With continued restrictions due to the ongoing pandemic, live-selling has been accelerating globally. With approximately 1 billion monthly active users on Instagram, and 83% of consumers discovering new products on Instagram, the social platform presents an opportunity for businesses and brands to connect with consumers.
In Southeast Asia, social commerce growth doubled in the first half of 2021 with orders and revenue generated per order jumping 102% and 88% respectively in the first half of 2021. Studies have shown that over 73% of total shoppers in Singapore have adopted social media as their main shopping platform, with 43% having used social media to make 1-2 purchases per month.
With the SEA social commerce scene emerging, merchants in markets like Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia can also expect a continuous boom in social commerce in the years to come.
In this climate, SHOPLINE has announced the availability of an Instagram LIVE integration enabling over 350,000 SHOPLINE merchants to begin selling via Instagram LIVE. This new feature joins other existing Instagram integrations from SHOPLINE such as Instagram Shopping and Instagram Direct.
Selling Seamlessly on Instagram
Earlier in 2020, SHOPLINE integrated its livestream tool with Facebook for merchants to engage with customers in real-time, and to drive conversions. The addition of the Instagram LIVE integration allows merchants to manage livestream and customer comments on both SHOPLINE LIVE, Facebook, and Instagram through one single backend system.
The new integration aims to build on the existing SHOPLINE Social Commerce offering, which has already helped merchants host over 60,000 livestream events, and collected over 60 million comments from consumers during livestream events in 2021 alone.
In Singapore alone, more than 40% of SHOPLINE Singapore’s merchants have already adopted social commerce as their main sales channel with top merchants earning up to SGD 300,000 per livestream.
Jeff Lim, General Manager of SHOPLINE Singapore added, “We find LIVE commerce to be the most effective form of interaction with our audiences, bringing them just a bit closer to an in-person experience while driving sales. Together with Meta, we hope to create an entertaining and interactive livestreaming option via Instagram for everyone including our local merchants and the public.”
