Live shopping & interactive videos are the future of eCommerce and retail
Last year, in the fateful month of March 2020, we launched 25+ In-stores in suburban Mumbai from Juhu tara road, to Bandra linking road, from Andheri to Ghatkopar, and from Dadar to lower parel. And guess what happened on 24th March? — The entire country went under lockdown, retail businesses were forced to close their doors to walk-in customers — and just like that the entire nation came to a standstill.
After 6 months of hard work and several million rupees worth of investment later, this is the curveball that the universe throws back at us or should I say a bag full of curveballs? While what was initially thought of as just a few days to a maximum — a couple of weeks, tops, worth of an exercise lasted for a few months with some parts of the country experiencing it for even much longer.
We lost almost everything. We had to let go of the most part of our team, which was the hardest most difficult decision I had to ever make. We had to shut down all of our in-stores, we had to pull out of our co-working spaces and stop those darn rents, we had to cut down our marketing budgets by almost 100% to save all that cash burn, we had to stop taking orders due to uncertainty about production and the deliveries. And over the next few months, we ran out of money — and there it was, an existential threat looming over us.
Now you may feel sorry for a young startup and its team members to have faced such an undeserving and unfortunate turn of events or some may think of it as pure bad luck — BUT DONT BE SORRY— because certainly, we are not. We are entrepreneurs, nobody forced us to start a company. We are founders — nobody put a gun to our head to dare to dream big and create something out of thin air. It is we who chose to live this life, and hence while we can’t control the uncertainties, what we can control is how we react to them. If there is one thing in life that I have learnt building a startup company then it would be..
“It is not the circumstances that define you, but how you defy those circumstances to become who you truly are”
While we lost a lot of material things, what we didn’t lose was our relentless commitment and a never-ending desire to building a high impact institution that creates true value in society and leaves a lasting mark on people’s lives. Kinda like the one where we like to think of ourselves as creating a dent in the universe. As silly and unrealistic as it may sound, but entrepreneurs are a bunch of hopeless romantics and only God knows how or why do we never run out of that oil which keeps the fire burning.
So in fact, we are quite thankful that this happened to us because it set us on a very different path. It helped us to course-correct, to think differently and to think beyond what we thought was possible. Because guess what, a few weeks into the lockdown, almost by the end of May-June, we started seeing a lot of our brand partners start using WhatsApp video calling and zoom video conferencing applications to conduct online shopping sessions with their target customers. In fact a lot of our loyal set of repeat customers starting calling us every day requesting to shoot and send them videos of the products that we have in stock at our partner stores, or are currently on a sale, or the new collection that is going to be launched so they can book advance orders for rakhi (august month), Navratri (Sept) with some going as far as Diwali (oct) occasions, orders that will get delivered once the lockdown gets lifted.
It was really a huge shock for us to witness all this, perhaps even more shocking than the idea of the lockdown itself as to our utter surprise we were observing people both from the brands and the end consumer’s side adapting to newer technologies and see their willingness to try out new ways to shop online. In a pre-covid world, these guys were die-hard offline shoppers and traditional business owners who never fully understood the concept of online shopping or bothered to use any form of online tech tools beyond the usual social media such as Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. And now all of a sudden they are starting to use video conferencing apps to see products in real-time, invoicing apps to place orders, filling out google forms to book advance orders, schedule appointments on Google calendar, and using payment apps to make UPI payments, so on and so forth.
And, we thought to ourselves, that we have spent the last 3–4 years working with several hundreds of fashion designers, entrepreneurs and other key stakeholders from the industry and built an entire commerce tech stack that after understanding their pain points, and we wondered, like a curious kid, what if? What if we built our own video streaming server on top of our existing eCommerce platform using interactive technologies such as text, chat, voice and messaging to create a new kind of interactive video commerce platform? One that mimics the same offline experience that you would get if you were to meet in person or physically visit a store?
It was then WE DECIDED TO PIVOT and started building from scratch — once again. This wasn’t a one day eureka moment, but a series of realisations we had working very closely with several of our brand partner for many months, testing out different iterations of our product. We knew that we had something solid with our instore concept, i.e our firm belief that retail is here to stay, but what we didn’t know back then, is that the boundaries of physical and online retail are blurring as merging much faster than what was humanly conceivable earlier. The future is not either, or but a combination of both online and offline, A PHYGITAL if you may like to call it and we realised that what the consumer and retail businesses require today is for someone to help them bring that human touch to online shopping, so it can imitate the same offline shopping experience that they would otherwise offer to the potential customers either in person or at the store. This is really missing today as most of the online eCommerce websites today provide a very dull and outdated shopping experience, to say the least.
And what better way to bring that authenticity element other than using videos? Think about it? Video consumption in India has grown 9 times in the last 12 months itself where the average Indian spends 30X more time on consuming video content compared to product shopping. So like how watching videos online have become the normal routine of our lives today, the same is going to happen with shopping in the future. Wait, IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING. I stand corrected. Not only are more and more consumers adapting to this new way of shopping online by watching videos, but we believe that in the immediate future with the rollout of 5G, A LIVE VIDEO SHOPPING experience is going to become the new reality in people’s lives. With better data connectivity, an increase in smartphone penetration, the rise of the new income class, people’s lives getting busier, and the ever-growing purchase appetite of the modern Indian consumer — India’s economy is going to witness its finest decade yet in terms of consumption growth while video commerce will naturally become the front runner to occupy the most significant share of the total online retail market. It is estimated that by 2025, India will have over 350 million online shoppers, which is almost 35% of our country’s population, with 1 out of every 3 individuals shopping online.
So if you are a brand today that is looking to bring that human connection to online shopping then we will help you. Whether you are a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand or a traditional retailer, you can instantly start using our virtual shopping mobile app that utilises your existing smartphone and turns it into a super-intelligent video catalogue creation, engagement, monetization, analytics and retargeting tool which enables you to:
a) set up your online video storefront in just 1 min 🏪
b) create shoppable videos — both pre-recorded tik-tok styled short videos called SWIRLS or schedule a live video session 📷
c) start sharing the links on any digital or social platform 💪
Once the audience clicks on the link, without having the need to download a mobile app, they get a full screen, movie style, live video shopping experience where they can..
- Request SHOW ME to see the product details 🙇
- Record a VOICE NOTE to send an audio message 🎤
- ASK A QUESTION privately 🙋🏻♀️
- LIVE CHAT 👨💻
- CONNECT ON WHATSAPP 🥳
- Send / receive TEXT / SMS 👌
- REQUEST PRICE (in case of a custom / made to order product) 👍
- Place a VOICE / VIDEO CALL 🤳
- Book an appointment to WALK-IN 🙏
- Click BUY NOW to complete the transaction ✌️
..this kind of interactive video shopping experience not only greatly enhances your customer engagement by 7X but also start giving your customers that turbocharged interactive shopping experience that directly leads to a 9% conversion, at least 5 times higher than the industry average of 0.5–2%. Plus it helps you to imprint a strong brand recall value that ultimately leads to a high-value customer relationship that greatly increases lifetime loyalty and repeat business. Watch this video below 👇
So if you are a traditional small to a medium-sized retail business owner who is testing the waters before plunging into starting to create your online web presence, then you can use our B2B SaaS product as a standalone solution to build your virtual business OR if you are a digital-first eCommerce brand then you can use our fully-integrated video commerce solution that automatically integrates with your existing eCommerce platform whether on WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Wix, woo-commerce or BigCommerce using a short code, API’s, and plugins and provides the same interactive virtual shopping to your website visitors.
So what are you waiting for? Don’t let uncertainties cloud your judgement, don’t let other people’s opinions of you become your reality, go out there and build your own future and we promise you that we will have you covered. At the end of the day, all of us business owners are chasing those lifetime worth of value customers — which could be our biggest moat, and the post covid era presents an excellent opportunity for early movers to go out there and try something new and innovative to build a competitive advantage over our peers. Visit https://www.GoSwirl.live to GET STARTED today or BOOK A DEMO and our team will get in touch with you asap 🤝 Already 100+ brands such as Greenberry organics, PN RAO, BeChef, HumbleBee Luxury and AltoVida trusts us.
