Retailers Spark Sales with VTEX Integrated Live Shopping Experience Powered by Amazon Interactive Video Service

Future-proofing digital commerce strategies and reaching customers worldwide across multiple media channels are key priorities for continued growth in retail. Enterprise digital commerce solutions offered by an AWS Retail Competency Partner VTEX are streamlining the process for brands and retailers, helping them to deliver and manage complete experiences for a range of transactional models. One of the most recent offerings is VTEX Live Shopping, a native live stream app designed to unlock growth through immersive shopping experiences. After a global beta launch last year, VTEX is now rolling it out massively. The new feature, which is powered by Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS), has enjoyed rapid customer adoption, with more than 170 companies across 14 countries already deploying this live streaming service within their ecommerce sites.

“By using VTEX Live Shopping and Amazon IVS, a large global electronics manufacturer was able to sell more than $1 million in merchandising value and engage nearly 12,000 viewers during a 54-minute live event in Mexico for the launch of its latest product,” says Manuel Garcia Cuerva, Head of Live Shopping at VTEX.

The VTEX solution natively integrates with company websites or applications, so it’s invisible to consumers while providing comprehensive functionality, from managing analytics to inventory. With the VTEX Live Shopping app, brands and retailers can easily start a live event in minutes, customize the look with overlays and backgrounds, implement interactive features like chat or polling, and showcase products through preselected shoppable links. During the live stream, hosts can share an invite to the event, allowing almost anyone in the world to join the session just by having access to a smartphone.

Working together with AWS

Initially, the VTEX development team explored building Live Shopping alongside various third-party streaming software. However, it achieved mixed results because this approach required customers to set up an additional account for streaming capabilities. By collaborating with AWS and integrating with Amazon IVS, VTEX created an intuitive all-in-one solution, a feat it would not have been able to do otherwise. From initial tests to in-production, the improved Live Shopping solution was ready for launch in about a month.

VTEX Live Shopping integrates a complete commerce solution with live streaming features that are unique in the market. “Although there are a few live apps around, the lack of commerce capabilities meant that clients tended to avoid this channel. But now, they can really count on our solution, which offers full commerce capability by integrating inventory, orders, catalogs, and much more,” says Garcia. “It’s easy, powerful, and comes with solid technical support and reputation from AWS.

The way Amazon IVS delivers streams to viewers is also distinctive. The service automatically adjusts the stream quality so that viewers can stay in the event and enjoy it, even if they don’t have a great connection.

VTEX customers who use live streaming as part of their digital commerce strategies see a 28 percent increase in consumer engagement, with viewers more likely to watch streams for longer and make more purchases. Once the streaming event is finished, VTEX customers can continue to draw traffic to their sites by archiving the event in a special “live” section. Check out a great example here.

When streaming Amazon IVS with VTEX’s customer solution, brands can configure feeds to connect simultaneously to social media channels, reaching potential viewers across multiple touch points. They can also view all the analytics collected during streams—such as quality metrics, unique viewers and locations, average session time, likes, and comments—through the VTEX Live Shopping dashboard. The data is then added to the brand’s data lake in the platform, built with Modern Data Architecture on top of AWS services. It is all integrated with other VTEX solutions, providing brands with a centralized and scalable data infrastructure that can drive machine learning and statistical models to inform their digital commerce strategies.

“We display data captured from the streaming events—such as quality metrics, unique viewers and locations, session time, average likes or comments, and purchase decisions—in a dashboard so that users can better understand their audience,” explains Garcia. “One of the cool things about Amazon IVS is that you can choose vertical or horizontal layouts, so when brands know how most people are viewing certain content, such as mobile or desktop, they can select the best way to orient video when going live.”

Attracting more viewers

In Q1 2022, an event using VTEX Live Shopping feature attracted 37,000 concurrent viewers, a number that continues to increase as more brands adopt the feature and host events with greater frequency. Using the record-to-S3 feature in Amazon IVS, users can also opt to record streams to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Depending on the VTEX subscription tier and the inventory of featured products, streams can be replayed on demand with shoppable links.

“A cake is only as good as the ingredients that you put in it—and the same goes for digital products,” Garcia says. “When you work with great providers, you can create state-of-the-art tools. Live Shopping is a great example, bringing together innovative capabilities of VTEX and AWS to offer the agility that retailers need to continue to be relevant, innovate and ultimately say ‘yes’ to what their consumers will ask for next.”

To learn more about building with interactive live video, check out: aws.amazon.com/ivs/

For information about VTEX Live Shopping, visit: ​​vtex.com/us-en/live-shopping/

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VTEX (NYSE: VTEX) is the enterprise digital commerce platform where global brands and retailers run their world of commerce. VTEX puts its customers’ businesses on a fast path to growth with a complete Commerce, Marketplace, and OMS solution. VTEX helps global companies build, manage and deliver native and advanced B2B, B2C, and Marketplace commerce experiences with unprecedented time to market and without complexity. As a leader in digital commerce platforms, VTEX is trusted by more than 2,400 customers, such as AB InBev, Carrefour, Colgate, Motorola, and Whirlpool, having over 3,200 active online stores across 38 countries (as of FY ended on December 3, 2021). For more information, visit www.vtex.com.