2.🔊 Hardly the essentials needed to endure a lockdown, but it’s made for brisk business for QVC and its sister channel HSN, which now reach into 380 million homes worldwide and continue to find a massive audience for its hokey sales pitches that push everything from mattresses and mops to cooking supplies and jewelry.

3.🔊 Last year, the two channels—plus a handful of smaller clothing and home décor brands—delivered revenue of $14.2 billion for publicly-traded Qurate Retail. QVC has been around for 35 years but has suddenly become the company to beat in the industry’s new fervor for live shopping. Amazon, Facebook and TikTok are in hot pursuit, along with a number of venture-backed startups. Walmart wants in too, as do Macy’s, Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Wayfair, Estee Lauder, Tommy Hilfiger and Levi Strauss, all of whom have begun to experiment with the approach as a way of reaching shoppers who are staying at home—and may never come back.

4.🔊 “They are more relevant now than ever,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, of the two channels born at the dawn of the cable-TV era. Livestream shopping, the internet-era name given to programming that leans heavily on lively demos, time-pressured promotions and real-time interactions with shoppers, is set to grow four-fold to $25 billion in the U.S. in the next two years, according to Coresight Research. 

5.🔊 And that’s nothing compared to what’s happening in China, where data firm iResearch expects consumers to spend $300 billion on livestream purchases this year, about 15% of the country’s total online sales. Qurate, with 22 million active customers, is the largest in the U.S. by far and still growing, adding 7.6 million new shoppers during 2020. Shares of Qurate, which is controlled by cable billionaire John Malone, have delivered total returns of 300% in the past 12 months.

6.🔊 “The world is shifting to what we do,” says Qurate CEO Mike George, who is set to retire at the end of the year. “As we see others copy what we do, it motivates us to move that much faster to expand our leadership.”While most livestreamers are still fumbling for footing, QVC is a well-oiled machine that has already won over millions of bargain-hunting, middle-aged women, who buy an average of 26 items every year at a cost of $1,335, an enviable advantage. Big tech is still in the trial-and-error phase. Amazon’s first effort, “Style Code Live,” was canceled in 2017 after a year. 

Qurate Retail CEO Mike George wants viewers to feel like they are having a conversation with a neighbor over the backyard fence, a concept established during the company’s early days. QURATE RETAIL

7.🔊 The online behemoth has since revamped the strategy to allow brands and influencers to host their own livestreams, which run throughout the day on the Amazon Live page. Last year, Facebook began making it easier for small businesses to sell products during livestream sessions, while TikTok is running tests with Walmart. A pilot event in December attracted seven times more viewers than it anticipated, prompting a second livestream earlier this month.

8.🔊 A rash of copycats has also emerged, with ambitions of overtaking the incumbent with a slicker, more digitally savvy version geared toward young shoppers. “I love it,” says George, who keeps a thick file of stories about companies purporting to be the “new QVC.” Most of them failed. “It’s good to be talked about.”

Discussion

1.🔊 Have you/a friend/family member ever bought something from a shopping program on Television? What was it? How much and why?

2.🔊 Who do you think the target demographic in Japan is for Tele-shopping (for example Japa-netto Takata). Do you think there is any advantage to buying a product in this way?

3.🔊 If the products you buy from amazon/rakuten etc were able to be purchased for less money but online in a tele-shopping style, would you be interested in doing so? 

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