How to Run a Live Shopping Show That Actually Sells

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Nathan Bush: I really want to talk about live shopping, but before we get to that, tell me about breaks. I educated myself a little bit in breaks coming from the non card collector world. Discovery breaks and discovering how big they are and how much of an event it is. I just Had a thousand ideas of how we could potentially take this out of just cards and apply it to a broader retailer. E commerce sense.

[Ad]: But to start with, can you just

Nathan Bush: explain the concept of breaks and how you bring your community together over them?

Grayson White: Yeah, well, historically, they've always been called breaks. We've shifted to calling them live shopping to sort of align more with the modern terminology that the wider community's probably beginning to get familiar with. But essentially they began around 2008, 2009, when there were products in the marketplace that were too expensive to justify one person buying them, or they certainly weren't selling through with any velocity with one person buying them. And as such, people started to see good value in taking a $1,000 item and dividing it by the 30 possible teams. So you might buy the Los Angeles Lakers because you collect Los Angeles, and I buy the Chicago Bulls because I like Derrick Rose. And then in that product, when it gets open live on camera to a community of people that are chatting and familiar with each other and taking the piss out of each other, then you would get any of the Lakers cards that came out, and I would get any of the Chicago Bulls cards that came out, and if there were no Lakers cards, you get nothing. And it just.

[Ad]: It caught fire.

Grayson White: People that wanted the cards loved it. People that wanted the theater loved it. People that wanted to just talk shit loved it. It was a beautiful community. A really fun time in my life where how I kind of saw the future of trading cards being this really kind of live IRL experience was realized. And, you know, I love my staff. I've got an incredible team. I'm so extraordinarily lucky. But there's something beautiful as well about every single cent being yours and every decision being yours, and every mistake being yours, too, because you make a lot of those. So that was a really beautiful time. And breaks or live shopping just grew and grew and grew, and now there's so many different ways to do it. And just recently, obviously, whatnot, which is, yeah, I think like a 12 billion company now.

Nathan Bush: Huge.

[Ad]: There's not that many in Australia using

Nathan Bush: it, though, is there?

Grayson White: There's a fair few now. Only launched a year ago, Alibaba is the world's largest live shopping.

Nathan Bush: Yep.

Grayson White: But it's. Alibaba is kind of like the dfo. Whatnot is like your specific. It's like you're going there for collectibles, whether that's collectible clothes or collectible toys or cards. It's a very specialized store, and it

[Ad]: is built for performance.

Grayson White: It just Works, Yeah, it is going to make, I'm not too sure what the average age is of your listeners, but for the ones that are under 20, I think it's going to make a lot of them millionaires. It's not playing around, it does the work and you just need to find what the, what the product is that you drop in. And whether that's you collected Lego, you're going to put minifigures on it or you know, you collected DVDs and you're going to, you know, put those on there or whatever clothes you collect band T shirts, you found a place you can buy those out of Japan like boom, boom, boom. And yeah, you got to have seriously good results.

Nathan Bush: And so obviously very different mindset from E Comm where you can list your products up and hope they sell and once the inventory hits zero, your job's done. On live shopping, how do you approach that from even a scheduling or a planning perspective? Do you consider it kind of like episodes or shows or do you just kind of go events? Like how do you kind of think about that differently to kind of build hype for these events on whatnot?

Grayson White: Yeah, well, to answer your question either, but you know, not well, we're at a point where we are a slow moving ship compared to, you know, kids are hopping on that platform and they're just dominating it from the moment they hop on. We got to go through the whole process of creating a strategic objective, you know, getting the people behind that, not over burdening the people that are already in that space. Like there's a whole process that is involved in developing something like that. And there's certainly people out there that are doing phenomenally. They should be events. Every show should have an event, a really clear call to action to them. And to an extent, extent, we're getting better at that. My team are extraordinarily good at YouTube, which is where we kind of made our money and our community, that's where they live. And bringing those into that whatnot environment is something that we're learning every day and we're getting better at and we're investing in. But like you say the moment, it's like walking into a shopping center and what you need to do is have a really nice storefront and there's a

Nathan Bush: real skill, isn't there, to being a TVSN type personality in the modern world compared to being a content creator or an influencer. Influencer where you can go back and edit your stuff like to keep people entertained constantly and to fold in product and Sales messages at the same time as keeping it entertaining. What have you learned around live shopping, especially through all your events, to make it not only entertaining, but to actually

[Ad]: move product at the same time?

Grayson White: Yeah, well, that's really something that's difficult and you need to work with it delicately. Our marketing approach has always been that we've never wanted to come across as a catalog. We treat our community as an engaged and a group of collectors who want to escape the grind of whatever they're doing for work and be able to still take part, whether or not they want to be the person who's just making jokes in the stream or they want to be the person who just observes what people get. And so we freely focus on that. And then every now and then we've got an offer we'll fold in an offer for them that we think is something that is either going to be a good value to them or something that's going to be really interesting for everyone who's watching. And I think that when you've got that trust, they will activate.

[Ad]: Yep.

Grayson White: So, for example, today the Select NRL trading cards launch. When we do put up a post or we do put up a show and we say, hey, guys, world premiere of Select NRL trading cards, we find that our community go, they trust us that we're not just, you know, trying to move them widgets for the sake of moving them widgets. And they're not going to get another email that says, hey, do you want more widgets? Like, that's just not how we operate.

[Ad]: What Cherry built here isn't a sales channel. You can't compare it to the E Commerce channel or Amazon. They've actually built a model for how entertainment and commerce work together and it transfers well beyond trading cards. I mean, trading cards are cool, but I'm sure we can all think of ways that we can use live shopping in our business. So here's a few lessons. Number one, live shopping works when buying is one of the reasons that people turn up. Sounds obvious, right? But the reason that the brakes model caught fire and most live shopping experiments don't comes down to who the show is built for. Grayson says there are three distinct audiences that turn up to every card break. There are the collectors who want the cards, the people that just want the theatre, and the people that just want to turn up to be part of the conversation. One of those three is there to transact. I know that sounds grim, but one of those three is there to transact. The other two aren't. The other two are there for entertainment. And if you design the show only for those groups that are there for entertainment, you lose the whole point of the thing. Motto Fashions is a 40 year old Australian women's fashion brand and they proved this when Covid forced their stores to close. Lauren French and her mother, the brand's designers, started doing daily live streams on Instagram at 4pm and here's the interesting bit. They were walking in three minutes before going live each day with barely a script. It was pretty raw, but the brand grew 127% in 12 months during COVID I mean, we're all growing in Covid. But they put live streaming down to a lot of their success. They kept the streams running after lockdown because the three audience model had taken hold. Viewers came for Lauren, for the banter, and for the style hacks some of them were buying. The practical question for your next live show, who is turning up to watch and who is turning up to buy? If you are only designing for the customer with purchase intent or you're only showing up for the customer who's there for a little bit of entertainment, you're already structuring the whole show wrong. You need a mixture of both. Lesson 2 Don't use live shopping as a catalog Most brands approach a live show the same way that they'd approach a promotional email. Here's the product, here's the price, here's the reason to buy. Now that structure makes complete sense in an inbox where we're trying to get to the point really quickly, but on a live show it just kills the vibe. The people watching didn't turn up to be sold to. They turned up for something to watch. They could be watching a thousand other things. They chose to watch you, so you need a trust before transaction model because it changes what happens after the show. Natalie angel is an independent fashion creator who goes live on Instagram every Friday to try on clothes and give honest, real time fit reviews, including when something doesn't work for a body type or height. There's no pitch. No, this looks great on everyone. The result isn't just purchases during the show. Her audience goes back to their own networks and recommends. It keeps people coming back and coming in to the live show. This honest review builds advocates and not just customers. And that's where we need to come through first. How do we attract people into our content? How do we get them to trust us and then subtly give them something to buy if they love what we're doing? The approach at Cherry follows the same logic. Treat the community as collectors who want to escape the grind, who want a little bit of nostalgia, Focus on that first and then fold in the offer once you've earned the right to when the Select NRL cards launched, Grayson's community were activated because he had 15 years of running live shopping, not just a catalog. And they knew that Cherry had something interesting to say, that he wasn't just trying to move packets of something new. And so we need to check that for our live show. How much are we building out? That is entertainment versus how much are we selling? And do we have an entertaining idea in there? We should be leading with that. Lesson 3 Every show needs an event, not just a schedule. Even Cherry is still learning the whatnot rhythm. What separates the shows that work is that everyone should have an event frame. It's a clear reason beyond the schedule for people to show up. You need to build a bit of hype, a little bit of interest. What is different this time? But getting there requires some reps. Ozhair and Beauty started running live shows to build operational knowledge before TikTok shop arrives in Australia. But they're not doing it for the immediate revenue. When they first got up and running, their Internet blurred midstream. They forgot to tell the shopping center that they were trading late, the air conditioner switched off and their presenters end up visibly sweating while selling hair products. Not ideal. These are the problems you can only find by going live and you need to start before you're ready. But it doesn't mean that you can't hide behind not putting an event on. If you don't launch it as an event, you'll never find out when the format is working. A live show becomes a content factory. The authentic moments when captured live, whether they go well or not, create an event. These could be a six figure card pull, a presenter's honest reaction. These are all better as raw material rather than anything you create from scratch or try and script clip them and then put them everywhere. It doesn't mean that once they happen live they don't exist everywhere else. So you start with an event, you let the mayhem happen. Hopefully it's good mayhem and then you use that as content elsewhere. What really matters as well is platform choice because you don't go live across all platforms. Whatnot works really well for Cherry because it's purpose built for event driven commerce and is very much built around hobbies and interests. Trying to run live shopping on social in Australia still means navigating checkouts and a checkout friction that hasn't been properly solved. Despite all the promises and There will be a conversion drop off there. But if you're a fashion brand, most of your audience is probably on Instagram, so it makes sense to do it there. You don't have to wait for the ideal platform that gives you all the live capabilities plus the checkout at once. So the practical check for this is you need an event hook for your next live show. If you get the hook right, then you can let the mayhem happen. Hopefully good mayhem, like I said. And then you've got content that you can then distribute through all your channels, post the event, and if your audience has seen the buildup to the event, that content is likely to make a lot more sense afterwards. So Live shopping is still a work in progress. No one has cracked it yet. The platforms haven't even cracked it. We've still got a lot of promises of what's to come, but the ones that are getting ahead right now aren't just showing up to camera and talking about products. They've got a show that people want to watch. They've built enough trust to fold in an offer when it matters and for it to feel authentic. And they've structured every session around an event that's worth turning up for. None of that requires a massive team or a broadcast budget. Anyone can do this. It requires a different way of thinking about what live commerce is actually for and where you turn up to do it, and how you engage your most committed communities. If you're working out where live shopping fits in your business, which platform makes sense, or how other operators are structuring their shows to actually convert, those conversations are happening right now in the Add to Cart community every day. You can join for free over on add to cart.com au that is the playbook for this week. I'll see you next Friday.