Why retailers should offer live shopping by appointment
September 16, 2024
Offer your customers the opportunity to make an appointment to book live shopping sessions via video conference and help them make their choice among all your products. Give them professional advice on colors, materials, prices, and availability and make them feel privileged by answering all their questions live. Live shopping is a great way to offer your customers an exceptional experience and has many advantages to be offered by appointment:
Fashion, luxury, cosmetics, etc. No matter the industry, it's the ideal solution to improve the conversion rate and increase the online shopping basket size!
Born in China around 2016, live shopping quickly came to Europe, becoming very popular in 2020, when the pandemic started. As the perfect solution to continue selling and promoting during the lockdown, live shopping has become essential for retailers and is now used more often by luxury and cosmetics companies.
As already mentioned in our article explaining live shopping, it consists in presenting items via videoconference, either in One-to-One or One-to-Many. It's an excellent alternative to traditional online shopping that brings a much more human touch. This practice is quite easy to set up but still requires some preparation to be successful.
Not to be confused with video consultation, which simply consists of chatting with an employee to get more advice on a product, live shopping aims to combine the in-store experience with the comfort of remote shopping.
Recent research with our clients has shown that 95% of live shopping sessions are by appointment. This figure represents almost all customers attending a live shopping session. So it's clear that any retailer needs an appointment scheduling software to launch live shopping or video consultations.
It is also essential to offer live shopping by appointment for organizational and logistical reasons. By scheduling your events, your personnel can prepare for each session and provide fully personalized service and advice. In addition, when your customers book a live shopping session, they will receive reminders to make sure they don't forget anything and that they are present during the appointment.
Finally, having to register to participate in a live shopping event will also allow you to easily collect your viewers' data to include in your CRM.
Furthermore, a major cosmetics brand sees an 8% conversion rate for their usual live shopping sessions (without booking) but has no way to capture data from the remaining 92%. However, by using Booxi, it is possible to directly collect data from 100% of the viewers upon registration and thus offer them a tailored experience while increasing your conversion rate.
There are many problems for which live shopping by appointment is one of the solutions. For example, when a customer visits your site and wants to talk live to one of your employees but nobody is online at the same time. Or when someone has a question that needs a more detailed answer and the online chatbot is not enough.
Making an appointment to attend the next live shopping session with one of your employees can be the answer to each of these situations. This is one of the ideal solutions to offer personalized service and not lose any visitors, even if none of your collaborators is available at that moment.
When you offer your customers live shopping by appointment, you increase your traffic and your return on investment. It is often a success and it can lead to conversion rates ranging from 15 to 35%!
Choosing the right software for your business is the first step to providing this service to your customers. Many retailers around the world use Booxi, integrated with a live shopping tool, to allow their customers to book appointments and sign up for live shopping sessions. Booxi's appointment scheduling software works with any tool such as Bambuser, Caast and Livescale, video conferencing tools that provide customers with interactive and professional live shopping sessions. Viewers will be able to interact with the hosts live and ask questions while product references appear on their screens and can be added to the shopping cart in a single click.
After the show, you can send your viewers a thank you email with a link to the featured items, a promotional code, or a booking button for the next live shopping session. To take it a step further, Bambuser even sends a personalized message when someone leaves the show early, suggesting they make another appointment.
In conclusion, offering a live shopping appointment button on your website is a great way to offer your customers personalized service. In addition, live shopping by appointment boosts your engagement, increases your average basket size and significantly reduces no-shows.
