Industry research shows that 96% of consumers find shopping videos a desirable e-commerce feature that helps facilitate purchasing decisions. On the sell side, 72% of businesses report that video has improved customer conversion rates.
With so much consumer and business interest in a new approach to online retail shopping, AiBUY hopes to leverage its proprietary technology as a game changer for live shopping.
Retailers have tried shoppable videos before. While promising, they haven’t made universal headway beyond niche audiences. Marketers have had some encouraging success with the concept, depending on the platforms used.
Shoppable videos and live commerce present potential buyers with a mix of product videos that contain links to payment options on merchant sites. This approach adopts live merchandising objectives based on consumer-driven and consumer-focused product discovery.
Founded in 2007, Texas-based AiBUY wants to push that concept to its innovative marketing and commerce platform that offers retailers and consumers something unavailable elsewhere. The video shopping technology provider serves the B2B space in the retail market segment.
According to AiBUY CEO Randy Bapst, the platform is built on 83 patents in 35 countries.
“Many companies have tried to do this before. We’ve been working on it for years and years at this point to make it more seamless and usable for everyone on a larger scale that hasn’t been done before,” AiBUY VP Dalaney Thompson told the E-Commerce Times.
Move the needle potential
The live commerce innovation to power this new platform comes into play at the checkout stage. It’s a patented technology developed by AiBUY, according to Thompson.
AiBUY’s shopping capabilities bring people closer to sales. Its solution is uniquely different from anything else out there today, Bapst added.
“We enable retailers to monetize content by placing items for sale within their content that can be fulfilled and paid for without leaving the content,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “These are the key value points that the new platform brings to the equation.”
The element that drives content sales, and what Bapst predicts people will see a lot of in the future, is how it’s revolutionizing the way people engage. It eliminates marketers relying on impulse buys from viewers or arguing with a video that tries to get them to click on a link somewhere else. Instead, it empowers marketers to create content.
“It’s a little more aggressive than product placement and just hoping and praying that people recognize the brand and go to the store and buy it,” he said.
Content selling goes beyond creating opportunities to influence the end user. That response is significant for retail, especially with content creators and influencers and even editorial, digital content in the market today, he noted.
More convenient for buyers, new revenue for sellers
As Bapst explained the new sales process, consumers can now read an entire online article about products or watch streaming content with integrated shopping ads. They can click to interact with images and complete a seamless checkout process without leaving the article or video.
AiBUY’s Hot Spots feature means product links anywhere in video content.
“It is more convenient. It is closer to conversion. The result is multiple conversions from multiple vendors without losing traffic paid for aggregation,” he elaborated.
He sees significant value in this for the publishing side, as well as for video and content creators, because capturing those viewers is a challenge.
“So if someone is actually engaging with your content, here’s a way you can now open up a revenue stream and monetize your content in a way that wasn’t available before,” he said.
Real content purchases
AiBUY’s platform eliminates the redirection of consumer traffic to complete a purchase. Many companies now offer what they claim is content buying engagement, but it’s not entirely the case. Even on Amazon, if shoppers want to add one or more items to their carts, they have to go to the checkout page to make additional purchases.
That’s not the case with AiBUY’s AI-based display platform, Bapst emphasized. It achieves what other companies are trying to do.
For example, if a person is watching a video and likes the shoes someone is wearing on screen, as well as someone else’s jacket and maybe even a plant, the viewer can buy all the products from multiple vendors and never leave the presentation. They don’t go to an external page to checkout, which eliminates all viewer drop-off between offer and conversion.
No Tech Lock-In
AiBUY’s technology opens the door to a variety of options and existing software systems that sellers use.
It may take several weeks for AiBUY to create the features a particular user wants. However, once it’s done configuring, it doesn’t matter which platform the content sales solution uses. Which features are available depends on the options vendors choose and the software platform available.
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“We are platform agnostic. It can be any platform you have. It is not important. At the end of the day, it’s a piece of code and a simple integration that we turn on,” Delaney said. “There are so many ways marketers can use content presentations to influence people’s participation.”
A multi-industry appeal
AiBUY is not a single target marketing platform and users are not limited to one industry, Bapst suggested. To begin with, sellers mainly carry apparel, cosmetics, and sports.
“You name it. I mean, adopters are creators with content, products, or both who want to monetize or sell the product. That’s the target user,” he said.
The company is in active talks with various potential new users, Bapst suggested. Talks are ongoing with organizations such as the NFL, ESPN, cosmetic companies and manufacturers. Users are not limited to uprights or branches.
The user limit is only limited by imagination, Bapst suggested. Thompson agreed that much of the potential might even fall within the realm of the metaverse platform.
“That’s what makes this concept so interesting with this kind of thought process and this idea that our platform can be used in multiple mediums, like the gaming world or the virtual world,” he continued.
Thompson would like to see it develop. He acknowledged that the company doesn’t yet have those tokens on the line to really create that integration.
“But I definitely think it’s within the scope of what’s going on,” he concluded.
Integration demos are available on the AiBUY website.