"staring at the live broadcast notice of a certain anchor in the afternoon and buying in his studio in the evening" has become the new norm for young people in China. The domestic trend of live streaming has also spread overseas, with both e-commerce and social content platforms trying to seize this new opportunity.

Even Google recently launched Shoploop, a short-video video delivery platform, developed by its internal incubator Area 120. Lax Poojary, founder of Shoploop, said that young Americans are used to making recommendations on social media such as Instagram, then switch to YouTube to watch product reviews and experience videos, and finally go to the official website to buy.

To buy a favorite product, you need to switch between several app. Shoploop hopes to allow users to complete the closed loop from recommendation to purchase on an application. "

What does Shoploop mean to Google? Why do short videos and live broadcasts that are so noisy at home still look like new things abroad?

Place the order after 90 seconds of reading.

On Shoploop, bloggers use short videos of no longer than 90 seconds to show the selling points, usage and experience of the product. In terms of recommended features, Shoploop is similar to "video version of Little Red Book". At present, the content of the platform is not rich, mainly to make-up and skin care. Next, Shoploop will add live streaming and search functions to its product functions, and enrich the platform's short video content, expanding from the existing beauty makeup to clothing, accessories, home furnishings, art and electronic products.

Shoploop doesn't seem to want to build a lifestyle community like Little Red Book, and currently only provides users with the interactive function of giving likes to videos. In contrast, its e-commerce attribute is more obvious. Shoploop marks the price of each product in a prominent position in the video stream and sets the "shopping window" in the lower-left corner of each video. Users can click to jump to a third party to place an order, and the blogger will get the corresponding transaction commission. Users can collect the products they like by collecting videos.

From the existing positioning, Shoploop is more for the third-party merchant website diversion. Shoploop does not have an independent App, and the existing entry is only for mobile web pages, but from the perspective of the domain name Shoploop.app, it is likely to become an independent app in the future.

This is also in line with Google's intention. When the digital advertising market is separated by Amazon.Com Inc and Facebook Inc, Google needs to tap traffic entrances to maintain its attractiveness to advertisers and increase advertising revenue. As Shoploop said, the future of content publishers is not limited to online celebrity bloggers, but also the introduction of third-party brands and merchants.

At present, many bloggers on Shoploop come from other platforms such as Instagram, and they are well-known. For example, the blogger @ heleneisfor has 14000 followers on Instagram, and her usual posts are mainly about lifestyle, travel and clothes.

This is because the number of posts sponsored by advertisers on Instagram has dropped from 35 per cent in mid-February to 4 per cent in mid-April, and the cost of advertising sponsorship per post has recently fallen by 15 per cent, according to market research firm Launchmetrics.

Due to the sharp reduction in spending by advertisers, the "online celebrity economy" has been affected by the epidemic, bloggers who usually make a living by "sending things", and the epidemic has restricted some content creation. had no choice but to "downgrade" the creator who brought a premium to the brand to the anchor who brought goods.

Does Google want to become a platform for selling goods?

On July 30, local time, Google released its second-quarter results. Q2 revenue was $38.3 billion, down 2 per cent from a year earlier. Advertising, the main source of revenue, is facing challenges, with search-based advertising revenues down 9.8 per cent to $21.3 billion, up 6 per cent from a year earlier to $3.8 billion, and online advertising revenues down 10 per cent to $4.7 billion.

Compared with Facebook Inc, who released the results on the same day, thanks to the growth of Facebook Inc's daily active users and monthly active users (people can't go out), Facebook Inc's advertising revenue was $18.632 billion, up 10 per cent from a year earlier. Although this change comes to some extent from the composition of platform advertisers, such as Google advertisers, tourism and other real economy accounts for a high proportion, Facebook Inc on the Internet small and medium-sized enterprise advertisers are too many, many are mobile applications, games and entertainment advertising.

The difficulties faced by Google will be alleviated after the epidemic, but the current situation is that the market share of Google digital advertising is also declining. EMarketer predicts that Google's market share of digital advertising in the United States will fall to 29.4% from 31.6% in 2019.

In contrast, Facebook Inc's share rose from 22.7 per cent to 23.4 per cent and Amazon.Com Inc from 7.8 per cent to 9.5 per cent. Facebook Inc and Amazon.Com Inc are already grabbing some of Google's e-commerce ads.

Since January, online shopping orders in North America have increased by 80 per cent, while European e-commerce revenues have increased by 40 per cent and 80 per cent compared with the same period last year, according to COVID-19 Commerce Insight. Google mentioned many times at the Q2 earnings conference that "e-commerce is a huge opportunity." "

Google has previously decided to cut the sales commission of Google Shopping (shopping search engine) to allow merchants to use third-party payment and order management services, saying that Amazon.Com Inc merchants can migrate to Google Shopping without changing the data format to attract more merchants and users searching for consumer purposes. In the future, Shoploop with enough rich video content can undertake this part of the traffic.

For the video e-commerce platform, the huge KOL/KOC resources are the natural advantage of carrying goods. YouTube, owned by Google, is the largest gathering place of online celebrities in the world, and the accumulated resources of high-quality creators can be exported to Shoploop.

Many YouTube head anchors rely on sales and subscriptions, and their income has exceeded the advertising share. According to statistics in August last year, PewDiePie, one of YouTube's most popular bloggers, earned $8 million a month on YouTube, of which $1.136 million was shared by advertising and $6.835 million by merchandise.

Going back to the YouTube platform itself, when its potential as a delivery platform was tapped, Google announced a new form of advertising (by adding a browsable product map at the bottom of the video ad to direct traffic to the product surface of the brand) to increase advertising revenue for YouTube.

Although Google does e-commerce with a certain commission, it is essentially a traffic import business.

Do not like "group buying second kill", overseas video e-commerce companies have to go their own way

KOL/KOC is imported, but it has explored a better commercial cash path in China-live broadcast with goods. But overseas, especially in North America, the significance of KOL/KOC for brands lies in brand building. Village CEO Vickie Segar, an online celebrity economics company, said, "Brands are not used to doing Instagram Lives (live streaming). If they don't do it in the traditional creative way, brands usually feel uneasy about content output." "

Bloggers on social media define themselves not as the person who sells to the brand, but as the content creator (creator), usually in a very vertical field to ensure that their fans are loyal.

But the epidemic has led brands to re-examine their social networking strategies. However, the "dislocation" caused by this is, "overseas, the live broadcast of online celebrities lacks product data tracking and industrialized business final accounting model, which leads to the extensive settlement model of online celebrities and e-commerce." Even if the economy of online celebrities in overseas markets is very mature and limited by the development stage of overseas e-commerce, the combination between online celebrities and e-commerce is not as close as at home. "BABA Global Express social program director Yang Yuan said.

Compared with the domestic situation, the live broadcast mode is just emerging overseas, the scale of users is not enough, the ecology is not perfect, and the platforms are also separated.

Amazon.Com Inc launched Amazon Live in 2019. Only VJs can unilaterally promote the feature settings, and consumers are not allowed to give likes, comments and other actions. Facebook Inc announced the launch of Facebook Inc Shops, trying to promote consumers to complete the purchase closed loop without leaving the application, but users are not used to it.

Moby Whale, a sea service platform, mentioned that the transaction settlement of live broadcast by Facebook Inc in Southeast Asia is basically a transaction settlement in which consumers and merchants transfer money with the bank through backstage private messages, and the highest conversion rate of transaction payment is about 10%.

But they are also improving the situation. Amazon.Com Inc specifically launched the online Celebrity Program (Influencer Program) to provide data tracking services and sales sharing for online celebrity bloggers who successfully joined the program; Shopee launched the KOL proxy service to connect online celebrity bloggers for cross-border e-commerce; and Facebook Inc acquired Packagd, a video e-commerce platform, at the end of 2019 to complement the live shopping function.

At the same time, each family is also exploring its own entry route. For example, the current layout of the Southeast Asian market e-commerce platform Lazada, Shopee in the domestic live broadcast with goods experience to export.

Popshop Live, a live ecommerce platform based in Los Angeles, raised $3 million in July. The platform's route is to capture a specific user base, and its platform is dominated by small businesses, selling products such as Japanese anime, retro clothing, crystal collections, and so on, enough to capture vertical consumers.

For Google to do video with goods this matter, there is no successful experience to learn from. In overseas markets that are not accustomed to "live group buying", blindly Copy from China may not be satisfied with local and local conditions.

If you use the overseas online celebrity economy is good at playing-brand looking for KOL/KOC to do brand promotion, consumers first establish trust in KOL, and then establish awareness of products through KOL, so as to form a virtuous circle, which may become the future development route of Shoploop.