Nowadays, everyone enjoys doing their shopping online. The convenience that it offers has won people over. Today, people prefer to do online shopping instead of visiting a brick & mortar store. It provides them plenty of time to research and check reviews to decide which product to buy from an eCommerce site. Isn’t it simple?
However, It required people to constantly switch between apps for comparing products and reviews on an e-commerce store, and once they are satisfied and willing to make the purchase, they add it to the cart and place the order. Video Shopping Platforms have made things easy for the consumers; the audience can quickly discover, evaluate, and buy products from one place.
In video commerce, businesses use video content to promote and sell products and services online. Video Shopping Platforms are the game-changer step in eCommerce as it provides a lot of convenience to the consumers. Also, it is essential for retailers as it offers them an opportunity to showcase their product and give shoppers a better user experience. Today in this blog, we will be discussing various elements of video commerce that can grow your eCommerce store.
To better understand, we can consider an example of TV advertising. For the past many years, it is creating awareness of products and brands. Video advertising makes it easy to demonstrate products and brands attractively. It helps in increasing the conversion rate of your eCommerce store.
You can make your eCommerce site more interactive by using video content rather than images and graphics; a short video description of a product or a brand can help your consumer explore new products and services in a better manner.
How Does Video Shopping App Work?
Video Shopping is a way of engaging the consumer with the help of videos and live streamings. It helps reduce the buyer’s hesitation towards the product with its interactive and attractive nature, thus improving sales.
You can use different platforms for developing video shopping stores, Such as Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, Shopware, etc. You can also integrate Shoppable Video Platforms into your existing eCommerce store like Amazon Live, Bambuser, Livescale, Popshop Live, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Video increases user engagement by directly connecting the consumer with the product or services; It enhances conversion rates and eventually boosts your sales.
Types Of Video Shopping Mobile Apps
1. Non-Live Video Shopping App
It is a type of app from which we can record a video of a product or service and integrate it on a website, social media platform, or any other kind of video platform. It is an excellent way of showcasing your products and gather a massive audience. The only drawback is you can’t assume the need of your audience.
2. Live Video Shopping App
Live Video Shopping, also known as Live Video Stream Shopping, has audience interaction. Here, the video presenters are on LIVE, and at that moment, they have the chance to understand the reaction of their audience in real-time. When it is one-on-one, the presenter requires only asking what the shopper desires to know or see. Here they can directly respond to their needs. Resultantly, the chances of conversion are very high. Then in the one-to-many scenario, the presenters are posing questions and get the response from the audience by tweets, polls, direct messages, or they can even gauge the reaction based on how many people leave the LIVE. In this scenario, it benefits when the presenter is entertaining, as the more responsive these presenters are to the audience, the greater is going to be the propensity to make purchases.
3. Dedicated Video Shopping App
A type of Video Shopping app is mainly developed for a brand to execute its day-to-day operations. In this type, the customers get associated with a specific brand, and all the operational activities varying from receiving orders to delivering successfully are entirely managed by the brand.
4. Aggregator Video Shopping App
All the merchants are under a single platform, so the app users find shops, vendors, and dealers (in the proximate location). These sellers offer the users the best deals on the products shown in the Video shopping app. In this model, usually, the app charges a particular commission amount from the vendors, dealers, and shops registered on the app.
Benefits Of Video Shopping Mobile Apps
In today’s times, Video Commerce plays a critical role in the eCommerce strategy, and resultantly there is a tremendous amount of activity to support increased conversion via video. It brings many benefits to eCommerce:
1. Better engagement
Through a video, a lot of information can be conveyed quickly to the target audience. A single video is way faster than reading and has more depth than a single image. As here, the video timing is usually 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or a minute, so people stay longer on your website. The shoppers can explore the themes used in the video on the website once the video has been viewed.
2. Increase in Sales
People like a moving picture, and thus, videos can consistently produce higher clicks through rates. And when they like the video, this increases the chances of making a purchase, which is sure to boost sales.
3. Boost in Conversions
Video searches are among the most popular search results, and thus when you have a video on your website, you come up with more and more search results, enjoy better rankings, and increased traffic. A nicely produced video has people featured in it who well explain about your product. Thus, people can relate to it, get reassured, and have higher chances to reshare. We see everywhere on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that people love sharing videos, and hence if you create entertaining videos, they will be shared. So when a fun video that demonstrates your product has been uploaded, it gets shared a lot. And then you know that people who watch a video of a product are highly likely to convert.
4. Lesser Costs
Videos can be created easily by simply using smartphones’ high-resolution cameras these days. It is straightforward, with people having inherent knowledge of how to shoot a video and edit it quickly. Thus, it brings down the cost of producing videos remarkably.
5. Connects the Influencers, Consumers & Merchants
The Video Shopping app brings together the influencers, consumers, and merchants under a single platform. This way, the consumers don’t need to switch between the media to buy a product.
Google is also working on its Video Shopping App ShopLoop
Statistics About Video Commerce
2020 was considered “Year Zero” for Live Shopping or Video Shopping in Europe and North America. Many client industries conducted more than 600 events, and they had an average of 300 viewers per event. It has been proven that Live Shopping works pretty well for fashion & accessories, fitness, beauty, and food & beverage, mainly the more visual-oriented industries. One prominent accessories brand went on to sell 282 items in just an hour, thus scoring a 56% sales conversion rate.
Video Shopping is a high-liked marketing tool where the notifications are not muted by default. Speaking particularly of Asia, Video Shopping marketing is not new there and has been growing for years. Lately, it became vital in brand marketing strategies, particularly in the e-commerce field. To illustrate this better, China’s version of Amazon, i.e., Taobao, has generated over $15.1 billion in gross merchandise value through the Video Shopping sessions in 2018.
To learn more about a product or service, 96% of people have watched an explainer video.
When asked how they would like to learn about a product or service, 69% said they would rather watch a short video. This compares to 18% who prefer to read a text-based article, website, or post, 4% who prefer to view an infographic, 3% who prefer to download an ebook or manual, 3% who prefer to attend a webinar or pitch, and 2% who prefer a sales call or demo.
The perceived importance of video as a marketing tool has increased significantly. In 2015, approximately 78 percent of video marketers told us that video was an important part of their marketing strategy. As we approach 2021, that figure has risen to 93 percent.
So, even though video marketing is an old concept, the new tools & platforms that allow to shape online marketing trends & drive video consumption are constantly created. As per Insivia, mobile video consumption increases by 100% every year. And the data gathered on the video marketing by Cisco states that the Videos are expected to be making up more than 80% of the total internet traffic in the year 2021.
These statistics mentioned above reveal a massive rise in this industry. It has paved the way for new opportunities, and now people can seriously consider making investments in creating such mobile apps. The Video Shopping industry is going to be the next big thing very soon. It will be profitable for the businesses to start making suitable investments to generate a good deal of revenue in return.
How Can Video Shopping Mobile Apps Make Money?
This platform is constantly growing and has good prospects. There will be a good amount of ROI (return on investment) for businesses to choose to invest in this area. And in case you are interested in investing, then here we mentioned ways using which your Video Shopping mobile app can make money:
1. Subscription
In this model, the app users who aim to access the videos present on the app platform must pay the app’s subscription fee and then make monthly payments for watching such videos.
2. Commission
This model helps let other brands display their products on your app or sell them from your platform. Thus, a specific fee is charged by the app as a commission from these businesses.
3. Featured Listing
Here, the new content that the app launches on the platform can be promoted via small video clips to allure the users. These clips require entertaining and captivating to catch users’ attention and should be available to only users who hold premium accounts.
4. Advertisement Selling
In this model, the app derives a good amount of revenue from the advertisements. The app sells its space on the homepages and pages, and here the most-liked content helps earn good returns. Further monetization is done with ads displayed on the range with maximum user engagement & downloads.
Top Video Commerce Platforms
1. Amazon Live
This platform has successfully engaged with the shoppers in real-time and drove consideration via interactive and shoppable live streams. It enables brand interaction in real-time and gives customers the confidence to consider new brands & make purchase decisions.
2. Bambuser.com
This is a self-service solution that allows more and more businesses to engage the shoppers and drive sales using the company’s interactive e-Commerce technology.
3. Hapyak.com
This is a software-as-a-service cloud platform that provides interactive overlays for the videos to which you can buy a subscription. During the term of your subscription, you get access to their web-based, self-service tools & activity reports.
4. Livescale. Tv
This Video shopping platform enables organizations to transform content & e-commerce into real-time shopping. This live shopping platform is created to transform your app content with direct e-Commerce integration to make a great live shopping experience for your app audience.
5. Spin. Live
This interactive LIVESTREAM shopping platform keeps you connected to the live feed as you make a purchase, without the need to backtrack to finish the video and hunt via the comment section to locate the product link. Here, users can shop as they watch live product demos and get huge discounts on their loved brands.
Key Features Of Video Shopping Mobile App
Video Creation Tool (VOD): This is the most critical functionality, and a Video Shopping app can genuinely do without it. Integrating the app with a video creation tool will allow the presenters and bloggers to create a video and make it fun easily. Hence, they engage with it, head towards conversion, and make a purchase. This is a must-have feature for this kind of app.
1. LIVE Streaming
Another crucial functionality to have for a Video Shopping app. As we mentioned above, there are several types of Video Shopping Apps, and among them, one was the LIVE Video Shopping app. And for that type of app, the LIVE Streaming feature is a must, as it will allow the presenters to conduct a LIVE stream to convey about the product, give a demo, and present it to the audience in an entertaining manner.
2. In-App Voice Assistance
In-app Voice Assistant is an essential feature for the Video Shopping app, as it increases the app’s value significantly. Your audience would love this opportunity to use a voice assistant in their interaction with the video presenters during a LIVE session.
3. Push Notification
This feature allows the app to send messages, alerts, and notifications to app users to convey information to everyone.
4. CRM Integration
Customer Relationship Management is essential for any app, and the same holds for the Voice Shopping app. This feature allows managing the customer relations better by keeping in mind their specific requirements and offering personalized recommendations and services to them.
5. Loyalty Program
Every business enjoys having a large number of loyal customers, and you can do it too by integrating this feature and then successfully serve your customers in a much more pleasing manner by offering them rewards, and coupons, discounts, from time to time appreciating their loyalty towards your business.
6. Real-Time Analytics
This functionality is helpful as the admin gets access to the real-time statistics in reports, pie charts, and dashboards on the admin panel. Admin can receive the information on LIVE shows that run at a particular time and retention numbers. This allows the admin to strategize the plans and accordingly market the content.
7. Behavior Tracking
It is vital to find out what content interests your user, and this can be found according to the searches saved in the back-end. The app should push recommendations to the users, as that will generate interest in the users. This helps in content promotion and to get more views from users.
8. Recommendation
Using the rankings and reviews that the user has collected, the app platforms filter content that is pushed to any user’s screen.
How to develop a video shopping app?
There are many things that become inevitable in making the video shopping app. Let’s dig deeper to understand the steps for video shopping app development.
1. Identify the Type of App
The foremost step is to identify the type of video shopping app you want to develop. The two main types of this app are live streaming and pre-recorded videos.
The pre-recorded videos allow the user to watch product videos at their own pace. On the other hand, live streaming apps allow users to shop with a host in real time.
2. Market Research
Once you know what type of app you want to develop, it’s time for market research. The process contains the analysis of the competition. Also, helps in analyzing the features that can be included and the latest market trends. These can be analyzed by using the app stores, customer reviews, and social media.
3. Hire a Professional team of App Developer
If you do not have an in-house team of developers, it is important for you to search for a good development team. There are many companies available that specialize in video shopping app development that provide industry experts. Make a list of multiple top companies and go for the one that suits your business requirements.
4. Choosing the best Tech Stack and Features
Now, when you have a team of experts, the next step is obvious: go for the best features and tech stack to stand out in the market. Research and take the reference of the competitors, and with the experts’ help, ask for the one that can differ in the app from others to enhance the experience of users.
5. App development
The process contains all the coding and integration of the third-party system app. This is where the app takes its form. The team works on each element thoroughly. First, they develop the MVP, and after finalizing the things by analyzing that, the main app development is carried out.
6. Testing and Deployment
Once the app is developed, it is necessary to look at the app thoroughly. Thus helping identify the errors and bugs in the app. Once the app is tested and bug-free, you can deploy it to the public.
Developing a successful video shopping app requires careful planning and execution and taking care of each step to be completed properly.
Challenges Faced While Creating Video Shopping Mobile App
1. Develop Connector For The Multiple Platforms
There are various phones of different formats, be it Android, iOS, and Windows, and along with it many digital devices, such as laptops, tablets, from which the app users like accessing a video. Hence, the video providers must make a video platform or an app that supports all the devices & formats.
2. Content Delivery with No glitches
Often, the video app developers face being unable to attain a stable stream transport under all conditions. They struggle at avoiding complex server setup, installation, and maintenance processes.
3. Robust Streaming Architecture
Several standards formats enable live video streaming depending on the operating systems, browsers, and platform. Here you need to find out which design is going to work best for your use case. In this process, you might come across these challenges, such as:
- Set-Up: To set up a live stream and maintain good-quality delivery, needs complete knowledge around server installation & maintenance.
- Stable Streams: Your stream & camera signal must be stable even in the unstable network conditions for the playback on a global level. This needs a high-quality adaptive bitrate algorithm & quick reconnect workflows.
- Cross-platform playback: Look for the playback quality on different platforms & devices. It is essential that your playback software enables you to share multiple streams of the same event or has a large global audience.
4. Content Transcoding
Yet another challenge as it can be pretty expensive to save larger data sets as a procession of several jobs is done in various formats.
5. Insightful Analytics
A video platform must keep track of its app users, including the customer, admin, merchant, and influencer) using its analytics. But often, these analytics reports lack the details and tend to be pretty expensive.
6. Highly Scalable Database Storage
Any app must find its number of users, regardless of their number constantly increasing. The app has to ensure that the back-end architecture is scalable so the number can be easily calculated. Keep in mind that the storage of data on a large scale can be expensive and slow. Also, the bandwidth offered is very intensive.
Video Streaming Architecture
Tech-Stack For Video Streaming Mobile App
Here we have mentioned the technologies that need to be integrated into the Video app platform:
- Push.io, Twilio for Push Notifications
- Nexmo, Twilio for Voice, SMS, and Phone Verification
- Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, e-Wallets for payments
- Robust Programming for GWT
- Manage Data with Datastax
- Manage everything regarding emails with Mandrill
- MailChimp Integration, Postgres, HBase, MongoDB, Cassandra for Database
- AWS for Cloud Environment
- IBM, Cisco, Apache Flink, BigData, Spark, Hadoop for Real-time Analytics
- Nimble Streamer & Wowza Streaming Engine for Streaming Media System
How Much Does It Cost To Create A Video Shopping Mobile App?
There are several factors on which the cost of developing a Video Streaming mobile app depends, such as app size, features, design complexity, and location of the app development company. Also, a team of app developers was hired to the creation of the app. This team consists of:
- Project Manager
- iOS, Android developers
- Backend developers
- UX/UI Designers
- Quality Analyst professionals
Now, taking a look at charges based on the countries, they are
- For US-based developers, it is $50-$250/hour
- For Eastern-Europe, it is $30-$150/hour
- For India-based developers, it is $10-$80/hour
Keeping all these factors in mind, the cost to create a mobile app for Video Shopping usually tends to come around $25000-$30000 when it is an essential app for a single platform. However, if the app includes advanced features and is created for multiple platforms, it doubles the cost to $50000-$60000.
Conclusion
In today’s technology era, everything around us is changing the way we used to see and becoming better and better day by day. Talking about shopping, all the things are available online today, but to make it more favorable, making a shoppable video streaming app becomes the cherry on the cake. It is one of the best innovations to engage many audiences and enhance customer engagement.
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