Live Selling on Amazon

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Remember those telesales channels that promote handy products? If you grabbed the phone immediately, you’d get a bonus product or a discount. Live selling has been around for a long time. If you thought they were losing their charm, you’d be wildly mistaken. Live selling is now a billion-dollar industry that’s rapidly growing in the United States. #TwitterSmarter’s own Jim Fuhs has been live selling on Amazon for years. We couldn’t have found a better person to ask about this exact topic. Here’s a summary of our chat.

Guest: Jim Fuhs
Topic: Live selling on Amazon
Format: Eight questions directed at the guest. Everyone’s welcome to share.

Q1: What are the benefits of live selling?

More like live solving, according to Jim. You can talk about things that help solve specific problems and help others find the same solutions to similar problems. It’s a good way to build your brand and credibility.

One of the biggest benefits of live selling is that you can bring a whole bunch of people together in one place at any given time. They can engage with you, with each other, and make a purchase–all on the same platform. Live selling isn’t novel, but as Jim said, it’s only just getting started in the United States.

As you build your live selling profile, brands will start noticing you. As our guest pointed out, it’s a great opportunity to build relationships and even business partnerships with these brands.

Q2: How do you get started with live selling? And how do you execute it successfully?

Jim, along with his co-host, Chris Stone, started off by joining Amazon’s Influencer Program. Once you’re approved, you can go live on Amazon anytime you want. To learn more about Amazon’s Influencer Program, have a look at this #TwitterSmarter chat summary from when Jim was a guest a couple of years ago.

Live selling is also growing as a sales strategy. For example, as our guest explained, brands like Walmart and Target are exploring the opportunities of live selling. Even Shopify now allows you to go live and sell products from your website.

As our friends from VirtuDesk pointed out, before you dive headfirst into live selling, it’s important to do some research and run tests. Identify what times work best for your live show. It’ll differ based on your audience and their geographical spread.

Finding a time that works best for your audience is crucial, but if your audience is all over the world, then it might be prudent to consider converting it onto a podcast, as Jim explained. Or as video snippets. If you find that most of your audience isn’t on Amazon, you can do what Jim does: Multistream to other platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Q3: How can you engage with customers during a live selling event?

If you’re on Amazon, you can use third-party live-streaming tools like StreamYard and Ecamm Live. The latter has also recently launched a feature that allows you to highlight certain comments on your screen during the live show. Amazon also has a live chat functionality through which you can chat with your audience in real-time.

As Thiam suggested, you can also do Q&A sessions to boost engagement and interact with your audience during the live show.

Q4: What strategies can you use to drive traffic and increase sales during a live selling event?

Promoting it across social media helps a lot, as Jim said. If you use Amazon, it’ll also show your live show on the pages of the products you’re highlighting on your show. That also brings in a lot of traffic for your live show. Jim’s show consistently gets over 1000 visits, and this compounds on big shopping days like Black Friday.

Scheduling your promotions well in advance and multi-streaming are good ways to drive traffic to your live event.

Jim also told us about Descript and Lately, two tools that he uses to embellish the video after the live stream ends. This is an extra effort to polish your content, but in the long run, it helps drive traffic and establish your brand.

Q5: How can you measure the success of your live selling efforts?

Amazon gives you a lot of good stats including views, unmuted viewers and how long they watched your livestream, and how many people clicked on products you highlighted. 24 hours after the end of your livestream, you’ll also get revenue reports from your event.

Q6: How can you overcome technical difficulties and low engagement during a live selling event?

It’s only natural. As Jim said, a lot of people tuning into the live show are lurkers. So if you have technical issues, you can stop and restart the show. Just make sure you make short clips of your live event and share them across social media so that people can watch it whenever they can. This helps you convert sales well after your live event ends.

Thiam also shared some excellent ideas. If you’re having trouble during a live event, communicate that with your live audience via chat or other messaging platforms. If you’re collecting data from your audience such as contact details, make sure your digital platforms are GDPR compliant for your audience in Europe.

Q7: How can you create a positive and secure shopping experience for customers during live selling events?

Jim vouches for Amazon because it’s already a trusted platform for shopping. It monitors live chats for trolls, and you can also block and mute certain users you don’t want getting involved in your live selling event.

As Jim added, Amazon will possibly expand its live selling platform to different markets. As a global vendor, you can be assured that Amazon has the necessary data security systems in place to comply with data protection laws in every country it expands to.

Q8: What tools and technologies are essential for live selling?

To sell on Amazon, you’ll need a phone or a tablet, and the Amazon Live app to create and display products you want to sell. For your live streams, you’ll need a computer, camera, good audio equipment, and a streaming app like StreamYard or Ecamm Live. These are the absolute basics for live selling. You can, of course, go a bit upmarket and get a whole bunch of fancy equipment to make your live event more attractive.

Here’s an article on how to live stream on Amazon using StreamYard and here’s how to do so using Ecamm Live.

Well folks, that’s all from me this week. Thanks for reading through and for more great insights from our chat with Jim, have a look at this Twitter thread. If you like this summary, you’ll love the real-time chat. Join us next Thursday at 1 pm ET for #TwitterSmarter. We also have an after-chat on Twitter Spaces at 5 pm ET. See you there!


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About me, Narmadhaa:

I write all the things—marketing stuff to pay the bills; haiku and short stories so I feel wholesome. A social media enthusiast, I hang out with the #TwitterSmarter chat crew, and am always happy to take on writing gigs.

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