Newegg Rolls Out Mobile Livestream Shopping Platform

Digital electronics retailer Newegg said on Thursday (Oct. 7) that it is testing an app-based livestreaming platform dubbed Newegg Live, which will let customers communicate with the hosts of livestream events and grab exclusive deals during the session.

“We’ve always been committed to delivering a great mobile shopping experience,” said Montaque Hou, Newegg’s CTO, in the company announcement. “But mobile engagement goes much deeper than simply shopping. Customers want to hear expert opinions about how products will fit into their lives and engage with those experts within the flow of the livestream. We developed Newegg Live to allow customers to ask questions, comment and react in real time using features built directly into our Newegg mobile app.”

The mobile-only Newegg Live offers customer-focused livestreams in the company’s mobile app. Newegg previewed the offering to more than 10,000 people on Sept. 1, rolling through 20 products during the 90-minute session.

“Our engineering team went to great lengths to understand the needs of our sellers, as well as what our customers expect when using our mobile app,” said Kidd Liu, Newegg’s director of mobile development, in the company announcement. “Based on this extensive research, we were able to build a livestream platform that equally serves the needs of both.”

Newegg Live will offer weekly livestreams during the beta phase, with plans to increase the frequency later in the year.

Related: Newegg Breaks eRetailer Ground With Litecoin Payments via BitPay

In July, Newegg announced it will accept Litecoin on the BitPay platform, meaning that international customers can pay for merchandise with Litecoin using the BitPay Wallet app. Newegg teamed with BitPay in 2014 to enable bitcoin payments in the U.S. and later in Canada.

Google engineer Charlie Lee developed Litecoin in 2011; it was intended to be a “lighter” tech cousin to bitcoin, but with faster transaction times. Litecoin processes the average transaction in 2.5 minutes.