Live Streaming Sales: The future of outbound marketing and why Indonesia business should practice it ASAP!
After the covid-19 breakout that happen in Taiwan, I had to face the impact of being laid off from my part time job as kitchen assistant, but luckily there is temporary job vacancy as administrator for online clothing, even its only one day working, however this experience is the eye-opening experiences in my life, not for the position that assigned for moreover on how they sell their clothes, during this covid-19 restriction state they able to sell 400+ pieces for one day by live streaming through facebook and tik-tok!
One of the successes of live streaming shopping practice is happened in Mainland China, according to forbes, the estimation profit of livestream e-commerce is $60 billion annually. In 2019, over 430 million people, about 30% of China’s population, viewed livestreams, and in 2020, it’s projected to reach 560 million, or around 39%. Sales from live streams are expected to grow more than 100% in 2020 vs. 2019 to almost 9% of all online retail sales and all the livestream purchases dominated by gen-z, millennial and middle age through Platforms like Alibaba’s Taobao and JD.com
Why Do Livestreaming become a thing?
This practice is more convenience, we don’t need to order a cab to go to the shopping mall especially for Jakarta people where bad traffic is a common thing, you can just on your coach or napping in the sofa while choosing your items and compare to the common online shopping where you customers only able to see the product through picture and description, the live streaming selling help both consumer and sellers to have direct contact by leaving comment section or chat box and ask product description in details and sellers can reply it immediately, similar to face to face shopping but the difference is no cost required for transportation and customers can chill at your home while clicking those link to purchase their items. These days customers want to interact with brands and live streaming offers an opportunity to consumers to quickly interact with the sellers.
Is this method inclusive for any business type?
Absolutely! For instance, Guo Chengcheng from China, per livestream she is able to earn 500,000 orders and for a month she can earn 9 million yuan. Livestream selling has become a trend among rural entrepreneurs that sell their goods to urban consumers with tik-tok live streaming feature as their trading platform. It happens due to the pandemic circumstance where the demands of fresh groceries have become higher yet consumers are unable to go outside.
According to Bloomberg, The number of farmers broadcasting in China is growing fast because more than 100,00 farmers streamed 2.52 million sessions on Alibaba Group’s Taobao Live in the year ended in March and tik-tok agricultural content creators with more than 10,000 followers.
Is Indonesia Ready for it?
Definitely! According to bank Indonesia, the e-commerce transactions in 2020 with estimation 140 million and on top of that has 338.2 million mobile customers, 175.4 million internet users, and 160 million active social media users, means that there is potential chance that livestream selling will be effective and other than that the impact of covid-19 shifting Indonesian consumer behavior, stated by Mckinsey that due to covid-19, nine out of ten Indonesian trying a new habit of purchasing behavior that mostly choose digital shopping method that 88% chance intent to continue this behavior. Practicing this highly interactive activity as one of your marketing activities will aid you to sell goods with no hassle especially for well-known businesses or businesses that already acquired loyal customers and on top of that this type of selling is perfect during this condition.
How to and Where?
One of the challenge for Indonesian is internet speed,In south east asia, we are ranked fifth for mean upload speed over mobile (10.42 Mbps) and choosing best internet network could be best option for this matter because good internet is required for live streaming activity in order to pervent lag that could lead to customers become not interested with our product and dont forget to prepare before live streaming, for instance camera, backdrop, the goods, transaction method and script, preparation is a vital! make sure your live stream is attractive enough to engage customers and to do live stream, as far as I know, the e-commerce platform that added this feature in Indonesia is shopee but sellers can use Instagram, facebook and tik-tok, however it is more convenience to use marketplace application because they already have purchasing link while on Instagram, facebook and tik-tok still need to do manual administration, however it’s not a big problem, sellers can still use the livestream platform for selling and direct the consumer to click on the link to purchase goods.
