Case study

It’s all smooth shopping from here: how low latency spikes sales in live shoppable videos

Customers who watch videos directly on brand websites are more likely to buy whatever that brand is selling. They’re there, they’ve clicked, and they intend to take the next step — as long as the video can close the deal.

But when these videos are live, conversion numbers climb remarkably higher. This was the experience of Max Drut, co-founder and CEO of LyveCom, a streaming platform that enables brands to host live virtual shopping events directly on their website. As he put it, “[These visitors are] sticking around for over eight or nine minutes and have an average of 30 to 40 percent add-to-cart rate. That’s pretty mind-blowing for the e-commerce space.”

This kind of outcome is why brands everywhere are trying to incorporate more live video content into their e-commerce strategies — and why LyveCom has created an intuitive streaming product that any brand team can use to create and own live shopping experiences across their digital properties.

Moving at the speed of conversation

Live shopping is more than just a live stream to display products. It’s interactive video that enables brands to build community, engage with consumers, and create conversations with their fans (or soon-to-be fans).

If the stream is delayed 10 or 15 seconds behind an interactive chat, however, it no longer feels like a natural, fluid conversation. Lag time gives pause to potential buyers, literally and figuratively. And LyveCom knew they needed to offer their e-commerce customers a low-latency solution to keep the stream, conversation, and conversion rates strong.

Starting with a traditional WebRTC platform with no real RTMP solution, LyveCom had ultra-low latency, but they were running into issues with the stream output quality. Max and his team recognized they needed a more holistic, flexible infrastructure that could support a wider range of video.

They turned to Mux, which allowed them to choose the best solution for their business’s and customers’ needs. They could stream WebRTC to RTMP, or they could utilize Mux’s low-latency HLS. Mux gave them the best of both worlds: high-quality streaming with a smooth interactive experience. “Low-latency HLS, four to seven seconds, is absolutely amazing,” Max says. “And it gave us a competitive advantage over another enterprise competitor who’s at 10 seconds.”

“More than just a sales tool, live shopping is an engagement tool where you can really foster a very interpersonal, deep connection with your customers. Especially when you're putting a face behind the brand,” says Max. “So with low-latency HLS, that instant communication of talking with a brand rep is as if you're in the store. It creates a very memorable and special experience.”

Building for today and tomorrow

Of course, a long-term video strategy is crucial. LyveCom’s aim was to keep growing and increasing their network of direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brands, and they knew they needed video infrastructure that would grow and scale with them — now and well into the future.

“We really needed a partner who could provide the infrastructure for us and not have us spend a year ‘deving’ our own CDN and all of the video systems on Amazon and Cloudflare, for example,” says Max. “We were also looking for a partner to scale with as we work with fairly large S&P 500 brands as well as smaller DTC brands.”

They chose Mux for the long run. “Overall experience, ease of docs, ease of getting an MVP up and running. All of those things combined, and price point, made Mux a no-brainer,” says Max. As more and more brands adopt live shopping, and as LyveCom continues to expand their use cases and integrate different types of video, they rely on Mux to provide infrastructure they can depend on and the innovation required to stay ahead of tomorrow’s e-commerce trends.