What’s the Story?

This report is part of our Innovator Profile series, which focuses on emerging technologies that are disrupting traditional retail and fueling innovation across the retail value chain. In this report, we profile Livescale, a platform that enables brands and retailers to host engaging live shopping sessions and make purchases directly within a livestream via the dedicated app. Coresight Research collaborated with Livescale to offer insights into its service capabilities and offerings.

Why It Matters

Livestream shopping is set to continue growing rapidly, with the US livestream e-commerce market set to reach $11 billion in 2021 and $35 billion in 2024, Coresight Research estimates. Brands and retailers will increasingly turn to live shopping channels to engage consumers. Livescale’s livestream shopping technology offers a complete customer-branded solution to give merchants full control over the look and feel of their live shopping experiences. In addition, Livescale focuses on enabling retailers to integrate and manage their inventory and live store fronts across channels. The company also offers actionable business insights to ensure visibility into the online customer journey, which is crucial as consumers return to more normal ways of living, working and spending.

Livescale: In Detail

Headquarters  Montréal, Quebec, Canada Funding Stage Seed Management Team Virgile Ollivier—Co-Founder and CEO Laurent Boutet—Co-Founder and CTO Geoffroy Robin—CSMO and Partner Emilie Bernet—VP Operations What Problem Is the Company Solving? In the emerging livestream e-commerce landscape, brands are struggling to integrate and manage their inventory and live store fronts across channels. Livescale enables brands to manage their inventory, customer experience and payment functions within one seamless interface. In addition, Livescale’s 2020 partnership with Shopify will accelerate the integration of seamless live shopping for small and medium brands as inventory and e-commerce features are automatically synced between the Livescale and Shopify operating systems. For example, in June 2021, Livescale enabled L’Oréal Canada to participate in North America’s first Live Shopping Beauty Festival across multiple channels, managing inventory across its website and various social media channels. Livescale created a three-day shopping experience with 20, events featuring celebrity hosts and exclusive deals. To date, L’Oreal Canada has seen an average of three times more sales across its Livescale live shopping events than on its e-commerce channels. Additionally, the company claims that its integrated checkout, immersive client resources and outstanding customer service are unique within the industry, leading it to be recognized my LVMH as one of 2020’s most innovative technology companies. Competitive Advantage 1. Seamless payments: Many of today’s consumers shop across a variety of livestreaming channels, making it increasingly important for retailers to provide seamless shopping experiences within a live shopping session. Livescale’s solution enables brands to present items discussed on livestreams to consumers, offering the option for shoppers to read more information and finish payments within the same page. 2. High level of brand control over customer experiences: Livescale differentiates its offering with its capability to pair directly with a custom, brand-owned product dashboard, allowing the broadcasting team to create their own fully branded end-user experience. This comprises choosing from and tailoring a range of features, such as a branded landing page, color customization, enhanced gamification features (polls, chats, quizzes) and a unique giveaway function that allows one-to-one user communication. The company claims to stand apart from its competitors with this level of investment in gamification, shopper engagement and community management within live shopping. In addition, the company updates and revamps these features on a monthly basis. 3. Live shopping ecosystem: The company has built a unique training and educational database named “Livescale Academy,” where clients can access hundreds of documents, videos and content to become sales category experts. Livescale updates its database every day. 4. Customer service support: Livescale provides a designated customer success team for each client, which consists of a group of experts from all over the world, always on-call to ensure each live shopping show goes off without a hitch, and that each host/brand member is trained and empowered to sell and engage with as much confidence as possible. Especially for early adopters to the solution, the support and education is paramount. Strategy for the Post-Pandemic Market  Pandemic-related lifestyle changes have led to a huge swing in demand for livestream shopping for retail companies largely accustomed to incremental shifts. Livescale aims to adapt to the dynamic retail environment to increase value for brands through enhanced analytics offerings, new live shopping features and improving its connected live shopping ecosystem. Additionally, Livescale states that it has the most accessible pricing options for small and enterprise level merchants, ensuring an easy path to growth. Upcoming Developments Livescale is looking to continue creating solutions for brands beyond cutting-edge live shopping technology. This comprises offering a wider range of pricing opportunities for brands of all sizes and enhanced modules and analytics for clients, both in real time and for after events.

What We Think

Many brands and retailers already leverage live shopping features in their online business. However, Livescale enables brands to integrate their e-commerce inventory and customer journey to provide a seamless livestream purchase experience. In addition, Livescale’s comprehensive live shopping training materials and high level of brand control and customization should prove valuable to emerging businesses in managing their live video shopping experiences.