Marketplaces give live commerce a new lease of life

At 7PM on July 1, 380,000 people flocked to e-commerce platform Flipkart for the launch of the Nothing Phone (1). Smartphone launches on e-commerce platforms are nothing new. Indeed, Flipkart pioneered the online flash sale of smartphones all the way back in 2016. This sale, however, was unlike any the platform had done before.

Users who logged onto the platform weren’t just greeted with a countdown to a sale. Instead, they saw a livestream called The Zero Hour. It starred the likes of actors Jim Sarbh and Masaba Gupta, model Manushi Chhillar, television personality Gaurav Kapoor, and tech journalist Rajiv Makhni. The five discussed the various features of the phone, while their audience could interact via emojis or text.

The sale of the phone was only open for ten minutes during the half-hour stream, but that was enough for a sell-out.

Earlier this month, The Zero Hour returned with a new cast of characters. This time, it wasn’t to launch a phone. Instead, it was to drum up interest in Flipkart’s flagship sale, Big Billion Days. Over nine sessions, each of which ranged between 25-30 minutes, Flipkart not only revealed its Big Billion Days prices for various smartphones, but also allowed users to purchase them at these prices during the stream.

Flipkart isn’t the only e-commerce platform that’s wading into the live commerce waters. Myntra, the fashion and beauty platform it acquired in 2014, is also betting big on the medium. After introducing video commerce on the platform through MStudio two years ago, it went a step further at the tail end of 2021 by adding M-Live, a live commerce section, to MStudio.