With our physical and digital spaces increasingly merging, and e-commerce continuing to evolve, customer expectations have never been higher.
This is where contextual commerce comes in—personalizing customer interactions based on real-time factors. But you can make your e-commerce business even more lucrative by combining contextual commerce with live selling. This article dives into the strategies that enable you to do just that.
Contextual Commerce: The New Frontier
Contextual commerce might sound like a buzzword, but it’s not. It’s an intelligent, intuitive strategy where retailers seamlessly tie buying opportunities into their customers’ daily activities, whether they’re relaxing, cooking, or working.
Contextual commerce aims to make the retailer present wherever their shoppers are. Its goal is to eliminate traditional retail structure pain points and tailor experiences to the customer’s lifestyle, preferences, and immediate context.
Let’s take an example.
Customers often experience frustration searching for accessories and clothes for their favorite attire. They spot a look they want on an e-commerce website or social media platform, only to find that the things they want to buy are scattered across various categories or unavailable.
Enter contextual commerce. In this setup, by bundling clothes and accessories, retailers enable customers to purchase the looks they browse. This reduces friction, enhances the shopping experience, and helps boost sales.
Merging Contextual Commerce with Live Selling
But how do you make this context-sensitive e-commerce selling strategy even better? Live selling, the fusion of entertainment and shopping, lends itself perfectly to contextual commerce by taking it a step further.
Merging live selling and contextual commerce allows retailers to boost success, revenue, and customer engagement. In a live selling event, products can be presented in real-life scenarios, making them more appealing to the viewer.
We call it contextual live selling.
Consider a live fashion show. An event where the live sale host curates complete outfits for different occasions—be it a date night or a casual brunch with friends. They take viewers through each piece, from clothing to accessories, providing a holistic view of the look, and allowing viewers to purchase the entire look or any of its pieces as they see them. This type of contextual selling goes beyond the simple promotion of products, offering viewers the convenience of purchasing a complete look in real time during the live sale.
This contextual targeting, directly meeting the shopper’s needs or aspirations in real time, creates a frictionless, unparalleled, engaging shopping experience that traditional e-commerce can’t match. And modern live selling platforms allow retailers to use features designed to help make the most of contextual commerce.
Seamless integration with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok allows easy contextual targeting based on user behavior, preferences, and interests. Comprehensive analytics and reporting features further empower retailers to understand their customer’s behavior, helping them create more personalized, context-driven shopping experiences using simple automation.
But first, let’s explore some scenarios where contextual commerce flourishes.
Leveraging Contextual Factors
Contextual commerce succeeds in almost every situation. Each situation holds the potential to transform a casual shopping session into a rich, engaging, and personalized experience.
- Imagine a home decor live sale where sellers can browse historical sales data to see which products are performing well and use those products as part of a room-makeover-themed sale. They talk about and show each item: the room’s theme, the background stands, decoration pieces, furniture, and accessories. In contextual live selling, users not only see the products but can also buy them on the spot if they like.
- Another example could be a customer frequently visiting live sales of sports merchandise or exercise equipment. Here, the live selling host or instructor talks about the outfit they’re wearing, the mat they’re using, the yoga bricks, the shoes and exercise equipment—all available for purchase on the spot. They’re selling a lifestyle, not just individual items, providing viewers with everything they need to carry out the routine themselves.
- Imagine a live jewelry selling show. The host, a known stylist or jewelry designer, takes the viewers through a journey that matches jewelry pieces with different outfits and occasions. Instead of merely showcasing individual jewelry pieces, they curate full looks—consider a chic, minimalist ensemble paired with a delicate silver pendant for a business meeting or a flamboyant dress matched with statement earrings for a cocktail party. Maybe even changing the background decor a bit to match the vibe of what they’re displaying. And all the while, viewers get to purchase anything they see on screen.
Contextual selling doesn’t just sell items, it sells experiences. Features like shop-the-look videos give viewers a complete sense of what they’re buying, while live selling gives the added advantage of letting shoppers ask questions about what they see in real time. This is why contextual selling builds trust and loyalty.
Having your branded mobile app that provides a perfect place for implementing such contextual commerce strategies. Using push notifications, a mobile app will allow you to reach customers at the right time with context-appropriate product recommendations. You can achieve similar results with your own website as well.
You can push more inventory to your customers with contextual product recommendations during checkout, pairing a matching shirt with a pair of jeans that your customer is buying. You can also keep inventory moving by offering purchase-related mystery items or group items and creating item bundles to sell during live selling sessions.
Succeeding With Contextual Live Selling
Contextual live selling holds unprecedented opportunities for retailers to boost customer engagement, retention, and lifetime value. With live selling, retailers can present products in a real-life context, making them more appealing and relatable to the viewer.
Contextual live selling is not just about selling products but experiences, stories, and solutions as they come up in different situations.
With platforms like CommentSold, the journey towards a more context-driven, personalized e-commerce live selling experience is straightforward and exciting. Many shops have seen exponential growth, boosting their revenue by as much as 30x with contextual live selling! Welcome to the future of e-commerce.
