Walmart Inc. is taking a deeper dive into livestream shopping, using social media to put merchandise in front of a younger audience.
The Bentonville-based retailer made its first foray into what is also called social selling during the 2020 Christmas shopping season. Walmart partnered with social media app TikTok to offer "shoppable content" while the pandemic had many consumers avoiding stores.
Over the following year, Walmart said, it hosted 15 livestream shopping events on TikTok and other apps such as YouTube and Facebook. It also created its own live shopping website at walmartshoplive.com.
Then for Christmas 2021, the company teamed with talkshoplive, an online site that hosts livestream shopping shows, to present a four-episode trial that added Twitter to the app lineup.
Casey Schlaybaugh, Walmart's vice president of brand, said in a news release that the trial's success proved to the company that talkshoplive was the right partner for its social shopping strategy.
Walmart's shows, which stream on both talkshop.live and walmartshoplive.com, follow the same playbook as those televised on the home shopping networks. Hosts display and talk about the items they're promoting, and viewers can ask questions about the products through a chat box.
And even if a viewer misses the livestream event, it remains available for replay at any time. Shoppers can put their desired items in their shopping carts and check out during the livestream or replay.
A recent half-hour episode featuring women's spring fashions from Walmart's Free Assembly brand had 22,300 viewers at one point during the live program.
On March 31, Walmart will hold the last of the seven livestream events it scheduled for the month. The episode will feature a store manager from a Houston Walmart presenting beauty products carried in Walmart stores.
The company hosted eight events in February. Four featured brands from Black-founded companies, with the rest focused on baby products.
Livestreaming is a global phenomenon just now gaining a bit of traction in the U.S., said Carol Spieckerman, a retail consultant and president of Spieckerman Retail.
"It's become an important shopping channel in China and other countries so, as a global retailer, Walmart is certainly tracking the trend and not sitting it out," she said
The format is definitely aimed at Gen Z and younger shoppers in general, Spieckerman said, with the "live" part of livestreaming appealing to those who want early access to new products and engagement with other viewers.
"Livestreaming folds into the social commerce realm where passive engagement has quickly evolved into a measurable, monetizable opportunity for retailer, brands, and creators," she said.
"The trick is to convert passive watchers into purchasers," Spieckerman said.
That will fall mostly to big platforms like YouTube and large-scale retailers such as Walmart, she said. These "will do the heavy lifting when it comes to accelerating familiarization and adoption."
"As more sophisticated social commerce capabilities are developed, younger shoppers are logging onto social platforms with more of a commercially oriented, intentional mindset," Spieckerman said.
According to a December report on social commerce by market research firm eMarketer, Facebook is the most popular purchasing platform among social media users. It's followed closely by Instagram and YouTube.
These three likely topped the list because of their overall popularity among social media users, the study found. Among respondents to a survey, 88% said they use Facebook; 82% watch YouTube; and 60% use Instagram.
Facebook and Instagram have built out their shopping capabilities through features such as Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping, the report said. And YouTube has long allowed videos to include purchasing links either embedded in the video or in its description.
Social selling has been well popularized and adopted by independent sellers and "solopreneurs" such as artists, crafters and artisans, said Martin Thoma, a principal with Little Rock marketing firm Thoma Thoma.
These folks "are selling very effectively on these social platforms," he said. "It would certainly be a big leap from that to the world's largest retailer engaging in this particular kind of commerce."
"Brands today are all looking for ways to engage with their customers, to create experiences for their customers, and to deepen relationships and strengthen the emotional connective tissue between their organization and the customer," Thoma said.
"If you look at this format and this platform, then clearly it's an opportunity for Walmart or other big brands to pursue that kind of a strategy," he said.
"Walmart is an innovator," Thoma said. "It's not always the first one to market with a concept, but it's going to go big or go home when it jumps into something."
"It certainly turns the retail industry's head any time Walmart jumps into a space," he said.