Guest Bio:
Dominic Powers is the CEO of Stickler – a tech company that helps scaling Live Commerce. He is based in Southeast Asia, powering the quickly evolving and growing Live Selling industry there.
Summary:
In this conversation, Moritz Schröder speaks with Dominic Powers, CEO of Stickler, about the evolving landscape of live shopping and social commerce. They discuss the functionalities of Stickler, the challenges brands face in live commerce, and the importance of engagement and authenticity. Dominik shares insights from their data on live shopping events, the role of cultural nuances, and the future predictions for the industry, emphasizing the potential growth of live shopping in the coming years.
Takeaways:
- Stickler is a SaaS platform designed for live shopping.
- The platform provides tools for competitive analysis and host management.
- Live shopping in Asia is significantly more advanced than in the West.
- Engagement in the first 15 minutes of a live stream is crucial.
- Remote operations are becoming more common in live shopping.
- Authenticity is key for successful live commerce hosts.
- Data insights from live shopping can drive better strategies.
- Cultural nuances affect how live shopping is received in different markets.
- The creator economy is expanding with opportunities in live commerce.
- Live shopping could account for 25% of e-commerce by 2030.
Full Transcript:
Moritz Schröder (00:02.577)
Cool, Dominik, super nice to be talking with you. You are the CEO of Stickler, a company that works with live shopping. It’s a SaaS tool that facilitates live shopping on a large scale. I’m excited to talk more about that because I’ve been saying for a while that it’s so wild to see how social commerce and live shopping is.
not just expanding on the respective platforms, but actually expanding the entire ecosystem that is being built around this industry. So excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome.
Dominic Powers (00:38.647)
you for having me, great to be here.
Moritz Schröder (00:40.982)
Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about Stikler, just so the audience gets an idea what kind of functionalities you actually offer through the company?
Dominic Powers (00:50.606)
Sure, so Stickler is a SaaS platform that’s basically been built to enable brands or agencies to simply do live better. So we have competitive listening tools so you can listen to your competitors’ streams, have analysis of that and insights of that. We then provide studio tools which allow you to go live at scale. And we built the platform from learnings, a time spent in China, seeing when live went from version one when brands were just doing a couple of hundred hours a month.
to when they went to version two and Douyin allowing them to do thousands of hours a day. so providing tools which allow you to scale that so it makes it much easier to do. And then the final part is around the host management. So live commerce is not about influencers necessarily, it’s about hosts who understand the product to understand the brand they’re working for. And obviously brands need a way to manage those hosts because a large number of them are gig workers and they step in and out for the brands to host. So we provide this suite
tools that no matter whether you’re a small brand going live as individual streamers or whether you’re an enterprise brand that is going live in 30 studios at a time, we provide the tools that allow you to do that.
Moritz Schröder (02:04.112)
Okay, so when Stiglr was initially founded, there was obviously a messy industry that was booming, but at the same time clearly needed some structure around the areas you just described. Were there specific problems that stood out and that you saw or that customers brought up that then led to the development around Stiglr?
Dominic Powers (02:30.466)
Yeah, think so. So Finn, our founder, spent…
like four five years working with those brands in China, with the global brands, as they went through that scaling issue. back in the day when brands were going live in China, the process to go live required like 25 to 30 people. And that’s everything from strategy and planning, script writing, being in the studio, somebody moderating, somebody managing comments, somebody directing. And the platforms themselves, the native platforms, were not that intuitive.
to use. And so there’s just many little things that if you are working across multiple platforms, so we are a multi-platform platform.
There are different ways of working. And so by using an aggregator, a unifier, we’re able to standardize some of those operations so that people have a seamless workflow to use, whether it’s from the AI generation of scripts, because imagine if you’re doing thousands of hours and hundreds of products, how do you generate those scripts? So we’re able to generate the scripts, have approval processes for that. We’re able to connect into the platforms like TikTok, have your live bag, which is the products that you’re going to sell accessible and ready to
products. So really just solving some of the problems that you only really know exist if you’re deep in the weeds operationally of taking brands live.
Moritz Schröder (03:56.608)
Yeah, definitely seems to be the case that going live at the beginning seems like a very straightforward process, to be honest, right? Especially with apps like TikTok or the equivalent Douyin in China, you just push a button and you can stream from your bedroom if you want to. But then once you step things up and you want to take things more serious and more people get involved, as you said, you build a larger team and you have hundreds of products and thousands of hours of streaming.
Dominic Powers (04:13.196)
Absolutely.
Moritz Schröder (04:25.323)
it does add complexity on top of this. So yeah, please.
Dominic Powers (04:29.451)
And you have to think about that scale. And I think as we were just talking before we went on, it was 11 11 in Asia, singles day. It’s big in China. It’s big in Southeast Asia as well. And when you talk about people going live, they’re not just going live for four hours.
Some of the streams that we were monitoring yesterday and working on yesterday were 17, 18 hours long, continual streams. And so managing those processes, how you manage the hosts in and out, how you’re managing the script for that, it’s very scaled and it’s very people intensive unless you do it right.
Moritz Schröder (05:07.438)
Yeah, that’s wild. mean, the scale is something else in Asia. Europe and the Western world is slowly catching up to what has been building in Asia for about 10 years already. now looking at events like Singles Day, it’s very obvious that China and the rest of Asia is quite far ahead, I would say.
Dominic Powers (05:30.668)
I think we are. I mean, it’s obviously where Live was born, but we work in the US, we work in the UK with clients and those markets are moving fast and the EU is catching up. And if you look at TikTok shop now, only having launched, it was June in the EU and in particular France, it’s one and a half percent of all e-commerce just since it’s launched in like less than six months. And so that’s not all Live, of course, but probably, you know.
We estimate kind of 20 to 25 % of stuff on TikTok will be live eventually, but that’s a massive growth rate. And it’s something I don’t think a lot of people appreciate unless you’re in it. When you look at it from the outside, you go, what? TikTok is doing that much? And you go, yeah, shop is massive.
Moritz Schröder (06:15.501)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk more about your insights into, especially Southeast Asia and what is happening there with social commerce. But if we linger a little bit more on Stikler itself and the functionalities, I mean, you just mentioned 11.11 just happened. So if people go live for like 18 hours straight, how do they utilize Stikler in that process? Can you tell us a couple of the touch points where your software is then being used?
Dominic Powers (06:46.144)
Yeah, so one of the major things is what are going to talk about for 17 hours? And so obviously that pre-planning of the streams and we’ll take TikTok as an example. So the clients will use the software to understand what their run of show will look like.
And in our language that is what you’re going to say, what you’re going to do during the show. And so that run of show, they use our platform to build out their products. So what are the scripts for the individual products, as well as anything else they might want to say, and we call them assets, which are non-product things. So it may be an intro, it may be a reminder to like, share, follow, or it may be something around delivery. And so they use our run of show editor to build that out, get the approval. And then when they go live, what we provide
is a tool set as a studio software which for example gives a teleprompter interface for the host so rather than having them look down at their phone or look at
Google Sheet or something on a laptop, they actually have a screen above the camera and we have a teleprompter which is connected through to the TikTok platform. It’s also connected to the Stickler software so the host can be communicated with by the director, by the moderator. They can see all the comments, which if you’re going live and you’re just using the native platform, the comments are difficult to see. So we make those large, they can be responded to. And what we also do is have a method which allows you, for example, to, it may seem small,
but auto pin the product that appears in the light.
Moritz Schröder (08:15.892)
Mmm.
Dominic Powers (08:16.459)
on the bottom of the screen. TikTok has this amazing function that means that product on the screen gets un-pinned every 30 seconds and you have to go in and re-pin it. So we’ve developed tools like an auto-pinning solution which allows that just to be persistent so you don’t have to keep replacing it. So if you’re talking for five, 10 minutes about a particular product, you don’t have to keep doing that every 30 seconds. And we have the ability to reply to the comments through our system, so from the audience but also for the direct
to give comments to the host. So rather than speaking off camera or being noisy, they can type and give that. And so just a bunch of tools like that all the way through to the post live analysis. And so what we do is then we score each live based on the engagement metrics and the GMV that’s sold, which allows a brand, if these are brand streams, to then see who are their best performing hosts. It’s not all about GMV. It can be about self engagement that’s being driven.
Moritz Schröder (09:12.78)
Mm.
Dominic Powers (09:15.434)
And then one of the other tools is a of a brand safety overview. So you can imagine going live for 17 hours if you’re in the beauty and cosmetic space, for example, there are certain things you can and cannot say. You can’t cross that line between therapeutics and pharma and just health and beauty. And so what we’re able to do is to transcribe and analyze what’s been said and then overlay the brand’s own brand safety guidelines and give them a report which says,
there were these transgressions that took place where something was said that shouldn’t have been done. So for the next live you can give the host some pointers, some direction and tweak the script so that they don’t go off script. So kind of all things like that.
Moritz Schröder (09:58.988)
Right. And it really shows how in the weeds you are in this industry. I mean, all the things you just described, I can clearly see as pain points for anyone who does large live shopping events. But you really only know about it once you know about it, right? It also sounds like it’s an amazing software, but possibly also quite some hands on work needed from your company, like how much
of a support team do you have to provide for these large events and how much is really fully optimized.
Dominic Powers (10:35.613)
So we have clients that have signed up to the platform.
gone to our webpage, signed up, used the platform, gone live, and we don’t talk to them. They don’t message us on our support system and they just use it. But there are some clients who go live at scale and they do the mega lives and we have a couple of clients in Europe who do go live for like 12 hours ago. so we make sure we have the team is on standby, of course, just as that process is happening. But as a software, we don’t get in the way of the actual streaming. We’re a layer that just
everything passes through so when we have no kind of critical points of failure but it’s good just to be you know be around as that’s happening. We are a tool that can be used by the individual.
so you don’t need to have a team operating it and the tools are designed that you can either have people supporting you or you can do things just yourself. So it really is simple to use. It’s very intuitive and I think that’s one of things that was important for us is to make sure it has that ability because we don’t want to be another tool that the teams have to use and they go, but it’s another tool. We want to be the tool that replaces it as the aggregator and makes things much easier. So, you know, if you’re
Three people can run a very long stream and they can do that maybe as a tag team. So one of the things we do…
Dominic Powers (12:00.453)
While we never really wanted to be a services company, we’re also providing services to clients as well as they scale. So whether that’s remote moderators, for example. So we have some brands that we’re working with in the UK and the US who don’t want to put moderators in room in country, but they’d much rather use an offshore solution. And so with the Stickler platform.
don’t have to be in the same room. We plug in with APIs to the TikTok account, to the shop account, and then have the creator account and the mod account connected. So then it’s easy for people to be in a different location to actually do that. So, you know, there’s different ways to use it, different ways to scale it. You can run multiple studios at the same time. So we do have clients have seven, eight studios that they’re running. And it’s just very simple to use. And we think we’ve built something that will not only scale with the ecosystem,
system but will scale with individual clients.
Moritz Schröder (12:55.882)
That’s really interesting what you just said that it’s actually possible to do this fully remote if necessary. From what I understood so far with live shopping, it’s pretty much a prerequisite that you’re in the physical location. It’s the first time I hear about a solution that allows us to do it offshore if the company decides to go that route. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? Like how much is the demand on this kind of service and how would you then go about it?
Dominic Powers (13:25.266)
Yeah, so just to be clear, TikTok as an example, as a platform, it does require the stream to go live from that country because obviously a TikTok shop is focused to that country and there is almost no cross border trade, the EU being exception. And so, you the demand for it is really interesting depending on market. So we have clients in Southeast Asia, for example, who do the stream from Singapore.
They then have their moderators in Indonesia and they then have the director sitting in Malaysia. And again, they can do that.
Moritz Schröder (13:57.981)
Ha ha ha.
Dominic Powers (13:58.823)
purely because of the way our system is set up. The actual creator account that goes live is in Singapore for the Singapore market. And they do variations of that depending on their team, because they have a team that’s very hybrid. They’re then able just to make that team work as is necessary. And so as I’ve mentioned for the UK and North America, there is a demand for gig workers who can do the moderation or do the direction from a remote location. And so this isn’t just responding
to comments, it’s actually managing the live bag, managing the products, so that the host can just focus on hosting, can focus on engaging with the audience, because you really need a host looking at the camera, not talking at the audience, but actually building that relationship. And if they then have to their head down and do things to respond to comments, or they have to pin products, it means the experience isn’t as good for…
the audience. And so by having those kind of offshore people able to do that in a way that’s economically beneficial for everybody, including the people doing the work, we think it’s just helping that whole industry rise. And I think one of the things having been in the advertising and media space for far longer than I care to remember, where it’s hyper competitive, one of the things
we love about the social commerce and live commerce space is it’s very collaborative. There are companies that on the outside you would think would be competitive, but no, they work together to support each other and I think it’s a great thing about social commerce, it’s just so collaborative.
Moritz Schröder (15:35.001)
That’s the impression I get from the industry and it gets me even more excited about it. It seems like everybody’s part of this journey and especially here in the West, it’s a fairly recent journey, right? So whoever succeeds or shares their successes gets celebrated because it elevates the entire industry and everybody benefits.
Dominic Powers (15:55.59)
Absolutely. And it’s a great thing to see because there’s just so much growth. mean, the pie is only going to get bigger as consumers shift their purchasing habits. And obviously platforms like TikTok that have that discovery mechanism make purchasing just so much easier and so much more frictionless. And I think to use that old phrase, we’re not even 1 % done. If you think how fast TikTok and Doyin together have grown.
In the six years that they’ve been around, they’ve done more in GMV than Amazon did in the first 20 years. So it’s an amazing life, right? And we just think there’s so much more to come as brands dip their toe in and…
Moritz Schröder (16:28.848)
Insane.
Dominic Powers (16:35.994)
Mum and pop retailers dip their toe in. And I was on a conversation just last week where One of my favorite live streamers and live commerce shows is in Thailand where I live. And it’s this lady that owns a corner shop and she goes live every day and she does four or five hours and she sells cooking oil. All she sells is different flavors of cooking oil.
Moritz Schröder (16:59.975)
You
Dominic Powers (17:00.656)
She’s built herself out as an MCN as well. And last month in Thailand, she was the largest MCN in Thailand. She did close to a million dollars in GMV basically cooking oil.
home products. And so, you it’s not just about big brands. It’s something that can actually change the lives of smaller retailers, of smaller corner shops, mom and pop shops. So think that’s one of the great things about it. It’s the democratization that it brings.
to everybody. Anybody can be somebody that’s selling. And I think the benefit of TikTok obviously is it’s about quality. And you have to be a verified individual. You have to be a verified business. You have to have the right to sell the products you sell. And so it adds that extra layer of quality, of assurance that doesn’t necessarily exist in some of the other imported platforms, for example, where you don’t always know that what you’ve bought is going to arrive as you thought it would. And so the way TikTok’s managed
that is really good and I hope the other platforms of start to follow in that same vein because then it makes it fairer for everybody.
Moritz Schröder (18:10.972)
Right. You just mentioned this corner shop that is doing amazingly well just selling oil. What makes that particular creator so engaging that she can thrive so much? how can you see patterns in all the data that you’re collecting through your platform into what really makes creators succeed over others that maybe don’t have the same retention rate?
Dominic Powers (18:25.583)
Yeah, great.
Dominic Powers (18:36.485)
Absolutely, so it is about being truly engaging as I kind of alluded to at beginning. It’s not about sales pitch out, it’s…
having authenticity, it’s having empathy, it’s knowing the products you’re talking about. And just for cooking oil, she knows the oil, she knows what they’re good for, what you should use them for. And I mean, she has like a hundred thousand followers and anytime she goes live, she’s got one to 2000 concurrent viewers watching that stream. Because people like to listen to her and what she’s saying. And they’re doing bulk purchases, they’re doing repeat purchases. And if you compare
that to some of the more contrived streams that some of the brands are doing that are really heavily produced, heavily directed. They’re not getting the engagement, they’re not getting the audience, people are coming in and bouncing off. You can see the bounce rates are high and they don’t understand how to play the algorithm. TikTok lets you live or die by the first 15 minutes. If you don’t get engaged audience
you’re then not going to be organically pushed, you’re going to be organically demoted and even if you then start to boost your stream you’re not going to get the audience. So the ones that succeed are truly engaging right from the very beginning. and we more often than not then see that growth in viewers, the growth in views, a high point of peak concurrent viewers and then a strong number of viewers kind of in and out and that’s not just even an indication of GMV, it’s an indication of engagement.
And that’s what she does, she just keeps the viewers right to the end. I mean, we’ve seen some streams, for example, particularly in Asia, where brands are toying and trialing using AR avatar hosts. So they literally have avatars on hosts for two to three hours. We’ve tracked some of these streams, we’ve analyzed them, and one stream ran for 17, 16 hours for a cosmetics brand.
Dominic Powers (20:43.105)
it had three or four peak concurrent viewers at the most and at any one time it like two, three viewers. In that extended time it had 35 likes.
and the thing it did have most were negative comments. I came here to be a real human. I didn’t want to see an avatar on loop. It can’t even answer my questions. And so again, from a brand point of view, that went live on the brand channel. So that’s done a number of things. One, it’s negatively impacted your algorithmic score because you weren’t engaging an audience. Two, it’s just done good old fashioned brand damage because although there weren’t that many people watching it, the ones that did just didn’t
Moritz Schröder (20:58.084)
Right.
Dominic Powers (21:23.596)
enjoy it so maybe they’ll scroll through your real ones. So that authenticity, that engagement, that’s what people go on social commerce for. It’s about being social, it’s about being engaging and the shopping and the discovery and the frictionless purchases just makes it so much easier to be there.
Moritz Schröder (21:42.725)
Do you think that that’s just because AI and AI avatar selling is just so early stage? Because you do see other posts online saying, this is the future and we’re doing so much GMV just using an AI avatar. Of course, you never know how much of those claims are actually true, but it seems to be going into that direction. I for one, I’m very weary of that development because I do share your sentiment that it should be a very
personal and social experience with an actual human being and not an AI avatar, but do you see a world where those avatars become so good that they can actually answer questions and because they can run 24-7, they will just out-compete the humans?
Dominic Powers (22:29.037)
We’re way off from that at moment, but I’m not saying it won’t happen in the future. And to be honest, we’re building tools into the stickler platform that can enable some of that auto responding to comments, for example.
So it knows your catalog of products. It knows what are the general comments that come in and it can respond to them and that will be in a release next year. But like I said, in terms of the host, I think there has to be that naturalness to it. Will technology get to a point where people can’t tell the difference? Maybe, maybe not. But for the time being, you if we look at some of the biggest streamers in the history to date, whether it’s Lu Xiaoqi in China, did over a billion dollars in one stream or whether it’s some of the streamers
in Southeast Asia who doing like 40, $50 million a stream. If you say you’re getting good GMV with an AI host, I think it’s…
understanding what’s the relativity of that value of GMV. Maybe getting a couple of thousand dollars, but real people are driving a thousand, two thousand dollars an hour just from a regular host and we don’t yet see AI doing that. I think once it scales a bit, once people test it, I think it may have a place when studios are 24-7 always on. I mean, we do have cases now in Asia where a brand will have 30 studios and they run those studios 24-7.
and so they’ve got a lot going on. But yeah, maybe there’s a time where for a couple of hours it runs by AI just to keep it running while they clean the studio, tear it down a little bit. So let’s see. But I think at this point in time, social commerce is about being social, it’s about being authentic, it’s about communicating and connecting and improving the commerce experience. And I think that’s what consumers want, that improved commerce experience.
Moritz Schröder (24:18.622)
It seems like with Stikler as a platform being used as an intermediary, you have a unique opportunity to really aggregate a lot of data and insights from all the different live shopping events that you’re part of hosting, much more so than anyone who just looks at their own data, possibly only outcompeted by platforms like TikTok, but of course they don’t share all that data.
What are some insights that you have gathered from the thousands and thousands of hours that you’re being used on these live shopping events? Is there anything that you can share that the usual user might not be aware of in terms of what really drives GMV, but then also retention and engagement?
Dominic Powers (25:02.55)
Yeah, great question. And we’ve done hundreds of thousands of hours that we’ve tracked and analyzed and it’s everything from audio quality to the actual look of the studio, the use of the green screens if they’re used. And so one project we worked on recently was in Thailand, but it was looking at what are the best performing streams for clothing? How do they work?
One of the insights our language model picked up was when you have a full studio that is very professionally organized with screens in the background and looks very much like walking into a retail shop and you compare that to a studio that’s more like somebody’s living room where they have a rack of clothes and they’re pulling them out and talking about them.
The level of engagement on any metric is far higher on the more natural stream than the studio stream. And we look at hundreds of hours of different streams for that particular day, that particular type of product, and it goes back to being authentic, being engaging. And if you’re too professional, that’s kind of what people get when they walk into a retail store.
Moritz Schröder (25:59.107)
Mmm.
Dominic Powers (26:16.258)
They’re on TikTok to get that different experience and they want discovery to be different. And so those are some of the things we pick up. But we also pick up things around audio quality as well, because one of the things that TikTok doesn’t track that we do…
is the audio quality, the loops, which is the same measurement as they use in the broadcast industry. And kind of a number one killer of streams, which means that people just bounce off, is if your audio quality is too low. And the number of streams that we’ve tracked across the board, UK, US, across Southeast Asia, that have bad periods of audio quality, or in fact have silence as well. And so one the things that we’ve picked up on the longer streams
Moritz Schröder (26:54.274)
Hmm.
Dominic Powers (26:58.721)
I
Sometimes the hosts don’t think that they’re being watched, they’re being analyzed. And so they might go silent for like 15 minutes and our tool picks up that period. And we can see that direct correlation between periods of silence and obviously drop in views, drop in viewers. You negatively impact the algorithm and then you never recover. And so you’re better off just stopping the stream and starting again. So all these little things that we pick up and we’re also picking up some really interesting incidents
of brand safety infringement as I mentioned and when you’re talking for long periods of time when you’re maybe an inexperienced host you might say things that
are overstepping that line of a medical claim versus something that’s just a cosmetic. so the things that also brands have to be aware of, hosts have to be aware of, the TikTok shop partners have to be aware of is managing that. You have to be able to record, analyze, audit everything you’re doing. And I think having come from the ad tech and martech industry where brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on brand safety for platforms like Integral Ad Science, Double Verify,
all of those, they’re not looking at brand safety in the same way. And so I think there’s a lot that can be learned and kind of ported across from that industry as a whole around what brands need to start doing, what the providers need to start doing in terms of managing that. I think there’s some of the interesting insights that we’re picking up. And I think it’s also the slight nuances of the markets.
Dominic Powers (28:35.838)
TikTok Shop launched in the UK the first time and also in North America. There was a lot of reticence. It was like, no, that’s a China thing. That’s an Asian thing. It’s not going to be big here. And obviously you fast forward now. It’s been six years since Doi and we’ve had TikTok Shop kind of three years. It’s had its second launch in the UK. And what we notice across the board is every market goes through the same growth curve. Every market goes through the growth pains.
Moritz Schröder (29:00.491)
Ha
Dominic Powers (29:02.556)
It’s not just a uniquely Chinese thing, it’s not just a uniquely Southeast Asian thing, it’s human behaviour and that’s what causes that growth. There might be nuances, there might be nuances in the way people respond to how things are described and that’s something to get into the detail of. It’s understanding culture and the language and what makes things click with consumers.
But all markets are growing in the same way, they’re maturing in the same way. And that’s great for us to see. We knew that would happen. And we’ve been at this now three years. And so we’re just looking forward to seeing how the rest of the Western markets grow and take off and how people lean in. And looking forward to maybe when we do get billion dollar streams in the US like we did in China, it’d be a good thing to see.
Moritz Schröder (29:48.703)
Yeah, for sure. It’s so exciting how early stage this industry still is in the West and how much potential there still is and room for growth. Also interesting to see all these different markets find their own way of doing live shopping and doing social commerce, because as you said, there are nuances. It’s not all going to look like it does in China, but the growth curve is the same or is similar.
So it’s very cool to see, how does actually live shopping look like in the US? How does it look like in France? How do they do it in Germany? Because they all find their own voice.
Dominic Powers (30:23.441)
Exactly. And I think the really interesting thing about Europe is going to be that cross-border nature, which I think will accelerate, I think, the growth and acceptance among the small and medium businesses. know, somebody producing cheese in France, somebody producing sausages in Germany can sell cross-border. And I think that opens up a whole new level of e-commerce growth, which I think would be amazing. If TikTok facilitates that.
with the delivered by TikTok, that integrated logistics as well. I think a really good thing for e-commerce in Europe as a whole. So that’s one we’re definitely watching and looking to get involved quite deeply. So we’re looking to launch in the EU next year. We’re up and running in the UK and the US, but looking forward to the other markets as well.
Moritz Schröder (31:11.89)
Is that already life that you can sell cross border through TikTok shop in Europe?
Dominic Powers (31:17.438)
Yep, you can. So in the markets where it’s launched, so I know France, Germany, I believe Spain, Italy, yeah, other markets will come online. TikTok’s quite fast when they go into launch markets, you know, they fly the teams in and then the launch kind of happens. We had Japan launch.
Moritz Schröder (31:23.656)
Italy, Spain.
Moritz Schröder (31:37.288)
You
Dominic Powers (31:40.369)
earlier this year, of August, September. We’ve got Australia and New Zealand. We believe the launch is imminent as we’re seeing a movement of TikTok shop folks into the market to help with that. And I think next, which I think will be another interesting market just purely because of the way it’s grown as an e-commerce market and the whole is Africa. I think that’s going to be super exciting.
Moritz Schröder (32:04.063)
Mmm.
Dominic Powers (32:06.886)
To see it’s mobile first, they’re big on TikTok, shop I think would just be that natural evolution and again we’re really looking forward to that.
Moritz Schröder (32:17.705)
You mentioned that there are different nuances and differences between markets. Do you also see these differences between different platforms? Obviously, TikTok Shop dominates social commerce as of now, but I know that your software is not only focusing on TikTok Shop, you’re quite agnostic. So what kind of differences do you see there? TikTok Shop is also known for elevating experiences and videos that are not as polished, not studio level quality.
as compared to, for example, Instagram, what kind of differences do you spot from the data that you’re gathering?
Dominic Powers (32:56.105)
So what’s interesting is one of the other big platforms in Asia is Shopee, and that’s also big in Latin America. And they’re a marketplace. They are not a social platform, but brands do go live on Shopee, and they do it more as an event. And so I think one of the differences we’re going to see, and again, there’s a lot that we’re looking forward to. We’re looking forward to Twitch scaling what it’s doing. We’re looking forward to Instagram meta coming back into live.
Because there are these other channels that are there that have audiences, can aid discovery. But I think it is also about the audiences that are on the platform. And I think just a great bellwether for live commerce as a whole is what not. And what not in the US raising another 260 million and 11 billion valuation for collectibles and then doing live. And I think that shows that there’s different audience niches as well. And so I think if…
the different platforms can play to those niches. Again, I think that raises the whole industry. So that’s something we want to look for by market. But I think the differentiator at the moment that we’ve seen and why TikTok shop is so dominant is because that discovery format, that community format, which the other plat…
marketplaces don’t necessarily have. And so it’d be good if some of them develop that. I think it’s never good to have one dominant player, but we’ll ride that wave while we can. You know, want the market to be to be liberal, to be to have choice and all those kind of good things. So let’s see what develops in some of the other markets and particularly where there is no TikTok. So TikTok was obviously not allowed to continue in India, for example. And so I know there are a couple of platforms that
launching to take that place and launching shop functionality. We had obviously a similar issue in the US, but that’s kind of almost resolved. Similar in Indonesia, and they’re just addressing those different market dynamics and different requirements. But I think the one that will show us some real different things, I think, would be Africa. And just excited to see what out of there because of its vast nature.
Moritz Schröder (35:03.676)
Right.
Dominic Powers (35:08.143)
and who knows whether they’ll launch cross-border there, don’t know. Maybe it still will only be single market, but I’d love to see what starts to happen there. I think the real differences though are in the style of presenting and what actually resonates with your audience. And so one of the things that hasn’t exported well from China is the very Chinese we’ve selling, the very loud way.
lots of bell ringing and things like that and culturally that doesn’t necessarily work in other countries and so what we’re seeing again are those brands, those hosts that succeed adapt their style to the market and that’s important because it means they understand their audience, they’re driving the engagement. Some people don’t like loud noises when they’ve got their headphones on and they’re scrolling through.
So it’s how you manage that and think that’s the learning that as brands step into live commerce, you start to test, start to test, start to have different channels. And what we see, I as I’ve mentioned, it’s not just about having the studios, it’s having the channels. And so there are certain brands in Southeast Asia which will go live at the same time across 11 channels. And so that…
the different products, they’re testing the different formats and they’re starting to do old-fashioned A-B testing, they’re starting to test scripts, so to see what’s actually working at the same period of time so they can get an apples to apples comparison. And so I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to start to see the kind of professionalism and the analytics from the ad tech and martech world
find its way really into live commerce where historically it’s been, let’s just get a camera, let’s get a light, we’ve got some product, let’s go live. It’s going to be much more about, let’s plan this right, let’s plan to be successful. Let’s not try and do this on the fly, but let’s professionalize it. And ultimately, that’s what we developed Stickler for. that’s, at Fin, the founder’s vision was, let’s provide a professional piece of software that the industry even in China doesn’t have.
Moritz Schröder (37:16.881)
Yeah, I can totally see the necessity for that as the market matures. And especially when you have situations like, for example, cross border selling here in Europe, but then you do have cultural differences for Germany and France. If you’re sitting in Germany and you’re selling to an audience in France, things that land with the German audience might not land with the French audience besides language barrier and things like that. You mentioned, for example, loud bells and loud noises.
maybe that’s something that would work in one market and not in the other. So it would actually be fantastic to have a tool that gets so granular that you can break it down on the level of geographic location and actually track what works in France compared to Germany.
Dominic Powers (38:01.263)
And absolutely, and that’s again the level that you could even get at in market as well. We’re in discussions with a jewelry brand in the US that has, well, historically all of their social was English and they weren’t on TikTok shop, they were on the other platforms, but they made a switch.
to do streams and broadcasts and videos, yes in English, but they also then did them in for the Hispanic audience.
What they discovered is the moment they did that, the levels of engagement across all platforms just went through the roof. So as they now look to on board on TikTok, like, want to have two channels. We want an English language channel, but we want Hispanic channel, same products, same distribution center where we sell from, but we now know our market and the drivers of those markets. So I think no matter which country you’re in, if you’re very multicultural, that’s something again to look at. It’s not just style, it can be language. And so I think again,
And that’s that very social nature of it. It’s people being drawn to their own tribes, as were. That’s how it is. It’s ticked off great for that.
Moritz Schröder (39:20.092)
Yeah, it’s funny how that developed in the last couple of years. I saw that happening with social media content, not even sales related, but just large YouTubers suddenly launching channels in different languages and actually getting all their usually English speaking videos translated into Spanish, but then also other major languages just to reach a global audience.
Dominic Powers (39:42.65)
Exactly. And I think that’s a great thing, a great level up. So lots of opportunity there, I think, for brands to step in and start thinking like they do with their other channels. You’ve got to go local, but even doing it, as I said, that deep level of multicultural understanding for a particular market. So, yeah.
Moritz Schröder (40:00.893)
for sure. How does life shopping and social commerce look like in Southeast Asia right now? Because you’re, as you said, are based in Thailand. Is it a huge part of the culture like it is in China? Or is there still some catching up happening? How is it different from China, even though it’s also Asian? Can you tell us a little bit more about the nuances there?
Dominic Powers (40:23.321)
So there are certain markets which are much more developed in Southeast Asia. So the markets like Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia in particular are very scaled. Malaysia, kind of Singapore behind that. I mean, to give you an example, and this is kind of publicly known, if you take L’Oreal, for example, in Indonesia, they have 30 studios. They’re studios that they run. They’ve launched studios just in Indonesia.
Moritz Schröder (40:48.55)
Just in Indonesia.
wild.
Dominic Powers (40:52.693)
Earlier this year in Vietnam as well. And so they have the studios, they run them pretty much 24 hours a day. They’ll work with TikTok shop partners, they’ll work with agencies and they’ll…
test the agencies, test the TikTok shop partners, but ultimately they own the studios, they own the process, they own the shops. And so, you broadcasting at that level in Indonesia, obviously you’re driving a lot of GMV. And I think that’s something that, again, brands that are stepping into it, even global brands that don’t understand live commerce, are missing a massive opportunity for GMV growth that they’re not going to see through brand.com, they’re not necessarily going to see through marketplace.
mean live commerce is still a percentage of total commerce, but from marketplaces, if you look at the likes of Shopee and Lazada, they have big days on 11-11 on Singles Day. But again, they just don’t have the same experience.
Depending on the market, think live is between 15 to 20 % of all e-commerce in the markets in Southeast Asia, each one slightly different. But what we’re starting to see is the emergence of these very scaled specialized businesses, the TikTok shop partners that are going multi-nation. And so there are a couple in Southeast Asia which have scaled tremendously doing.
a couple of hundred thousand hours a year for brands. They’re now moving cross-border and acquiring other businesses. you know, we’re definitely moving fast. We’re still not…
Dominic Powers (42:29.791)
at the GMV levels obviously that China has, but obviously the market size is very different. We don’t have the 1.7 billion people, but they’re still in Southeast Asia, close to 680 million people. So there is scale to come and it’s only going to get bigger. And that’s the thing. And I think the driver for that is going to be just the ease of shopping, the reliability, the quality that TikTok brings versus some of the others. So it’s a great
market to be based. It’s great to see something being exported from Asia into Western markets rather than the other way around from a business idea or an actual offering. And so, who knows, could it get to 30-40 % of all e-commerce by 2030? Yeah, why not? It could be possible. And again, it just depends on the audience and how people evolve and how the marketplaces evolve.
marketplaces that are in place at the moment just don’t evolve with the times enough and they become too difficult to use and discovery becomes difficult. They become too retail media ad driven and it’s not true discovery. So you can have to think about the authenticity of the platform. And I think if you’re a brand, the difference that live brings and TikTok in particular, if you look at some of the metrics that you use to manage your other media spend,
Moritz Schröder (43:40.366)
Mm.
Dominic Powers (43:58.968)
When somebody joins a live stream, you’ve got to remember that’s 100 % brand owned, it’s 100 % above the fold, it’s 100 % leaned in. You don’t have a captive audience like that on any other channel. And when you’re buying attention as brands do, when they’re trying to buy validated three-second clips on YouTube or Instagram,
you have hundreds of thousands of hours that you’re doing on TikTok on live, but you’re not actually thinking about the monetary value, the halo effect beyond the actual GMV that it drives. And I know that some of the UK players are also looking at this. So some of the TSP’s like Go Places and Sam at Go Places are talking about that halo effect and what that can drive for brands. I think.
Live commerce, TikTok, any platform that aids discovery, any platform that has that leaned in audience is going to drive everything that goes on in e-commerce. But I think it will become more than just the ascendant form of e-commerce. It will be the dominant form of e-commerce in the not too distant future.
Moritz Schröder (45:09.483)
Right. And then you do have, as you said, the halo effect that trickles down to all the other channels. You have your Shopify site or whatever you sell on Amazon. So those channels are not going anywhere clearly, but it might be that the actual starting point to interact and engage with a product or a brand might be live shopping rather than scrolling Instagram and seeing an ad or Googling something.
Dominic Powers (45:36.555)
Yeah, I think it’s that interactivity piece as well. And if you think what’s the first thing people normally do when they’re discovering products and they go to Amazon, they go to marketplaces, they look at the reviews because that’s the way they can get a sense of what the product is. But if you’re viewing a live stream, you take that kind of reviewing thing to an immediacy where you can not only ask the host, but you can also communicate with the other viewers. Hey, is anybody
you know, what’s your port? loads of streams that we look at and we analyze, you actually have true purchases that are also being advocates. And I know this was great, know, do wonders for my hair or whatever. And they’re aiding that as well. So I think there’s a very different way that the platforms play out in terms of.
what they do to that customer journey, how they influence it. And I think that’s, one of things that, as a brand, you need to start looking at really, really closely. Where are we getting that stickiness, the engagement, the advocacy as well?
Moritz Schröder (46:40.472)
I think it’s going to be super interesting to see what happens to the industry if there is an even larger influx of large sums of money because large global brands discover this as a main channel for themselves. Because as you said, you kind of don’t want to have the studio quality at the same time if you’re putting a lot of money into it. And you mentioned L’Oreal as one of the prime examples there, they’re building 30 studios in just one country.
So you kind of want to go the direction of putting more professional setups in place, but at the same time, you don’t want it to look too professional. It’s gonna be very interesting to see how that balance then turns out to be.
Dominic Powers (47:23.27)
Yeah, I think that’s a very great observation. You want to professionalize the operations in order to make it scalable, but you still want to make it authentic as a delivery channel. And you want to keep that two-way communication. You want to not become too corporate. But at the same time, you still have to manage all of those aspects of brand safety and compliance that you have to manage with other channels. And so that’s the complexity that’s
be there as it all grows but you it’s great to be in an ecosystem, a world that’s growing and you’re trying to help brands solve those problems so they’re good problems to have.
Moritz Schröder (48:06.636)
You earlier talked about how the first 15 minutes of going live are crucial for engagement, for the algorithm and TikTok shop to pick up on the live stream as something worth promoting. Are there certain metrics that people should focus on in those 15 minutes and afterwards to make sure that they get the audience and the push to their audience as opposed to being buried?
Dominic Powers (48:31.53)
Yeah, I mean that’s a great question and we learnt this through a lot of our own work and research and analysis and so I mean the number one pointer we give to brands when they go live is the moment you’re in front of camera be there engaging. It doesn’t matter if there’s just one viewer you be there you be engaging because there have been some streams for big global brands that we’ve monitored and we’ve seen fail
because the host was there, they were live, there was maybe two, three people viewing, and then, we’re going to wait for some more people to turn up, and then they just had a solid conversation with themselves.
And that means as people do discover your stream, it’s in their feeds, or they see you’re not engaging or doing anything, they just flick away. The bounce rate’s really high. And so that first 15 minutes is what drives it. You have to come out of the gate, be really engaging, you’ll get organic traffic. Because if you don’t get that organic traffic, even if you boost, you’ll get an immediate spike, then the traffic will drop away again. And so…
almost if you haven’t got that engagement in the first 15 minutes, this is where I think a director, a manager of the stream has to make a call. Have we really made a mistake and not done good on this one? Do we think about stopping it and starting again so that we can kind of re-kick the algorithm? Because no matter what, if that 15 minutes fails,
you’re never going to get a amount of views, you’re never getting a strong amount of views because you drop down and you’re punished by the algorithm. it’s something that…
Moritz Schröder (50:09.92)
Can you recover for the next go life? Like you go live the next day, are you back to square one or are you already being punished because you had a bad stream in the past?
Dominic Powers (50:20.373)
So, you know, there’s some things we’ve learned and…
You have like a grace period. When you first start to go live, you’re bucketed in a certain place. And there is a scale that exists in TikTok. We’ve not seen it published, but it’s been spoken to us about that. There’s kind of eight levels to this where streams will end up.
And when you first start out, you end up in the middle stream, in the middle bucket. And then if you start to gain organic traffic and people are sticking, they’ll raise you up to the next one, which means you get more feed through from TikTok itself. But if you’re not getting stickiness, they drop you down to the next one and then the next one. And so you have some time. And it’s again, it’s a question of doing the old fashioned testing, A B splits, running the different streams, seeing what works for you.
seeing what drives the audience. But boosting doesn’t always work and again our data shows that you get massive spikes in views and viewers but you don’t get sustained viewership and therefore sustained GMV per hour. So it’s something that we consult about, it’s something we advise about but ultimately it’s for a brand and their products to see what works for them best in those first minutes.
Moritz Schröder (51:42.153)
That’s so cool that you get to see all that data from your customers and aggregate it and then do some consulting work either officially or unofficially with your clients because you have all that aggregated data. couldn’t totally see how that’s going to be already super valuable now, but only going to increase in value over the time. And as the platform and the industry grows, you’re going to just keep getting more input and more data.
I think it would be fantastic to actually make that accessible to even outsiders at some point and bundle that up in some way and sell that as insights for people who want to take things serious with live shopping.
Dominic Powers (52:21.94)
So to be very clear, our clients that use the platform to go live themselves, their data is their data. They attach the TikTok shop, it’s in a walled garden, that’s their data, it’s not taken. But the public streams that we analyze, that we track for our clients that are just out there in the wild, yeah, that data is growing daily. And yeah, it’s valuable for…
a number of different reasons, whether it’s cultural and understanding the differences of what’s being said, whether it’s linguist, all that kind of information about engagement. we do engage with agencies, brands that want insight reports, that want access to data that we have. And so, that is one of our business lines. And I think it will be a business line that grows and grows as just the volume of lives increases.
Moritz Schröder (52:52.733)
Exactly.
Moritz Schröder (53:16.104)
I know this might be a little bit of a vague question and possibly you’re also biased with the background in SaaS that you have. if I ask you who will be the main beneficiary of this live commerce boom in the next five years, what would you say? Is it the agencies, the live hosts and the affiliates? Is it the SaaS companies like yours? Is it the brands who just keep making more money? Where do you think this will pan out?
Dominic Powers (53:45.021)
So I think there are different layers to a response to that. think number one is going to be the platforms. It’s going to be the likes of TikTok. It’s going to be the likes of They’re the gateway to making this work. But then I think the other layers are, it’s going to drive a real change in the way that agencies are perceived. And what’s clear to us is the big six global networks
Moritz Schröder (53:54.472)
Right.
Dominic Powers (54:14.993)
are not deeply involved in live commerce. don’t know where it sits. Shop sits with the e-commerce team, short video sits with the media team, but nobody really owns live commerce. And so what we’re seeing are the emergence of businesses that are catering for that. So you’ve got the outlandishers of this world, you’ve got the Go places, you’ve got the So-Murses, you’ve got in Asia, the Onpoints, the Criers, and Air Labs. They’re companies that…
the agencies aren’t even aware of, but these are organizations that are doing hundreds of millions of GNV and then taking media dollars away from the big six holding companies because media is being spent on live. So I think there’s going to be a real scale, a real emergence of these kind of companies. But I also then think it’s going to provide
work opportunities for people that want to be in the gig economy. Let’s be honest, it’s not a great place to be economically at the moment out there in the world. All countries are under pressure. Economically, it’s bad in most countries. It’s a tough time. And so I think as an ecosystem, it provides that opportunity for people to dip in, dip out and work. And if you look within China, and this is directionally correct,
But there’s like 60 million people that work in live commerce in China. 60 million people. So if you think about that in terms of the population of some of the European nations, that’s massive. And that’s not just people front of camera, it’s people back of camera, it’s logistics.
But it is something that is a driver of GDP for countries. I think that’s one of the things that we will see just as e-commerce was. I think social commerce is. We’ll see live commerce becoming a driver of economies.
Moritz Schröder (56:10.419)
Yeah, makes me very bullish for the creator economy as a whole because 10 years ago you either had to be an influencer, so you had to have a large number of followers on either Instagram or YouTube or somewhere else. Or you had to rely on ad money mainly through Google, which for most of the people was simply not sustainable to make a living on. And now you have all these other opportunities to be part of the creator economy without having to have
massive following per se. And especially it rewards actual skills, actual hard skills of being able to sell in front of a camera in the way that you have to be engaging, you have to be funny, you have to be a good storyteller, you have to know all the technology and how to handle it and work around it. It takes much more than just taking nice pictures on Instagram. So I for one think that’s a great opportunity for people who want to take this seriously.
Dominic Powers (57:06.257)
Absolutely, couldn’t agree more. Like I said, there’s a pie that’s going to get bigger and there’s lots of room for people to be involved in that from front of camera, back of camera and for the brands to step in and realise the potential that it brings. So yeah, it’s definitely exciting times and let’s get through this silly season at the end of the year and see what it brings.
Moritz Schröder (57:29.759)
Where do you think social commerce and live shopping will be in five years? If we look forward to 2030, what would your hopes and aspirations be for this industry?
Dominic Powers (57:42.801)
So funnily enough, we put out a piece of research back in June this year, which was our vision for 2030. it’s based on all the data points that we see out there in some of our own analysis. But directionally, we think across the markets, excluding China,
We believe live could potentially push, as we said, 25 % of all e-commerce. There’s still going to be a place for marketplaces. There’s still going to be a place for standard e-commerce. But we think live will grow to scale. New markets will come online. There’ll be new industries that are driving it, for example, artisans who are building their own products. think, again, this is just indicative of it. There’s a UK butcher
somebody who obviously sells meat and they have a channel on TikTok in the UK and it’s gone ballistic and they’re literally selling meat so somebody who would normally sell from their shop just like my oil lady in Thailand
getting lots of sales through this way. it’s again it’s that democratization of e-commerce, it’s that democratization of retail that it’s going to bring and I think that will help drive its success and help drive its take of total e-commerce. that was kind of the big thing for us but we also think it’s the market shifts and we know that Africa is going to come online, the Middle East hasn’t come online yet.
TikTok’s massive in the Middle East. There are lots of marketplaces and again the nature of commerce we think it would be great for that. So we’re very bullish. I suppose we have to be because we’re in the space but we’re also realists. I think there are potentially roadblocks for it. It would just take regulation and economic issues like we had in the US with the tariffs to kind of knock stuff back. So we do have to be pragmatic about that view but
Dominic Powers (59:37.893)
we believe there’s a lot of headroom, a lot of room for growth.
Moritz Schröder (59:41.362)
Yeah, and a lot of white space on the maps, as you mentioned. So if all of those large regions would potentially join live shopping and social commerce at some point in the next five years, I can only imagine what that would do to the industry as a whole. Super exciting times. Dominic, where can people reach out to you or learn more about Stickler if they want to work together with you?
Dominic Powers (01:00:03.865)
Just go to www.stickler.live or you can reach me on email at domsticklerlive. And happy to connect, happy to introduce you to the team, depending where you are. But even just happy to talk live commerce. There’s a lot that we can share from Asia and if you’re just starting on your journey, we’re very happy to talk to you about it and help you understand the pitfalls and where best to get started. So thank you for having me. Been a really good conversation, really enjoyed it.
Moritz Schröder (01:00:32.483)
Really nice having you on and thanks for talking to me about LiveConvers. Thanks.
Dominic Powers (01:00:37.167)
Thank you.