface
- Widget (less immersive experience)
- No moderation
Now you have all the info to put your live shopping on your Shopify CMS!
