Livestream Shopping Is a Messy, Maddening Experience (for Now)
New offerings from Pinterest, Instagram and others are bringing the pushy consumerism of QVC to a new generation.
Holiday gift buying is hell. It always has been, and likely always will be, an anxiety-fueled decision tree that no machine-learning algorithm can solve. However, another e-commerce paradigm has arrived with the promise of making gift shopping easier by adding that most social of social elements: an actual human, speaking directly to the camera, engaging with a flood of live comments, and spitting out promo codes, all while reminding you that the clock is ticking! This is a limited-time offer!
Pinterest, Instagram, Amazon, Facebook and upstarts like Ntwrk and Whatnot have all entered the crowded live-shopping arena, each bringing different approaches to hawking goods, different target audiences and different ideas of what constitutes “talent.” All told, their offerings are like your mother’s QVC repackaged for your niece’s iPhone—a mobile-only shopping landscape with zippier visuals, younger faces, and hipper and more diverse brands and products, but with the same buy-it-or-lose-it urgency.