On a warm spring evening in New York, dozens of people gathered on a rooftop terrace in Midtown Manhattan to drink fruit cocktails and chat. Shortly after happy hour began, a woman stepped away from the crowd and went to work.
Standing between a backdrop of fake greenery and an iPhone attached to a ring light, she put on an auctioneer’s voice and begged her audience to buy a used sweater.
“Let’s bring this to $67, guys,” Iva Lazovic said with a smile and stepped toward the camera. “This is so cute. It’s Lululemon. You’ll never get it lower than this in the store. Let’s be real. Posh has the steals and deals.
Ms. Lazovic was one of several women at the event who jumped in front of the phone to sell their wares on Posh Shows, Poshmark’s new live-streaming platform, the company’s first major business strategy unveiled since South Korean juggernaut Naver last acquired autumn.
Poshmark is one of many companies racing to break into the United States’ burgeoning live shopping market, which is estimated to bring in $32 billion in sales this year, according to retail consultancy Coresight Research. Looking at the live shopping market in China, which is expected to bring in $647 billion this year, American companies have been pouring money into the medium for years, where people buy and sell products in real time via video. But American consumers have yet to start shopping the same way.
In 2016, e-commerce giant Alibaba launched Taobao Live, popularizing live shopping in China. The live streaming landscape is much more fragmented in the United States, but even as shoppers return to the stores, retailers and big tech companies are betting that consumers will continue to search for and buy items on their phones. For platforms, live shopping promises more engagement, with consumers sometimes spending hours watching hosts selling items. For retailers it is another channel to sell their goods.
In addition to Poshmark, QVC’s parent company Qurate recently launched Sune, a live shopping app aimed at Gen Z. Last year, Walmart, YouTube, and eBay added or expanded their live shopping features. For Prime Day, Amazon recruited celebrities like Kevin Hart to promote its Amazon Live platform. Shein was an early adopter when it launched Shein Live for US customers in 2016. It started with just a few hundred viewers per episode and is now averaging “hundreds of thousands of viewers per episode,” George Chiao, Shein’s US president, said in a statement.
“There’s just an insane level of excitement that we’ve seen,” Manish Chandra, Poshmark’s CEO, said at the rooftop event. “Within months they will prove that this form of live shopping works,” he added, referring to Posh Shows vendors such as Ms. Lazovic.
As big tech and major retailers try to gain a foothold in live shopping, start-ups like Whatnot and Ntwrk are touting their close-knit customer communities as a blueprint for live shopping in the United States. Investors poured more than $380 million into livestream ecommerce companies in the United States last year, compared to $36 million in 2020, according to PitchBook.
“We believe that shopping is not just about transactions. It’s about experience,” said Liyia Wu, CEO and founder of live shopping start-up ShopShops. Live shopping can simulate “an offline shopping experience online,” she added.
ShopShops began targeting US consumers rather than Chinese in 2021 as it saw more opportunities in the US retail market, Ms. Wu said. Because major players have not yet defined live shopping in the United States, ShopShops and other new entrants could “build the overall behavior,” she added.
For some viewers, live shopping has replaced malls and morning cable shows. AJ Johnson, a lifestyle blogger in Scottsdale, Ariz., watches live streams on ShopShops most days of the week, but her favorite show streams at 6 a.m. on Wednesdays.
The app is more than a place to buy clothes and jewelry, she said. Ms. Johnson, 36, has found entertainment and community on ShopShops by talking to hosts and other shoppers about their lives.
“Some people play video games. I just watch livestream shopping,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s like an escape.”
But live shopping faces fierce competition in the United States, where linear TV, streaming channels and social media also compete for consumer attention and money. Last year, 78 percent of American adults said they had never participated in a live shopping event, according to a survey by Morning Consult.
Some US companies have already withdrawn from live shopping. Meta gave a big boost to e-commerce at the start of the pandemic, but it shut down Instagram’s live shopping feature in March and Facebook’s in October.
Other companies are much slower to enter live shopping. Since November, TikTok has been testing its live shopping tool, TikTok Shop, in the United States. It’s a bet that users will stay on TikTok to see how sellers — both big brands like the beauty line Eleven and California clothing company PacSun, and small business owners — share their products and then buy the goods through the app.
But the TikTok Shop rollout has dragged on in the United States. The feature has been available in parts of Southeast Asia for over a year, and Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, has been offering live shopping since 2018.
In the United States, TikTok is facing strong criticism from lawmakers and regulators. More than two dozen states have banned the app on government devices. And in April, Montana lawmakers passed a bill to block TikTok in the state, a unique ban.
TikTok declined to say when TikTok Shop would become generally available in the United States.
Companies have taken different approaches to working with hosts. On Poshmark, anyone with an account can sell items from their closets. Other platforms work directly with the sellers, as is the case with Amazon, which uses celebrities and influencers to sell a variety of products such as printers and kitchenware.
For Paige DeSorbo, a podcaster and influencer on the Bravo reality series “Summer House,” hosting her own show on Amazon Live allows her followers to see a “completely different” side of her personality.
“People trust me in certain things, so they want my opinion on fashion or beauty,” she said. “When I talk to them live, I feel like it’s more, we’re friends.”
Ms DeSorbo, 30, has been hosting her show weekly since late 2021, usually filming episodes with two cameramen, a set designer and at least one producer. She receives a flat hosting fee from Amazon and commissions when people purchase products featured on her Amazon page or during her streams.
During a recent livestream, Ms. DeSorbo recreated outfits she shared on social media. While trying on “dupes”—fashion for fake versions of expensive items—for her outfits, she answered questions from viewers about what to wear to events like comedy shows and summer vacations.
“It’s like talking to the wizard behind the curtain,” one of her 500-plus viewers commented, as Ms. DeSorbo talked about a recent trip with other reality TV cast members.
Businesses will have to teach landlords how to sell and speak directly to shoppers, a worthwhile investment, especially for the landlords, said Deborah Weinswig, founder of Coresight Research. In China, companies originally hired salespeople to boost certain brands. Those sellers then built their own audiences, attracted shoppers, and eventually got enough agency to choose their own products and brands.
“The biggest misunderstanding was that celebrities were going to run this industry,” Ms. Weinswig said. “That’s why I think we went off the rails in the US because you’re a celebrity or a creator — you’re not necessarily going to be a good host.”
Posh Shows is not aimed at celebrity hosts. Instead, anyone with a Poshmark account can go live — including Alex Mahl, who works full-time at a law firm and streams live hours after work on Posh Shows.
Ms. Mahl, 26, spends about 40 hours a week on her side hustle, which includes hours of prepping mostly Lululemon clothes to sell, and uploading photos of them to the Poshmark app, where viewers can see the items during the show . She had sold more than $50,000 worth of inventory by early May and estimates she will make $200,000 in sales by the end of the year.
Ms. Mahl has considered making this her primary job, but remains cautious. She was given early access to Posh Shows and is keeping an eye on her viewership as more users go live. On a recent Monday evening, Ms. Mahl competed with dozens of other sellers, including a mother carrying a baby on her back selling New York & Company dresses for $8, and a man selling a Louis Vuitton purse with a starting price of $475.
“Am I nervous about more people having access? Yes, I am,’ Mrs. Mahl said. “But I’m confident in myself and in what I’ve built to keep moving in the right direction.”
