While it’s been a mainstay in China for years, livestream shopping is a newer medium in the U.S., having grown in popularity over the last few years. And grown in popularity it has. According to Coresight Research, livestream shopping in the U.S. is expected to hit $25 billion by 2023, up from $11 billion in 2021.

Livestream shopping sits at the intersection of content, commerce and community. It’s like shopping with a trusted friend, a tech expert or a personal stylist. Curious how a laptop performs? Ask in the live chat. Looking for a new fall wardrobe? Watch your favorite fashion creator’s cool-weather styling stream. With livestream shopping, customers can discover new products and brands, get firsthand information to help them make purchasing decisions, and have fun while doing it.

What is Amazon Live?

Amazon Live brings interactive, live video directly into the Amazon shopping experience, connecting customers with brands and creators to educate, entertain and promote discovery of new products. Amazon Live makes it easy for customers to add products to their carts in real time through the shopping carousel conveniently located alongside the livestream.

While Amazon Live sits at the point of sale, it’s also an avenue for storytelling, occupying that sweet spot between content and commerce, which makes it a valuable tool for brands.

Driving results across the funnel

During Prime Day 2022, Amazon Live streams ran across the Amazon homepage and Prime Day event page, with a high-energy, interactive marathon of content that highlighted the days’ best deals. Amazon Live Prime Day streams amassed more than 100 million views, and the top Amazon Live Prime Day stream peaked at 57,000 concurrent views.

Brands were also able to take part in the excitement of Prime Day on Amazon Live by telling their brand stories and bringing their deals to the forefront to reach Prime Day customers.

23andMe, a leading at-home genetic testing company, worked with Amazon Live to promote its Prime Day deals, using content integrations, sponsorships, and for the first time, an influencer-produced stream with health and wellness content creator Nicole Mejia.

It was important for 23andMe to highlight the health insights that customers can learn from its services, so it collaborated closely with Amazon Live to ensure the hosts were knowledgeable about the brand and how to talk about its FDA-regulated Health + Ancestry Service in an informed, accurate way. Hosts had the opportunity to try 23andMe for themselves and ask questions in advance so they could authentically share their experience with Amazon customers.

This Prime Day strategy paid off: The total ROI for 23andMe’s content integrations and sponsorships was 8X the Amazon Live benchmark, and most notably, more than 91% of its Amazon Live Prime Day campaign sales came from new-to-brand customers.

But the campaign didn’t just drive sales, 23andMe’s post-campaign reporting helped the brand better understand the composition of the audience engaging with its messaging through the live format. 

“Amazon shoppers are on the hunt for great deals during Prime Day, and the video component of Amazon Live presents a compelling reason to consider 23andMe,” said CJ Swenson, director of international marketing & Amazon, 23andMe. “It’s an efficient full-funnel marketing approach to reach and engage new audiences.”

What’s next for brands

Prime Day and other seasonal shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday present just a few of the opportunities for brands to work with Amazon Live.

Brands can also sponsor Influencer Festivals—like Beauty Haul Live—a multi-day format that rallies content creators and customers around a single theme or seasonal shopping moment. In the case of Beauty Haul Live, customers can choose livestreams from their favorite beauty experts and celebrities for curated #founditonamazon beauty picks all in one place.

Amazon Live is also experimenting with new content formats designed to resonate with customers based on where they’re watching and shopping—whether that’s snackable, vertical video on mobile or more entertainment-led, long-format content viewed through the Amazon Live Shopping App on Fire TV.  

Brands don’t even have to sell on Amazon to take advantage of the benefits of livestream shopping. For example, last year Mitsubishi unveiled its new car on Amazon Live. Now, you can’t buy a car on Amazon, but given customers weren’t able to attend car shows at the time, it brought the excitement of an auto showroom and a new car launch directly to customers’ homes.

And even as life returns to pre-pandemic normalcy, the demand for livestream shopping continues. It’s a medium that provides endless possibilities for invention, storytelling, and creating deeper connections between customers, brands and creators.