Live Commerce is e-commerce merged with live video streaming. It showcases shoppable content and in some ways mimics the in-store experience live. It’s entertaining, informative, fun, and interactive as opposed to forcing consumers to read, compare and decide based on textual information. Brands, retailers, and consumers adore it. Purchasing is instantaneous and curious with higher levels of value addition and most importantly live commerce offers higher conversion rates than conventional means which are also less interactive. 

Live Commerce is largely a creator economy where content consumption happens via influencers or brands that people are engaging with on a personal level and who trust each other in a close-knit community. Since buying decisions often happen on social media platforms, Live Commerce enables dynamic interactions and offers a comparatively better and more immersive buying and selling experience. 

With the D2C sector booming, in this session of IReC 2022, we take cues from India’s leading fashion brands about the impact of Live Commerce on retailers and D2C brands, where it is heading, and how new brands can look at live commerce before they start to build on it. 

Pragya Priyali - Director, Social Commerce - Myntra takes us through Myntra’s Live Commerce journey of nine months. 

Social Platforms Turning into Shopping Malls

She began by highlighting how social platforms have emerged as key drivers for purchase decisions as most of the content consumption and generation happens there. 70 percent of purchase decisions are made over social media while watching influencers. Influencers are dictating the choices in fashion and lifestyle. 

Myntra Studio is Myntra’s own Social Commerce Platform that was launched in the year 2020. When they started they had two lakh viable influencers that they could collaborate with. In 2021, when Myntra was planning to start its own live platform the influencer number went up to two million - a 10X jump. That’s the explosion in the creator economy that they witnessed. All of these developments make brands want to explore creator-led commerce even more. 
 
The Numbers of Live Commerce on Myntra Studio

-    After delivering about 10,000 live events since Sep 2021, Myntra Studio today offers 40 hours of live commerce every day.
-    1,200 relevant customers participate in every live who actually want to buy. 
-    The conversions on live are way higher than the Myntra platform itself, something that every platform would want to achieve 

She recalls that the journey hasn’t been easy. She calls Myntra a start-up within a start-up where they have pivoted and re-pivoted learning along the way. What are the 3 biggest learnings that could inspire other brands, we ask? Live Commerce is more than tech and influencers, especially in India as we don’t still have dedicated skilled professional live streamers - a phenomenon common in the eastern markets like China. 

The four pillars of Live Commerce as Pragya defines it for Myntra’s success can be summed up - Creators, Content, Community, and Commerce. She dives deep into each one of these leaving these lessons as keynotes for aspiring brands to take note of. 

Creators - They are thrones that people look up to for recommendations and buying decisions. Brands must know that not every influencer is a live streamer and not every TV anchor can do the selling. It’s a skill set that doesn’t exist in India as of now. Because of its large influencer and user base, Myntra is uniquely placed to pick and choose viable creators for themselves through Myntra Studio and other Influencer Programs. Even then 1 in 10 creators become viable for live streaming. The journey of Live Commerce is not easy to sustain. Myntra makes an equal amount of effort to train and retain their live streamers. From skill development to incentive programs - they make the effort to keep one when they find one. A live stream is only as successful as the user finds it easy to discover, use, engage and access it. Myntra has been able to build its own live streaming platform in record time and they have a very good creator ecosystem at their disposal enabling them to have a very rapid feedback loop which further allows us to build products based on the feedback received from creators. 

Content: After spending 14 years in the field of content, Pragya mentions live streaming has broken all her conceptions about what content should be like. The key difference between a Reel and a Livestream is that people are entering a live streaming session at different points in time and so they might not know what the last hour or 45 minutes was. Hence, it’s important to drop something new for every new consumer who joins the live every 5-10 seconds and keep the live interesting, else they drop off in 3 seconds or less. Duration is a key metric to having a successful live session. While conventional wisdom would say that the ideal time for a live is 45 minutes, Myntra plays it in a rather opposite direction. They make it quick and easy for the users to learn about a product, solve their doubts and make a decision whether or not they wish to buy the product and leave the live. 

Community: Community is the fuel of Live Commerce. The value of community building in live commerce works differently. Instead of a brand-first approach, creators need to be left by themselves to build their own followers/ fans/ communities on their own. Some of Myntra’s top creators have the largest communities on the Myntra platform as compared to any other platform/ social media networks where they are present. Their core fan base is on Myntra’s live platform. Myntra enables creators to create a community on the Myntra platform via live by working with a few creators, investing in them disproportionately, having them do live shows frequently, and making their live schedules predictable. They also like influencers to remain original and authentic and so they avoid dictating influencers on what they should be selling and how they should be selling as they believe an influencer knows their audience the best. Myntra lets the influencer choose what they want to sell, when, and how. They are constantly learning with creators on how to consistently deliver successful lives on their platform. So training, re-training, and monitoring live-on-live is the way to go.

Commerce: The most important thing about live commerce that brands must know is the feeling of scarcity that after a live, the price of the product will change or the product will run out or the influencer may never come back again. The other way would be to make them feel ultra special by allowing a few early users to be able to buy the product. If the user walks away with a hint that they can browse now and buy later then that dissolves the purpose of a live streaming. So like it or not, brands must ensure that the consumer feels they have a lot to lose if they don’t make a purchase through the live. 

Myntra:  Social Commerce and Live Commerce 

-    Myntra is the largest social media brand amongst others on all platforms
-    It delivers 30 billion organic impressions every year. 
-    Myntra Studio was launched in May 2020 and covers an MAU of 20-25 percent of the Myntra platform
-    Live is Myntra’s newest baby. They conduct 40-50 live events every day
-    Most of Myntra’s creators are women as the category is more attuned to the female consumer. Myntra thus has been able to provide sustainable employment to a lot of women influencers bringing in a lot more structure to the gig economy. 

For a lifestyle brand that Myntra is, its Live Streaming highlight is that each live streaming session hosts an array of products from Myntra’s own catalog when each influencer goes live. Unlike a live session on a social media platform which is just a live streaming session. This helps Myntra upsell its products and build loyalty and engagement that’s far more than that on a social media platform.