Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today we have Robert Tarabčák. Robert, welcome.
Yeah, thank you very much. Thomas. Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
So I’m Robert Tarabčák. I was born in Slovakia, now based in Prague Czech Republic. We are running a start-up for last, I would say already 3.5 years. I just got married three months ago and came back from honeymoon recently.
I said congratulations already, but another congratulations from me. So the topic of discussion today we’re going to talk about e-commerce live. For those that don’t know, can you tell the audience what it is and perhaps I don’t know a bit about what you do in relation to that opportunity?
Yeah, so e-commerce live is a kind of new trendy term, I would say, and there are a couple of other terms you may see online like live e-commerce or livestream shopping or instantly shop mobile video.
It’s very early market, we still don’t have the precise name that is world. That is standardised is used by many, but in a nutshell, it’s just a way to shop online because in the early days of internet there were only e-commerce stores that we’re not able to be social, we haven’t had social media, we could do marketing properly. Now, we are bringing social media back to the e-commerce. So live e-commerce, it’s very easy. You engage with the content. And based on that you buy a product. It’s different immersive shopping experience that is shared by many people. And we split live e-commerce into two categories. Today, it’s 1-1 that it’s reactive.
So as we are used to multiple chat bots that are helping in a customer journey. That’s a text version of the evolution towards the video. So with the live e-commerce, customers can ask you questions and have a video conference call with you because they want to see the product, they want to see the fabric, colours, material. and they just can’t do it through text. So that’s one category of live comments. The other type is one too many, and that’s what we do. One too many. The, I would say, TV or QVC or telescoping directly on your website or in mobile apps. So it’s a new emerging market in US and European market. That came from Asia and went from just a few million to 285 billion in just four years in Asia, specifically in China.
And that trend is we see a lot of brands, mostly fashion brands, applying this new piece of technology on their shopping experience because they haven’t had that before. They only relied on YouTube, Facebook Twitch live video, but now they can self actively to many customers at once directly on their website, directly where the business happens. It’s really interesting.
It does make me think, I don’t know, it’s kind of one of those problems which once you see it, once you get the concept, it’s so obvious or that it would be beneficial to someone because if someone’s watching a YouTube video and yeah, well it doesn’t really matter what platform, but let’s say there’s a weak link underneath within the description, you have to click to go to the description, you have to click the link to go to the website, then you have to find the product potentially and then check out and if you can all do it on the video, I mean I’m not 100% sure what the process is there, but it just removes a loader steps to purchase and it just makes it that much more efficient and you say that’s accurate.
Yes. And that’s what we see what even Facebook and Instagram trying to do with their video and live e-commerce on top of it as they already have a huge piece of market and traffic and tens of customers. But at that case the business doesn’t own the data behind that shopping experience. and that’s the reason why we think that our solution together with others may drive here on European and US markets because a lot of businesses already spend a lot of money building their own shopping experience. They don’t want to rely on social media, they just want to enhance the experience directly on their own business where they can measure data properly and were not only bringing livestream and chats to your online store basically sales event usually with discounts, it plays well together, but we also bring data.
So we also we know that when you have influencer marketing on place, it’s very hard sometimes to track the conversion that was done through those influencers, but now you can hire those influencers to go live on your website and do product review or unboxing video, and you’ll own all of those data and you will see exactly when people buy those products based on how that influence their behaviour on the livestream. That’s very powerful because it’s not, we are coming, going away from marketing and going more towards the true sales that is happening directly on your business.
So if we take an example now, let’s say it’s YouTube, I mean, I don’t know like we can talk about different examples maybe, but let’s say it’s a YouTube video and it’s live stream currently and you were to say, I got this new shirt, I don’t know what brand it is there, but, you know, you guys should, if you’re interested in buying this new shirt, you know, it’s got a collar, it’s got my two buttons here and the product comes up on the screen and you’re saying there’s maybe a coupon and they click on your product, which is your share, take them straight to the product link and then they can just check out from there, Is that kind of what you mean?
Yeah, so there are a couple of different approaches. Our competitors apply to this and in some cases those competitors bring their own card, their own basket, their own RP, their own way of collecting money for both products. In our case, we’re just very tiny solution that is very easily implemented on your side as Google analytics and with that we’re bringing picture in Picture Livestream. So, you can basically end up going from a link on Instagram, that there is going to be you or I’m airing right now, on this website, if you go to that website, you can go straight to that product page that is owned and designed by the business, and on top of that you see picture and picture the streamer and obviously you can trigger the full screen and buy that product from the basket from there.
But what we want to allow businesses to do is to have full control of their shopping experience. We are just that additional layer of bringing immersive and shared engagement to buyers and so the checkout and all everything around payments and the order itself is always owned by the business, that’s not what we want to do. We want to be the most affordable and the easiest to implement solution for you to start executing live events on your website. Okay, so yeah, it does remind me of sort of like having a salesperson on the product page who you can interact with them, and they’re there to essentially pitch that product, is that right?
Yeah, yeah, and also you can have a brick and mortar and there you can have full eight hours somebody streaming like a retail trader who is just waiting for people to join the stream and asking questions and because we don’t charge for stream, we always charge for watched, that’s very important to know by the businesses.
And that’s why what I meant by being the most affordable because you can go live and stay live on your website for 24 hours, seven days and, and we will not charge, we will charge you immediately when the conversion may happen.
Yes, I sort of get what you mean by people or businesses have been doing instant chat previously, so if anyone wants to elect to click and talk via typing, then they can do that, or sometimes it pops up on its own, but in this particular instance you’d literally be live there on video in order to talk to someone about that particular product. Yeah. And you can also you don’t have to only stream on your business using your retail trader or sales professional. You can invite artists, you can invite musicians to have a live concert on your website that also converts.
And it was surprising to me how great results are there just from showing people completely different content that they can engage with while they shop. It’s very similar to when you go to the offline store and you can hear the music playing right? that also, is helpful for, for businesses and that’s why in the future we want to start helping those businesses struggling to start producing live content. That’s why we are going, to launch the pre-recorded videos. So there is already a product review done by someone. You can use that to go live with the pre-recorded video and then you can have moderators responding to questions in chat. There are multiple models, then you can also replay the video that was airing live.
We’ll record that for you and in the future we also want to create some kind of marketplace where you can meet with influencers, you can send them products that they are going to review for you, or you can just buy pieces of content and raise them on your online store whether they are emotional or product oriented.
It’s really interesting and I suppose you can use the video, any kind of video for social media content as well, I suppose.
Yes, exactly. The other feature we are going to launch soon is the re stream. So if I will invite influencer to help me out cell specific goods because I have plenty of them and I would just love to sell them. That’s very proactive approach that we love because in that way you’re not waiting for customers to come randomly organically or for your marketing campaigns, but you actively want to sell something in that case you can hire influencers and not only business itself, but also those influences can re stream that live stream on their social media, including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook or LinkedIn even.
And in that way with the same piece of content being live on your website, you can do marketing on other social media as well to promote that special deal that you offer at that moment, directly on your website.
Okay, so again, coming back to, let’s say, you were doing a, you were selling your model of your t shirt, you would, let’s say, put it out on all your socials that you’re doing a product launch for this, and then they go to that page and maybe it would be live or maybe it would be a pre-recorded version of it. like you said, you had moderators if it’s pre-recorded, who can answer those questions? And is there anything else I’m missing? not really. I would say, what we also see is that duration of the livestream is typically from 15 to 30 minutes and the average customers spend around seven minutes on the stream while shopping.
And the card ratio we see from 20 to 50% from every single viewer and that’s a huge number. Yeah, I mean you are very early with your business. So how do you feel about how about being early in the space? You feel good about that? So I feel very good about the fact that the entire market of live e-commerce is very early that we have competitors that been here for a year, we launched just two months ago. But if you look at five years from now, there’s not going to be that much of the difference hopefully. And we also think that we are most affordable on the market with the lowest price for businesses as we use the decentralized ways of, of streaming video and as you know, video is the most expensive asset today on the internet.
So our infrastructure is very solid and reliable and cheap at the same time. So we are proud of those things. And yeah, being here only two months, it’s not enough but they were building these case studies, very successful businesses using e-commerce and we invite all of the businesses to try it out and see how it is easy. It is to start going live on their website. Do you think because I think this has the ability to, and I know change consumer behaviour in a significant way. Do you think some of the big players, the actual social media companies will want to get involved in this somehow?
They do and they ought to be, as I said, we have a ways to go live and sell your products on top of the video, on Instagram and Facebook. We see some camps from Twitch doing the same, TikTok as well. TikTok just partnered recently with Shopify to introduce live e-commerce on top of their live streams. And we also see a couple of our competitors acquiring influencer, marketing agencies and some of them already being acquired by big players. So I think this trend will only evolve. And as you said, not only consumer habits or behaviour changed during the pandemic as we haven’t had other choice to buy products that rather other than going online, but there are new customers, new consumers joining online world of shopping products that just haven’t, they haven’t had a need to go online before.
So, those customers expect to have a very similar experience that they have offline and that’s where I think our solution can help. Is there any downsides to it that you can think of?
I think many businesses spend a lot of money on marketing and then on the production of product images. And the problem may be that they just, well we’ll have a hard time starting with video and with the production of the video because when you have a nice X. A user experience designer, so when you have a beautiful website where you sell your beautiful products, you also want to have high quality livestream. So those high expectations can actually stop you from growing your business and actually reducing returns.
That’s very huge value that we bring to businesses. And so we want to incentivise all of the brands that it really doesn’t matter whether you have a high production quality livestream or very authentic video from your home because the most more authentic it is we see that it converts the most, so your position would be that if it was like a maybe a bigger company, they wouldn’t want someone on the product page who’s I don’t know, not sitting in a you know, high expensive production suite or something with a green screen and et cetera.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, that’s a really interesting topic when there are a few topics or bullet points of things that we’re going to talk about today that are broken down with any e-commerce.
And one of the phrases used was online business evolution, is that sort of what we covered? Or would you like to expand on that particular phrase at all? Well, I don’t think I think I covered it well, but as you see the difference between the classical e-commerce site and the one that has its own tv program that every single workday at 10 we’re going to show you, I don’t know, news from gaming hardware And at 11 we’re going to talk about the other thing. So when brands will start recognizing this this new change and what they can do for their customers on their website, I think it’ll be definitely evolution because today we just don’t have that and you always need to spend some time as a consumer to figure out what product you want and if we can make that decision making process faster and guide you through the process and show you the products in in in a better way.
I think that will be tremendous for all of us buying online. So let’s say someone is like, yeah, I’m actually pretty excited about this and lots of people do get excited about new tech and let’s say they want to get started straightaway, What’s your advice to that person who’s got an e-commerce store? Would you tell him? So the easiest, what they would, I think very important is to try it out by themselves, using their phones, they can initiate the livestream from the browser. They don’t need to even download our streamer app and they will be able to just share the live test event with your colleagues and see how it all works and how the experience is so smooth that even those colleagues working in that same live e-commerce would love to buy those things from them. And that’s what we also see here that whenever we do these better testing and with brands, all of my colleagues are buying all of the products from them because it’s not that hard to sell something when you are at that place, you see those products, you can browse the website as the stream goes.
And it’s I would just incentivise all of the guys trying to try this piece of technology just to sign up. We have 14 days trial and integrate few lines of code very similar to google analytics and then they can start streaming on their website and see how it all works. I can imagine it being disruptive a little bit to drop shipping because and you might already have a solution for this, but drop shipping has been really, I don’t know, it’s had a had a good couple of years, shall we say, But if it’s the case that the person who on that particular website doesn’t actually have the product, which is in most cases. And do you need the product to be in order to sell it, would you say that’s a really big part of it? What could you just have someone live on there and they actually have the product? Yeah, they can just talk about the product or they can read a book on that website and it also works.
It was surprising to me to see that all of these things, we also had to two hours DJ set among e-commerce site, so not related to the products sold at all, but if you’ll just create a marketing campaign with the messaging saying That there is going to be 30% discount throughout the event, people will come, people join, people will listen and engage with the content and maybe others. You know sometimes you want to chat with people. And yeah, like how I imagined this in the future is when I don’t know, drake will go on Twitter and say in five minutes I’m going to be shopping on Gucci.com, let’s say. And you can join me on that same mural straight from the Twitter browser. And that’s where I see the future of how we could shop online as very similar.
It was so flying, right? So when you actually been in LA, let’s say you could walk straight into the Gucci store, right? And you don’t have that ability right now. Obviously, there are some privacy concerns, but it’s all controlled by the business. So if business will hire some celebrities, they can do campaigns like this and, and I believe it will work pretty well. So from the business side of things, I mean, I’m sure you’ve done plenty of these, as you said, some beaters when someone is on the product page, let’s say there’s zero visitors on the product page and then someone comes on. Are you able to see that as the business? Can you see there’s like one visitor on the product page right now? Uh, yes, where are they? Depends on whether they are watching the Livestream or not when they attended that livestream, you’ll see that as well in real time, you’ll see how many viewers you have.
And you also see with our advanced analytics where those people are while what you you’re being live on the website. So yes. So is it right that the visitor kind of elects to join a live stream? So in theory it’s possible for them to say, I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. So I just want to look at the product. Yes, exactly. And there can also be multiple live streams going alive simultaneously and you will be able to pick the one you prefer because there can be multiple retail traders across the country, that that can help you and are airing at that moment. So the, the offline equivalent of that, it’s like, you know, if a, let’s say, a staff member comes up to you in a shop or something, a shop and they say, can I help you? And that person typically says, I’m just looking, just looking. Yeah, that’s the reason for that question.
Yeah. Yeah. But it’s only one way today. So it’s not like we at the moment call on our, having a call on the zoom. You can only as a consumer, you can only chat with that person streaming live. So what do you think in terms of, what’s your theory on uh, percentages of people or businesses using one too many versus 1 to 1? Because I can imagine if you went into it in a big way, 1 to 1, you do pretty well from that, especially if you’re early. But I can also see, you know, one too many is like a product launch where you actually get to speak to people. So what are your thoughts on that? We have a lot of discussions over here, whether we want to start which one too many are or 1 to 1. I see some benefits in 1 to 1, but I also see many competitors already out there that are, let’s say intercom, intercom is huge and for customer support.
And if they will just announced a new way of doing 1, 2 on the video apart from text and images, that they will just Yes, that will not be helpful for us, right? But we want to many, there are not that many players. and they’re all super early.so so we want to truly focus on proactive sales. And we also think that The reactive customer support through video 1-1 conversations is not that scalable. as one too many because there can be only 1-1 conversation. So if I have an employee selling through customer support, if I know that it’s going to have just eight our long calls in a day. then I know that you will be able to sell on the eight items probably or a check out.
If that salesperson will be able to together with marketing team drive thousands of customers to one live sales event. There is much higher all to sell more and that’s why I think there is much higher opportunity for businesses to grow their business With one too many. The other thing, I mean I’m sure you’ve thought about all the various different examples and how they apply. But it makes me think about you know like a let’s say you’re selling cars or something and you could literally check out and have a car delivered to your door and that person, you know, you don’t have to physically go to get a car anymore type thing. You know just thinking of all the scenarios where it might be applicable. Have you given any thought to sort of live or at least video live check out or inquiry for actual services rather than products?
So you know let’s say someone goes on a on a website and a company is selling services because we sell services. And in order to get a particular inquiry or a form submission or something there is also again someone who’s live on that website who you can talk to in video form. Yeah so I think but we both want to one and one too many are applicable to any kind of business is selling online. So if you if you sell services or your aim is to But as many people to R. S. V. V. that that’s your CTA. And like you can drive people true livestream to do that You can let people to subscribe to your service if you want, right? You can host someone on your live stream. You can have valuable conversation. You can provide, you can educate people why they should choose your services. You can show them an example of how that service looks like. And I think it’s yeah it’s very powerful for these businesses as well so you may use that too. Sure. Just seems like we got things to do now. Anyone who’s watching this, I I doubt they’re actually using kind of some sort of live as you say, 1-1 or one to many. It just makes me think there’s going to be a mad rush for it. Your thoughts. Hopefully I believe so I need some time. It needs education. We need to just let businesses know that it’s not that hard to go live and they don’t need any special equipment. I’ve been selling yesterday live I skin girls for one company because I wanted to try it out how it all works And I’ve been selling I skills for, for muscle pain. Too many people I didn’t know about and it works.
So if I could do that as a little nerd, I believe every business will find at least one person that will be able to go live and present their brand, their products or services. So, uh, do you have like a, a demo or something anywhere that people can look at or do you put any of that content on, let’s say a social profile or something? Yeah. You guys can check out our website. Korkuma.com. Okay? K-O-R-K-U-M-A and check out our video where we show the example of how it all works together. We can also, you can also book demo with us. We have an entire team of doing demos with you, explaining you how it all works. And uh, we can even go live to, to let you know how it all works. You’re going to actually wait until someone comes on the site and go live with them so they can see it in real time.
We’re also thinking about airing from our office 24 hours per some days. So whenever you will go to our website, you will see us working on our product because we should be able to sell with our sales tool as well. So that’s why I’m incentivizing the team to, to set something up so we can hear from our office, intriguing. So, I mean, I know you’re ahead of the curve in terms of where this is going, where do you think? Let’s say loads of companies, let’s say it’s the new norm and people are businesses are doing that. What’s next for it? What do you see in terms of trends once it becomes the new normal, where does it go from there? I think it’s hard to say. and also I purely focus on how to get there, uh, to be the norm, right? Because it’s very challenging and there needs to be a lot of education. We are also working on the university for, for businesses to start off with live shopping.
And it’s a good question, but I haven’t thought that much about what will come next to be honest. Do you have an idea of what could come next after that with any maybe virtual reality? I would say an artificial reality. Those things are going to be big things when you will actually be able to see that product on your table at home how it looks like. And we we see these examples of like having that built in in in their app, but with a mix of virtual reality that’s going to be Yeah. Completely new way. Yeah. So online, if they’re on their phone And then they go to the product page and in order to have that 1-1 experience or see the product, they literally put on the headset and it’s like you’re talking to someone, not through the phone, but through, you know, in in the real world or in the bathroom.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll wait for Apple to release their glasses. Yeah. So yeah, you just had a whole load of things your to do list. Is that fair or pretty much clear? Well then it segues nicely into the goals because I said I was going to ask you about that. So what your goals for your company and generally speaking? So for the company is too build case studies at the moment. So All right. Ask all of our listeners to try it out for the demo with us. Let us know how we can help you with setting up live e-commerce. And then in September we are going to have generally availability release. We’ll start with the pr and, and in a year from now, hopefully we’ll have more than thousands of businesses uh, streaming at least twice per week. Andin general, I believe that businesses will start leveraging.
This opportunity that we are actually able to go live on websites and it’s not like the TV. When you need lots of equipment and hundreds of stuff producing that content for you. You can do it straight from your mobile phone. So my goal is to, or our mission is to convert all of the live e-commerce sites into instantly shop. Huge, shared, social immersive shopping experiences. Great goal. In terms of like what’s normal for businesses, I mean I can only say it from my perspective, which is when someone goes to a website, you’re either looking for a phone call or a form submission and form submission I suppose would still be there. But in this context, you know, if someone is phoning the alert to the business would be obviously the ringing of the phone, what’s the what’s the equivalent here for someone going live?
Would it be like a and I know like a pop up or a request to talk to someone or something, what does it look like? So when there is like one too many conversations I’m airline live and I’ll just see that there are two people viewing watching me presenting and I also see in the chat that there is a new one coming in with a nickname and I will incentivize that, let’s say, Nick will join the stream, so I’ll see that from two. There are no three viewers and I can say hi neck, I’m just showing you all this new piece of headphones and if you have some questions I’m here for you to answer those and Nick can also share that livestream with all of its friends on social media.
Sounds cool, well worth trying. Is there anything that you think would be valued, valuable to the audience that I haven’t asked you about today in relation to e-commerce live?
I think it’s going to be valuable for them to check out our block our website and read something about live e-commerce. This new trend coming to our homes from Asia and do as I said book a demo with us where we can explain the benefits and show them some early statistics we have on the conversion rates and add to cart ratios.so they can see by themselves how they can grow their business, their sales and reduce their returns. And again, where’s the best place for people to find you? We are on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter as Kaka official and carcinoma.com is the website where you can sign up for free and try it out. I will be watching with intrigue, Robert, so thank you very much for your time today and sharing with the audience again.
Thanks for having me.