Luxury beauty spends big on Taobao livestreaming | WARC | The Feed

Luxury beauty spends big on Taobao livestreaming

Figures released by the Alibaba-owned shopping site Taobao suggest that gross merchandising value (GMV) for luxury beauty is up 107% on 2021 – here’s what that means.

Reported by Retail in Asia, the figures would imply that livestream commerce’s teleshopping perception (better suited to mass market brands) is shifting, as more than 90% of luxury brands on the marketplace have livestreamed.

A deeper trend

WARC earmarked social commerce – of which livestreaming forms an important part – as part of its Marketer’s Toolkit for 2022.

Up to 75% of marketers surveyed from around the world told us that they planned to increase their social commerce spend.

But in the luxury category, experimentation is leading to a diversity of offers. Rather than just the QVC-style demonstrations of products to camera, some luxury brands, such as Cartier and Burberry, are using Alibaba’s Tmall Luxury Pavilion, which has launched a new one-to-one livestreaming feature for an ultra-premium experience.

A refresher: gross merchandising value

GMV is a critical metric for Alibaba as a marketplace. Investopedia defines it as the “total value of merchandise sold over a given period of time” on a marketplace. It is a key measure of the health of an e-commerce site selling others’ goods.

Sourced from Retail in Asia, WARC, Jing Daily, Investopedia