Walmart is celebrating one year of livestreams with its first shoppable livestream on Twitter, making it the first retailer to try the platform’s new ecommerce feature, Live Shopping on Twitter. Walmart has spent the last year investing in live shopping through events across social platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
Beginning at 7 p.m. EST on November 28, Walmart’s Cyber Deals live event will begin, allowing users to watch a live broadcast while shopping featured products and engaging in conversation with tweets. Users will not only be able to shop on Twitter, but also on other platforms like Walmart.com, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
The event, which Twitter is using as the initial test of its new Live Shopping on Twitter in the US, will be hosted by musician turned creator Jason Derulo, who’s also the 12th most-followed creator on the platform. Derulo will be introducing the audience to deals on electronics, seasonal decor, home goods and apparel during his 30-minute variety show, complete with surprise special guests.
The news comes on the heels of TikTok’s recent launch of TikTok Shopping, a set of advertising tools that will allow brands to engage with customers in a more meaningful way, perhaps as Twitter fights to remain viable in the ever-changing social-meets-ecommerce space.
While TikTok recently surpassed 1 billion monthly active users (MAU), Twitter is trailing with 211 million global monetizable daily active users (mDAU) and 330 million MAU (before the company discontinued reporting on the metric), according to Statista.
Nevertheless, Walmart is taking full advantage of Twitter’s new livestream shopping platform along with any other shoppable platform available. It hosted its first shoppable livestream in December 2020 via a TikTok partnership on its Holiday Shop-Along Spectacular event. That was after its plans to invest in the video app fell through after courts blocked Trump’s executive order that would have forced a sale of TikTok’s US operations.
Still, the event delivered Walmart 7x more views than it had anticipated and grew the account by 25 percent, marking a huge success for the retailer. Walmart ran a second event a few months later. To date, Walmart has hosted more than 15 livestream events across five major platforms including its own website.
The new Live Shopping on Twitter platform builds upon Twitter’s existing shopping products and livestream capabilities, as well as upon its previous tests of a Shop Module. It will feature a live broadcast that streams atop a Live Event page, a Shoppable Banner and Shop Tab. Users can switch between the “Latest” and the “Shop” tab as they view products during the event. And when set to purchase, users will be directed to the retailer’s website within the in-app browser as the livestream continues uninterrupted. In Twitter remaining loyal to its roots, the new live shopping platform will also feature a textbox so that users can tweet about the livestream with a suggested hashtag.
Twitter’s Shop Module, launched earlier this year, offered brands and retailers the option to showcase products directly on their profiles. This feature tested whether there would be demand for shopping on Twitter with Gamestop and Arden Cove, among others.
Walmart’s Twitter livestream strengthens its continued venture into live shopping through the 2021 holiday season. According to the retailer, it has over 30 shoppable livestream events planned on platforms like BuzzFeed, Facebook, Youtube, IGN and more.
