LIVESTREAM SELLING IS HERE!
Mic Hensley won’t put on a dress. His fans would die for him to wear one when he livestreams to more than a million phones and Facebook pages while making sales for Pink Coconut, which sounds like a club but is actually a women’s clothing boutique he owns with his wife, Sheri, in Olive Branch, Miss. “I’ll put on a cardigan or a bunch of purses,” Hensley says, laughing. “But I try not to even do that very often because they just get pumped and want more.”
Though that’s not all they want more of. Livestream selling not only saved the Hensleys’ business from becoming a casualty of the pandemic; it has increased sales 20 to 30 percent every month, sending the Hensleys into a hiring frenzy that has now reached 48 employees and counting. “Once we started doing it,” says Mic, “everything just kind of shot to the moon.”
Widely referred to as QVC on steroids, live-stream selling in the U.S. usually features a sales-person or an influencer, often in their living room (cords, tchotchkes, and pets in full view), demon-strating products and shooting the breeze with online shoppers in real-time video. Viewers can say hi or ask questions in comments that float across the screen, and the live-streamer responds to them personally. Mean-while, everyone watches a bubble that displays the product’s dwindling availability until it sells out.
It’s already a craze in China, where livestream shopping sales will hit $300 billion this year, according to Coresight Research. (There, the video productions are more sophisticated and staged.) But the U.S. market has been pretty groggy, estimated to be only $6 billion in 2020. That may be about to change. Coresight, for one, predicts the market will more than quadruple by 2023 as the pandemic helps accelerate preexisting cultural shifts—especially since
