Agora Launches Livestream Shopping Technology

Agora, a platform for real-time engagement application programming interfaces (APIs), has announced the wide availability of its technology to power livestream shopping experiences.

The company’s solution enables brands, marketplaces and platforms to easily build live shoppable experiences, Agora said in a Thursday (Oct. 26) press release. The technology supports not only shoppable livestreams but also live auctions, personal shopper experiences, and eCommerce-related video chat for customer service.

Livestream shopping allows customers to make purchases during live streaming video events, and with the U.S. market for live video shopping expanding rapidly, many well-known brands are investing in this technology to provide more engaging content and boost conversion rates, according to the release.

CommentSold, a live-selling fashion platform for retailers, has partnered with Agora to provide its customers with multi-source live stream shopping, the release said. With this technology, CommentSold sellers can create live stream shopping events, leverage professional hosts for those events and invite customers to participate.

“We are absolutely thrilled to enable a paradigm shift in live selling with these features, which will open up new ways for CommentSold sellers to gamify live selling shows and drive engagement,” CommentSold Chief Product Officer Andrew Chen said in the release.

Agora CEO Tony Zhao added: “Our technology allows platforms like CommentSold to easily integrate interactive live video shopping experiences that create a more personal and engaging shopping experience for customers, while driving higher revenue for sellers.”

This new offering joins Agora’s real-time engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) portfolio that provides developers with APIs to embed real-time voice, video, interactive live-streaming, chat, whiteboard and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into their applications, per the release.

Leading retailers have invested heavily in livestream shopping during peak periods such as back-to-school and holidays, offering high-value promotions, PYMNTS reported in March. The concept gained popularity during the pandemic, particularly among younger consumers, with an appeal similar to that of earlier live, televised shopping.

In another recent move in the livestream shopping space, TikTok announced the general availability of its shoppable platform to its U.S. audience in September, adding shoppable videos and livestreams to feeds. Before its general launch, TikTok Shop underwent testing in the U.S. beginning last November.

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