Guest Bio:
Ron is an award-winning executive, best-selling author, and fluent Mandarin speaker who bridges the gap between East and West in social commerce and live social selling. He’s launched and scaled more than 150 Western brands in China—including Fender Guitars, Victoria’s Secret, and the NFL—while leading the largest Western-owned eCommerce agency there. Today, Ron is bringing that expertise and playbook to the U.S. with his latest venture: a new social commerce company helping brands and creators sell smarter, drive revenue, and build lasting communities.
Episode Summary:
In this conversation, Ron Wardle shares his extensive experience in the e-commerce and live shopping sectors, particularly in China. He discusses the evolution of live shopping, the importance of community engagement, and the key platforms driving this trend. Ron emphasizes the opportunities for solo entrepreneurs and the skills needed for success in live selling. He also explores the challenges Western brands face in adapting to the Chinese market and offers strategic recommendations for leveraging live shopping effectively. The discussion highlights the potential for live shopping to transform consumer behavior and the importance of building brand equity and community.
Main takeaways:
- Live shopping in China has grown to 33% of e-commerce.
- Engagement is key for smaller creators to succeed.
- Major platforms in China include Taobao, JD.com, and Douyin.
- Western brands need to adapt their strategies for live shopping.
- Building community is essential for long-term success.
- Post-live revenue can account for 80% of total sales.
- Training and skill development are crucial for live streamers.
- Brands should focus on building brand equity before entering China.
- The future of social commerce in the West is promising.
Full Transcript:
Moritz Schröder (00:01.944)
Cool. Ron, you’ve been living in China for about 20 years. What got you to move to China in the first place and what then led you to get interested and involved with live shopping?
RedRhino (00:18.801)
Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate being here as well too. Yeah. So I’ve been on and off in China for well over 20 years, on and off stuff like that. Basically, since 2005, I’ve been located in China up until right before COVID. Then I started to the transition between basically Asia Pacific, which includes Hong Kong, Taiwan, and also US market as well too for the last five years. So initially, I went there basically to start up a web design company.
that was doing websites. I was involved in, I used to work for HP. We used to do a lot of distributor websites, help them do their B2B ordering, stuff like that. So was kind of involved in that area. China at the time was just coming up. There was no e-commerce basically to speak of, even Taobao. eBay was barely kicked off. Taobao and stuff really wasn’t in play there. So we’re just doing a lot of websites. A lot of the companies are wanting to do their dot coms. So we were doing a lot of the website design.
some engineers and also a bunch of designers in China. So we had a small boutique firm that would do not only Chinese but also Western website design at the time. So this is back when we had Flash, if you can remember that back that far. But as long as your website looked pretty and it kind of did a bunch of little funky things, everyone’s really pleased with it. So that’s kind how we got started off on China stuff.
Moritz Schröder (01:33.836)
Hello.
Moritz Schröder (01:43.895)
And what led you to then become interested in live shopping? How did that transition look like for you?
RedRhino (01:50.768)
Yeah, as we started going through this process, I was going back from US and China quite a bit from basically 2005 till maybe 2009 ish, something like that. China was doing a rapid expansion. They just had 2008 Olympics. 2010, they had the World Expo in Shanghai. so there’s each country had their own representative pavilions in there. And so we were working with the USA Pavilion and they wanted to help try to sell some of the different brands and stuff they had in the US.
a pavilion for the World Expo online somehow. So we actually set it up where we help them orchestrate and actually do the operation and, you know, based on the 3PL fulfillment marketing, you know, pictures, everything to get online to help them sell during that World Expo timeframe they had. So that’s kind how we got started working with US brands bringing in China. We thought, hey, this is a pretty good opportunity for us to continue to expand that type of role. So we just can continue to roll that through. And then we actually started
a an agency that only focused on ecommerce bringing us brands into China. And again, this is long before Tmall, which is the the I guess the the grown up child of Taobao, which they have now as well too. So Tmall is a straight B to C, which is the brand to consumer. And you have to have flat what they call flagship stores on there. It’s not just anyone can go sell any brand or that you have to be the authorized seller and also the authorized brand to be on there. So it was a very consumer friendly type
of platform and so we started bringing a lot of US brands in and selling direct to consumer through the Tmall and Tauball platform.
Moritz Schröder (03:29.598)
It’s been a pretty insane development for live shopping in China in the last couple of years, going from pretty much non-existing to what I have read up to 30 % of all e-commerce transaction and volume being generated through live social shopping. What does that feel like when you’re experiencing it firsthand? You’re living in the country, you’re part of that industry, which is e-com.
RedRhino (03:48.164)
Right.
RedRhino (03:58.147)
Right.
Moritz Schröder (03:59.208)
and you see this massive shift in consumer behavior. Can you speak a little bit more about how that came about and how it felt for you as a professional witnessing it? Was it something that was very obvious to you would be a huge thing or was it a surprise to you as well?
RedRhino (04:16.623)
Well, I think initially it was everyone was intrigued with it, right? So basically, you know, we ran operations and brand, you know, e-commerce stuff for about five years. It wasn’t until about 2015, basically 2016 that the live shopping actually kicked off. And that was through Taobao and Tmall aspects, right? With Jack Ma and doing this Austin Li lipstick kind of challenge they had there that really kicked off live shopping from there. So being an operator there where we run basically everything from A to Z, we’re a full service e-commerce agency.
everything from customer service to logistics to you name it marketing, merchandising, live stream centers, everything. So we end up doing all that. Being part of that was actually really initially it was like it was a novelty to have because the platform wasn’t built out very well yet. It was still nice to have. And there wasn’t a lot of consumer adaptivity at that time. However, due to not only the industry, but the government, the brand, you know, the Alibaba and the other major
platforms, put a lot of resourcing behind that. So, you know, they really encourage more and more brands to go live. They provide a ton of incentives with traffic, coupons, rewards, same thing kind of like TikTok shop and stuff is doing other areas as well too. Let’s let’s build consumer behavior by adapting and giving them rewards and stuff to be on there. So as a brand operator there, we were given a lot of different traffic areas, rewards, coupons, different things to help do that. But at the same time, we built out we started with two
live stream centers that we built out for our brands and up to about eight live stream centers that ran seven days a week between eight and 10 hours a day. And so we’re all time on for the live stream port portion of this. So to witness that coming through the you know, the very inception to where we are today, you nine, 10 years later, it’s continued to evolve from that everything, you know, we can get into a little bit more of that. But, you know, we’ve seen the evolution of that from just straight one or two people doing live things and to where we are today.
Moritz Schröder (06:18.714)
You touched upon how things have evolved, certainly, since the very humble beginnings, I would imagine, about 10 years back. Is it still possible nowadays, if you’re a one-man show, you only have your iPhone to then become a live streamer and actually be successful? Or does it take a lot of capital behind it? You have to build a stage, you have to get professionals to be the hosts.
Basically, can you make it as a solo entrepreneur with live shopping still in China or has that ship sailed?
RedRhino (06:51.693)
No, so just a quick tidbit on the data and stuff you mentioned before. So of the overall e-commerce market, 33 % is actually full live stream and over 46 % actually I think it’s close to 55 % of all e-commerce is through social commerce. And just the live aspects is about 33 % right now. So it’s continuing to grow. Yeah, and it’s going to move up to close to 65 % in the next two years as well too. So the West is starting to catch up, right?
Moritz Schröder (07:10.719)
Wow.
Moritz Schröder (07:14.056)
Alison Singh.
RedRhino (07:21.609)
is sitting around 12, 13 % of e-commerce and live itself is only about 6%. So there’s a big gap that’s gonna be, even though the market for overall market size for e-commerce is, know, China’s ahead of the US a little bit, but you can see there’s a huge gap that’s gonna be, need to be filled as well too. So back to your question, well, can someone just come in as a solo entrepreneur and do this as well too? The way that the algorithms are working on the platforms right now, it really doesn’t matter how many followers you have. If you go live and have interaction in,
engagement, you can actually make it quite easy. In fact, the bigger brands, the bigger budgets, a lot of times they don’t have the the engagement levels that some of the smaller creators will have, right? They have a more loyal community following, and they’ll engage with their followers a lot better. Very personable, very engaging, very authentic. And and people are commenting and gifting and all these different things in the platform and just shoot some right at the top of the rankings versus some bigger players, maybe
not have that engagement, may have some good deals and stuff, but their conversion rate may not be as good. So is there an opportunity for you know, solar entrepreneurs? Absolutely. Especially on the West, right? It’s just getting started. And the platforms itself are giving a lot of traffic and a lot of resource into whether you’re a solar entrepreneur or a brand or small medium sized company, the more you go live, the more traffic and resources you’re going to get from the platform.
Moritz Schröder (08:46.698)
So from your experience in how things played out in China, and let’s see if it plays out exactly the same way in the West, that’s yet to be decided, I guess. But there’s definitely room for a lot of niche players. There’s also, I would imagine, significant long tail of creators. So it’s not really that winner takes all and creates all the revenue, because everybody’s tuning into, I guess, the big players as well.
RedRhino (09:16.556)
Mm-hmm.
Moritz Schröder (09:16.745)
But there’s also the smaller ones that then have their really dedicated following and maybe even convert better than the large ones.
RedRhino (09:24.426)
Right. Yeah. mean, some of the larger ones, you know, for example, like an Austin Lee, which is number one live streamer in China. I mean, his show has hit over 100 million people every night. Right. I mean, just think about that as far as demographics and population and popularity and stuff like that. I mean, how many shows go live every night or several times a week to have over 100 million viewers. Right. But you also have to remember the one of reason why China live stream has worked so well. I would say there’s three key things. One is concentration of people on the platform.
There’s basically three major platforms people can be on, right? And you have over billion users. So when you take a billion users and put them on three platforms, there’s a concentration of traffic and you know, people are doing they’re on these apps, doing a host of different things, not only shopping, but they have a whole entertainment on there. So think about it in Netflix to YouTube to the shopping aspect of an Amazon all incorporated in one app. So people are on those different apps for a lot of different reasons. So if they’re on there, they can get notifications that there’s
going on, they’ll tune in for these different things, what not across those. The second thing is they’re on the same time zone, right? As big as China is, they’re all on one time zone versus, for example, the US, you have four different time zones, right? And so you really split your traffic across those different areas. If I’m in New York at 5 p.m., 6 p.m., wanting to do a live stream for, you know, my dinner crowd, well guess what? People on the, you know, West Coast and LA, they’re mid-afternoon, right? They’re not going to tune in at all. So you’re losing a lot of your traffic and you don’t have the concentrated traffic.
on a website versus a platform. So and I think the third thing is the entertainment value that happens. Right. Again, the China doesn’t have all of the distractions we have in Western media, not only from the news state news aspect, but all the different channels or ABCs, NBCs, ESPNs. We have all the professional sports going on. There’s so much distractions going on that people are even though they are online, but they’re not online like they are in China. China has again, I talked about
about if they’re watching a sports or they’re watching movies, they’re using the same app. There’s only about three platforms. There’s a few more than that, but I mean, major platforms, that’s where everyone’s concentrating their traffic on.
Moritz Schröder (11:36.252)
You are just talking about the three platforms that really concentrate the majority of live shopping traffic in China. What are those three platforms and can you speak a little bit more to the differences between them in terms of functionality, but then maybe also in terms of the crowd that they attract?
RedRhino (11:56.555)
attract as well. So yeah, so one is Taobao, which include Tmall. So it’s Taobao, Tmall, all part of the Alibaba group, right? They were the earliest people in that kind of space doing that. So they have the highest concentration of adaptability for consumers to, they’re already used to being on those platforms. And there’s a trust factor on there as well, too, right? The second one is called JD.com, which is an e-commerce platform that started out as an electronics or home goods, you know, could be washing machines and beds.
and furniture and stuff like that. Larger items all in electronic fill. Now they’ve obviously expanded since those categories, but that’s what they were known for. And then also the third player is the TikTok sister app, which is called Doween. Right. So those are your three main platforms. Again, there’s a few other ones on there, you know, that definitely have some trash traction, everything from PDD to Quaishou and a few other things, Red and whatnot. But the three main platforms, I would say those are the main ones. And Taobao and Tmall is basically not only to e-commerce, it’s social commerce.
It’s entertainment all wrapped in one. They have travel, everything all wrapped in one. JD is still e-commerce, social commerce, some live streaming on there. But again, they don’t have all the entertainment factors on there that a typical consumer would have. And the Doe Wean part of this started out as a straight, just like in TikTok, the straight social media, quick video, short video aspect, and then they added e-commerce on later on. So again, your consumers are migrating between different platforms. I would say between the
the Tmall and Taobao stuff and the Douyin, those are where your main consumers are be on those. And one of the other things is that all the platforms have basically frequent shopper points, like frequent flyer miles. So the people have accumulated so much throughout the years on Taobao Tmall, so if they even they see other products on other social sites or different areas, they’ll probably migrate back over to Tmall and Taobao and actually buy that from there just because maybe they have, you know, consumer points they can use off of there as well too, where they have not accumulated those on these other platforms.
even though the price may be very similar or very close to that as well too. So those are kind of the three platforms.
Moritz Schröder (14:03.214)
Here in the West, course, TikTok now is an established name. Everybody’s familiar with TikTok, especially if you’re interested in social commerce and live shopping. Do you foresee other Chinese platforms making a similar move as Douyin did and push into the Western markets and try to establish themselves here?
RedRhino (14:06.442)
Mm-hmm.
RedRhino (14:24.436)
Yeah, I mean, on that aspect, think everyone’s kind of a wait and see approach right now, right? To see what happens with the, you know, talk about the political storm that could or could not happen. So that’s really hard to say. I think the one formidable one that could lay grounds in the West is the Red Note. They’ve already talked about doing some more stuff outside it. So when they had kind of the initial TikTok ban, there was this ever a bunch of TikTok folks all moved over to Red Note, which again, it’s a very small platform in China. It’s made for overseas to
of products and brands and experience is more of an experience website, kind of like the Instagram meets up with Pinterest, right? And they do have some e-commerce functionality in there as well too, but it’s not built out and scalable as the other platforms have been. And it’s again more for discovery phase in travel, restaurants, different experiences, stuff like that. I think if anyone has the second wave coming through there, it could be Red Note. And again, ByteDance themselves, they have a
a host of different apps as well too, like Lemon 8, right, is another one that’s growing very, very quickly in the West as well too, but that’s part of the kind of the same platform as well too. So I think it’s kind of wait and see approach, but there’s definitely, you know, some other, you know, Chinese social media companies or in that space that could definitely make some waves on the West side.
Moritz Schröder (15:47.994)
It was very interesting when TikTok became very close to being banned in January, or actually was down for about 12 hours, I believe in the US. My wife happens to be Chinese and she’s a lot on Red Note or Shaohongshu. And nobody else obviously knew about Red Note until TikTok was banned for a couple of hours. And then suddenly there was this huge influx of Western people into the app. And suddenly it was all over the
RedRhino (15:55.422)
Right.
RedRhino (16:07.07)
Right.
RedRhino (16:17.456)
all over the media, news and stuff like that. It’s shot to, I think it’s shot to number one on the app store, the Apple app store for quite a few days or something like that. Everyone’s downloading it, TikTok refugee or whatever on Red Note stuff. So, but yeah, I mean, you know, you can see that, you know, they, there’s definitely some aspirational and, and again, you know, they have, you know, over 300 million users on Red Note as well too, right? So it’s not a small platform by any means, right? I mean, it’s a major platform, but again, compared to the other top, I’d say the major three, there’s still a bit smaller one. So.
Moritz Schröder (16:17.483)
western social media, everybody was talking about it.
Moritz Schröder (16:26.053)
Exactly.
Moritz Schröder (16:48.481)
I feel like nothing is smaller when you talk about China.
RedRhino (16:51.175)
Now everything’s built for scale there, right? It doesn’t matter what you do from train stations to airports, stuff like that. Everything’s built for scale.
Moritz Schröder (16:59.333)
Exactly, exactly. You were talking about the, I think, largest live social seller, Lipstick King, as he is known in the West, breaking records already a couple of years ago where he sold more than a billion with a B dollars worth of product in like a 12 hour live stream, which is completely insane for anyone to understand here in the West, but seems to be
RedRhino (17:09.97)
Yeah, Austin Lee, yeah.
RedRhino (17:16.614)
Mm-hmm.
RedRhino (17:27.143)
Right.
Moritz Schröder (17:28.289)
more or less common place, at least with the very largest players in China. Can you try to put that into perspective? how, even for a country as large as China, those are insane numbers. How is that even possible? And what does it take to reach those kind of numbers in terms of GMV generation?
RedRhino (17:32.327)
Right?
Mm-hmm.
RedRhino (17:46.632)
Yeah, so something like that. Again, Austin has a very large team around him that not only helps negotiate the different product deals and set up all the backlinks and affiliate links that they have as well too. They filter products, they get pricing. So there’s like months of work ahead of time before they go in to actually doing these major live streams like this, even though it does maybe nightly or something like that. that particular one, the 12 hour one was getting close to the big 11, 11 sales they had there. So they have 30, 40 people on their team
help do all of the production part of this, also the operations and whatnot behind the scenes, right? So to him do this, it’s that, you 12 hours is a long time as well too, right? But for him to actually do that, they have, you know, we weren’t part of that particular segment. We were on another segment. I can tell you just from what we’re doing, most of the brands you have about a five minutes. So think about out of an hour, that’s, you know, you five minutes, how many, you know, you got, you know, a bunch of different brands going in every hour, right? So
you know, you have 12 brands going in per hour, and they’re each generating. we would gent. So one of the one of the things we did is we generated in a five minute segment, close to $300,000 us dollars in sales in, in that timeframe, right. So and some of the brands obviously have a higher average order value, things like that, and some other major brands, maybe some bigger discounts, whatnot. But you can just think about that, you know, perspective wise, how fast they can generate that many sales as well to
Right. So, but that’s not a nightly occurrence. mean, they’ve they’ve sold everything from, you know, rocket ships with one of the other live streamers as well, too, with VIA and all these different things. But yeah, but again, support from the platform, getting traffic, right, making sure that you have that hundred plus million followers, viewers at any one time on there and doesn’t drop behind there. So the conversion rate, the more viewers they have and obviously the more sales and engagement they have. know, I think that one actually got up to close to 180 million viewers.
at some point for that particular one. So when you have that many viewers on there across the country, all different great deals coming through their shopping frenzy. Yeah, was remarkably incredible, you over a billion dollars in sales in GMV is incredible. So.
Moritz Schröder (20:01.697)
What does it take for a live streamer to reach those kind of numbers or get anywhere close to those kind of numbers? Traffic certainly helps. But in terms of like real hard skills that you need to have as a live seller, what do you see converts best in China and what could be replicable to the West?
RedRhino (20:08.006)
Number one, traffic. Gotta have traffic.
RedRhino (20:20.315)
Yeah.
RedRhino (20:27.258)
Well, in China, it’s definitely around the deal structure that they have, right? It’s the whole FOMO thing of, hey, here’s the best deal of the year. And that’s where Austin gets all these deals with his team, right? They come in, why they can sell so well so quickly, because they have all the popular brands and products that come out and he negotiates the best deal of the year or the six month period. So people know when they come out and buy that they’re getting the cheapest price across the board. There’s no more cheaper price. And it’s usually bundled with something else. You’re getting a huge value out of it. So that’s kind of his
magic sauce that a lot of people can’t replicate that. For regular, I mean, there’s a whole industry around live selling, hosting and training. There’s schools upon schools upon schools about training people how to be great live stream hosts. And you’ve probably seen some media stuff, whether it’s YouTube or some of the print static photos stuff that go out. There’s lines of people and in schools and across the day. mean, it’s just like it’s a whole
industry in itself that really hasn’t caught off in the West yet talking about you know the live stream host and can they help convert stuff like that. The West is a little bit more situated around entertainment value and often authenticity versus China’s a lot of it’s just around the deal right. It’s very price sensitive and price driven. I’m not saying the West is like that at all but I’m saying there is more entertainment value. I mean you can just look at what’s happened in the last 30 40 years with our TV shopping and stuff like that. It’s very
entertainment value and they’re trying to bring that online as well too. Now there’s a mix of those as well too but I’ve seen the brands I’ve seen in the West have done the best, have done this entertainment plus the FOMO plus the sales on top of it and they kind of extend the show out and really try to get some really nice user engagement out of it as well too.
Moritz Schröder (22:17.474)
Do you feel like that’s also the way forward to make life shopping even more popular here in the West or do they have to switch up their approach and maybe get even better deals and more or less replicate what is already working very well in China?
RedRhino (22:32.826)
Yeah, on the West side of things, I see that two twofold window. One, you need to go to the major platforms where you can grab some traffic and get a halo effect, whether it’s TikTok shop, Amazon live, could be whatnot, these different ones. If you can get enough traffic and stuff from these different areas to maybe make some sales from there. But the majority of your sales, you’re still going to want your first party data over on your own website or own entities as well, too. And that’s where you really drive a lot of the revenue post live. So I can give you a few examples. So what we used to
to or what we have done in the past to really drive sales. For example, the one I talked about, Austin Lee, generating $300,000 US dollars in five minutes in sales. also got acquired 22,500 new customers during that time as well too. You think about that, it’s incredible. How do you get that many customers? And after we pay all the fees and commissions and our cost of product and all these different things, we basically came out even.
I know some people are like, well, you didn’t make any money doing that. I’m like, well, I just did the opposite. I just got over 20,000 new customers at zero CAC. My customer acquisition cost was zero. Now it’s up to me and my team to actually go nurture those new consumers. So on China is a little bit different than the US. We actually take and put them in groups. There’s obviously an app called WeChat, which is quite popular. So we break them down in different groups and we call them VIP ones and twos and threes. And then we’d actually do live stream on WeChat.
Moritz Schröder (23:42.561)
Mm.
RedRhino (24:03.165)
outside of the normal platform, we’d have products for sale and stuff on there, but we do our live streams on there around education and around retention. So education, we would actually, you know, in this particular beauty tools and skincare and makeup brands, we’d actually teach them how to use their product better, how to engage the life, extend the life of them, how to maintain their stuff. So they don’t have to come back and buy stuff so quickly, right? And, you know, people think, well, that’s kind of counterintuitive. I’m like, no, it’s not because now we’re building a community.
And as we continue to build that community, that 3, 6, 9, 12 months later, we generate over $3 million from sales from that $300,000 initial sales. So think about it, that’s a 10x increment and we didn’t pay anything for those customers. And we generate over $3 million just from that group.
Moritz Schröder (24:42.358)
Hmm.
Moritz Schröder (24:51.841)
Wow, those large numbers.
RedRhino (24:54.091)
Large numbers and they continue to spiral from that. But you don’t do it by once and then never talk to him again. And like six months later, you throw a coupon out of them and say, hey, come by again. They’re not going to buy from you. Right. I mean, it’s just you got to build a community and light. that’s what the good thing about on the West or even China side is around live stream and social shopping is around that social aspect, building community. It’s not a FOMO one time sale. If you can build a community after the sale, the initial live stream will be more around getting attention and getting them in into your
Moritz Schröder (24:59.904)
No.
RedRhino (25:23.958)
ecosystem.
Moritz Schröder (25:26.249)
Is that a common approach that you see with companies doing that get involved with life shopping that they basically use it as a relatively cheap way of acquiring new customers and then they nurture them and they try to extend the revenue that they can generate from those customers? Yeah.
RedRhino (25:44.109)
the lifetime value and stuff. Yeah, honestly, I don’t think very many Western brands have started even at adapting that they’re still struggling figuring out how do I go live first? What’s my economics around it? What’s my ROI? Right? All these different things they would typically take into a marketing spend aspect. The CFOs hate live streaming because most of the time, the initial live stream doesn’t make any money. They’re like, we did it once, we’re done. Right? It doesn’t work. We didn’t get the numbers. We saw Austin Leigh get the billion dollars. So we’re not going to do it anymore. And it’s and they really need to think
Moritz Schröder (26:12.501)
Yeah.
RedRhino (26:14.086)
about it as putting it part of their playbook and part of their marketing stack of using social commerce properly, right? There’s proper ways to do it and proper not ways to do it. And I would say 90 % of the Western brands still haven’t, they’re still trying to figure out their way, how to do for their own particular way, but they’re still far off though.
Moritz Schröder (26:33.247)
It seems like there’s also a lag in the Western world of real big influencers that do live shopping where brands could just come on like you did with Austin Lee and get a five minute time slot, get a 10 minute slot and generate revenue, but then also gain new customers. Instead, it seems like most brands or companies that get involved with live shopping, they want to build out their own stage. They want to have their own customers, their own stream.
RedRhino (26:43.029)
Mm-hmm. Right.
RedRhino (27:00.311)
Mm-hmm.
Moritz Schröder (27:01.69)
And maybe that’s not long-term the way to go. What do you think?
RedRhino (27:06.135)
Yeah, I think you have to look at as a combination or a hybrid method of doing this as well too, right? Yes, the West does not have the Austin Lees or VIAs or Shirley. That’s another one as well too. Again, concentration of traffic on a few different platforms and it’s people already doing that for shopping. In the West, we still haven’t quite got that Amazon, even though it’s the number one shopping e-commerce site, that live aspect and community has not been built out very well. It’s not their main core function. TikTok Shop is building that out, but still lot of brands
are still a little bit wait and see approach. How do we go about doing this? And again, a lot of them, as you mentioned, they love to have their first party data, which I agree with as well too. And they’ve built out their dot com over the last 20 years as well too. Right? Since 2005, six, seven, everyone has their own dot coms, especially if they’re kind of legacy brands, even newer brands, everyone has their own dot com for things as well as their social media. And they use social media to help drive traffic, you know, sometimes to their own website where they own that customer data. Right. But enabling customer or sorry,
commercial live streaming on their own website. Still, a lot of people haven’t had very good success. There’s some smaller brands that have done actually really well at this. But again, they’re a little bit smaller. They’re scrappy. They go live all the time. They’re highly engaging with their users, right? They’re not just a one and done. Here’s my one pitch. Here’s my product. Here’s my discount and move on. It’s always on infrastructure, always on community building. And that’s how they do very, very well, even though they’re maybe not, you know, they’re not your major brands, but they’re medium sized brands that do
very very well just doing live streaming on their own websites.
Moritz Schröder (28:40.188)
It’s interesting that you have these third party tools available here in the West and I assume also in China, but maybe less popular. I live in Stockholm. I live in Stockholm and we have a company called Bamboozler here. You probably are familiar with them and they do exactly that. They provide third party software to then do live streams on your website. Interesting concept. I wonder if you can actually get enough customer.
RedRhino (28:48.192)
Less in China for sure, yeah.
RedRhino (28:53.952)
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Moritz Schröder (29:07.369)
to tune in on a regular basis to make it worth the investment on a monthly basis and also in terms of staffing, in terms of equipment, et cetera, that is necessary to pull something like that off.
RedRhino (29:17.826)
Exactly. And that’s the whole thing around it. You have to put that and make the investment into your marketing stack to actually make it work and then actually work that whole ecosystem to actually, you know, make those customer engagement activities you have to do, but also provide value for the community. Right. If you’re not willing to spend time and build a community, not just an email list on like a lot of brands, like, I have my email list. I blast out every once in a while, whatever. If you’re not willing to fully engage them on video with everyone else kind of being, and you can do, you know, it doesn’t have to be, you know, straight live stream for everything. It doesn’t have to be selling.
all the time. Again, three of the different live streams we had, one was totally live stream, right? mean, live stream selling, it was a hard sell, everything, blah, blah, The other two were very soft sales. We were around education and around retention, helping them understand, answering questions, right? Building that community. And the later two actually drove a lot more revenue over a period of time, obviously than the initial one did. So if you take a three tier approach to this, brands do. And there’s definitely some brands in Europe doing, whether they’re using Bamboozer or Esprit or Live Me Up.
There’s a bunch of different third party platforms and stuff that are offering these type of SaaS plugins and stuff over the top of your website. If you do it properly and consistently and adapt that into your marketing stack, you can actually do quite well, but you have to be willing to put in the work. And again, what I’ve seen on the Western market is there’s not a lot of capability and skill set around this yet, it’s growing. And a lot of people are getting training, real time training from like TikTok Shop or Amazon Live.
Those guys are the ones that eventually are going to start rising to the top. But I really don’t see you’re going to have an Austin Lee type of personality come out of this. There definitely could be, but it’d have to be almost manufactured from one of the platforms itself to actually push them and get enough traffic consistently that people want to buy from them.
Moritz Schröder (31:11.09)
Yeah, it’s an interesting point that I actually hadn’t considered before you mentioned it with the different time zones. That is a problem here in the West and a problem that Chinese as a market or China as a market doesn’t face, luckily for them. So you’re able to build these massive audiences besides language that is universal there compared to like English being strong, obviously in North America. But then if you want to include the European audience, you have a huge drop off.
RedRhino (31:17.397)
Yeah.
RedRhino (31:35.871)
Right.
Moritz Schröder (31:39.874)
which, yeah, with, the, the time difference, you really have a problem when it’s about live content. I mean, you have podcasts like Joe Rogan that reach a massive audience, but that’s only possible because he can record it. And then I can listen to it the next day if I want to. if he would do everything only live, then it would probably not be as successful at all.
RedRhino (31:47.713)
Right.
RedRhino (31:57.31)
Yeah, exactly.
RedRhino (32:03.22)
Well, one of the interesting data points from the Western market that I’ve seen during the last few years is that after a live is done,
For the 30 day period, 80 % of the total revenue during a 30 day period came from after the live, 80%. Those are from cut down. So if you have an hour show, 20 % of your revenue over 30, during that 30 day period that you would generate would come from the actual live. And 80 % came from the cut downs that you would, you you do the cut down from the different segments and repost those on social media, driving traffic back to your own website and things like that. So you’re getting the huge uptake from that. And a lot of brands really aren’t really taking advantage of that very
The brands I’ve helped in US market, they’ve seen tremendous value and tremendous revenue and average order value actually goes up versus the actual life, right? Because they see that they got that deal still going on for a certain amount of time and they’ll add one or two other products on there as a bundle as well too. And so average order value goes up and they didn’t have to spend hardly any extra money for that as well too. So.
Moritz Schröder (33:04.401)
So is that part of the number that is considered life commerce or social commerce revenue or is that in a different bucket?
RedRhino (33:12.576)
you
Yeah, don’t know. I yeah, I think it depends on if you’re using it for a market segment versus just a brand itself. How do they go about looking at this? I work with, you CFOs and CMOs on this as well too, helping them understand over a two week period, three, four week period. Cause you could, those are all trackable. Once you have those from the live stream, you cut those out, you put them into your links and you can track those for 30 days, right? If you want it live for 30 days. Sometimes you still want that same deal, only good for seven days or good for 10 days. You can track that very, very easily. It’s all a treatable.
for that. if you do that properly, and this is something that doesn’t happen in China, you don’t have that. It’s live by now or it doesn’t go on. So that’s where you get that real FOMO from as well too.
Moritz Schröder (33:54.49)
You talked about the ecosystem that has been developing around live shopping in China with tutors, with courses, with trainers that help you become better at it. Is this a viable career option for people in China nowadays, especially young people, or is it still something that is looked down upon a little bit?
RedRhino (34:17.136)
Yeah, I think it’s definitely viable. It’s not I mean just because it’s so mainstream these days And the competition level is very very fierce right again
when you’re only on, let’s say three different platforms and you’re fighting for traffic from everybody else, it’s hard to build, unless you have your own following like on Red, you have your own following and personal WeChat groups and part of these different areas, you can definitely drive some traffic from them. And that’s why you see a lot of like these smaller brands they bring out themselves. We used to work with a couple of different KOLs, Key Opinion Leaders, which the influencers, they would actually, because of the supply chain, they would actually create their own labels, fashion labels,
very very quickly with some of these China manufacturers and not only help sell other brands but they sell their own brand as well too so they have more margin through it so they don’t have to rely on some of these other brand deals and some of the brand deals are really hard to get as well too unless you can drive some enough traffic for it. So I think it’s definitely a viable industry. What’s really changed since COVID or during COVID is a lot of the brands themselves would enlist their own staff as the live streamer right so you’ve seen a
a lot of these live streamers, whether it’s makeup counters, fashion boutiques, they came up out of their own from these different brands, and they’re helping build these brands and stuff from inside the company, right? And that’s where you’re getting a lot. is it, can you be a live streamer and be independent? Yes, but a lot of the brands are actually looking for live streamers to come work in their own company to do this. So there’s, think there’s a huge opportunities, but again, you’re have to be well trained, you have to be able to convert, you’re gonna have to do all these different things like a normal sales or host would have to be doing on the outside.
Moritz Schröder (35:47.386)
Hmm.
RedRhino (35:56.96)
versus internally in some of these brands. But I think it’s definitely, if you’re good, you’re gonna be good, right? So.
Moritz Schröder (36:04.185)
Right. That’s something that you foresee for the Western world as well, where you have this whole ecosystem developing around live shopping and social commerce with ways of learning it, with people tutoring other people, basically creating this infrastructure that probably at some level is necessary to really rise to the top of this emerging industry.
RedRhino (36:31.071)
Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen that already. There’s been some, you know, some previous like home shopping network or type of hosts that have been doing that for 15, 20 years. They’re actually doing a lot of their own life selling schools, teaching people how to go about going live. I think one of the, know, which is great, it’s helping educate that into a new medium. But again, the TV shopping versus the, you know, the internet shopping is definitely a little bit different. So there’s a little bit different skill set. But I think people are adapting very, very quickly to this as well, too. Right. But then
teaching them not just how to go live but creating that whole ecosystem and training modules with them and then doing the follow-up and being able to create groups of individuals with creators and different influencers to help them educate them and also be able to help them drive revenue for brands because what’s happened so far in Western side of things is creators have been really reliant on brand deals and Brown sponsorships, but brands are starting to smarten up a little bit. They’re like, hey we need
some actual attribution out of this, right? So we need some real sales because they’ve seen the power of what affiliates do on TikTok shop. And that really drives all that. And they’re like, hey, you know, we can pay you a little bit compared to last time, but you got to drive some sales to us, right? And so you’re going to see a lot more of that coming. So there’s going to be a lot more of these type of deal structures that need to come through as well, too. So again,
Moritz Schröder (37:33.808)
Mm.
RedRhino (37:55.838)
as more and more creators get into this space, which a lot more are, not a lot of them are, I think the last data point I saw is I think like 40 %
of creators right now in the US market earn less than 15,000 US dollars per year, which is if they’re full time, that’s one thing, right? If they’re part time, it’s actually not too bad. It’s a great supplement for all these people as well. If you’re full time, it doesn’t work. And the brand deals are going to get less and less because a lot more creators are jumping on. But again, with the algorithms on the, for example, TikTok, you can have a few thousand followers or a few hundred followers and actually do very, very well on there if you have the right connectivity with your audience that comes in and they continue to push you out through
Moritz Schröder (38:17.924)
Yeah.
RedRhino (38:38.503)
algorithms, you could actually sell a ton of product very, fast.
Moritz Schröder (38:43.226)
I think it could also be good for the industry that nowadays more more it’s important to have some real hard skills. For example, being able to sell and actually convert versus 10 years ago where you could be an Instagram influencer. You have 2 million followers just by looking pretty in a bikini basically. And then you’re able to post and make money off of that, but it might not convert at all for the brand. being able to.
RedRhino (39:03.111)
Right.
RedRhino (39:08.7)
Ha ha ha.
Moritz Schröder (39:11.405)
have some skills that you have in your toolbox and then being able to also make really good money if you’re really good, I think in the long run could be very good for the industry.
RedRhino (39:22.289)
Yeah, absolutely. And mentioned as well, too, I was working with a Western brand and SaaS company that was the plug in for their website. And this is a major brand as well, too. This is early right after covid and they were trying to do live streaming on their own website. They actually hired a very influential influencer, had millions and millions and millions of followers on Instagram. They put her on live on their live stream and barely sold anything. Right. She was
I watched it and I was like, she’s a terrible salesperson, but she’s great on Instagram, right? Cause it’s just static photos, stuff like that. Millions and millions of followers. The audience just couldn’t connect with her. think they ran that. They didn’t do cut downs at the time and stuff like that, like they’re doing now, but just during that live stream, they drove hardly any revenue and the brand did it one time. They’re like, it didn’t work. Right. And I had to almost like say, Hey guys, this is actually what you should be doing is XYZ. Right.
Moritz Schröder (39:56.35)
Yeah.
RedRhino (40:22.078)
But at the of the day, brands will continue to invest in this and experiment, which I think is good. But they just need to get their playbook done properly.
Moritz Schröder (40:31.831)
Yeah. If you had to give out like a one minute playbook to Western brands right now, what would you say for brands that have never done any live shopping event? They’re completely new to this, but they heard about it. They are experimental and they want to try it out. What should their checklist look like to actually be successful with live shopping?
RedRhino (40:56.784)
Yeah, what I tell them to do first before jumping into the full life straight life shopping aspect of things. I tell them just go live on Facebook, Instagram and any other social platforms they are and just start building a community from there. Right. And start building it up and get used to be in front of the camera and talking, answering questions, engaging. Don’t try to be selling anything. You can say, hey, we have these things over at our website. Please come over. Here’s a link, something like that before you jump in too far. Because what happens is people overthink about going live. They want to
get everything 100 % correct. They want all the lighting, the staging, we got to have all these things done. And then you have to think about the host and the, you know, the cost to do this. A lot of times, again, the Western brands I’ve worked with within 30 days, if it’s not successful, they basically pull the plug on it, right? So because they think, oh, it’s not ROI positive, which if they actually did it properly, it would be so number one, I just go live and get as much experience you can for 30 days and get feedback, ask the customers, hey, if we got, have
life shopping will just be interested for you, right? And start building that up as well too. And there’s some other platforms they can go on for very inexpensive, right? Whether they can go to like, you know, I know for collectibles and stuff like that, they have whatnot. They can also go Amazon live if they have an Amazon shop. TikTok shop is probably a little bit more…
challenging for a lot of folks if you’re not useful, if you’re not used to their setup and operations aspect. A lot of times you need to have an operator help you do some of this, even though you can do it by yourself. But if you need probably need an agency, which may or may not be within their budget initially as well, too. But I just go live and do that as first start getting some feedback. And then once you get there and say, yes, we’re going to continue to do this, then think about your strategy. Right. Is it a tick tock? Is it tick tock shop? Is it a whatnot? Is an Amazon live to do that?
Moritz Schröder (42:27.0)
Mm.
RedRhino (42:47.457)
do also do that and sync that with our own live stream shopping on our own website. And then what do do from there, right? So if you’re on Shopify, there’s a lot of great plugins, very cost effective for them to do as well, too. But again, you got to have skill set around it. You got to be able to go live enough. You got to build your traffic. And that’s a lot of things if they go on their own website is they’re not getting enough traffic. And that’s why social media platforms to just to go live on them will help them encourage them, but also give them confidence that this could actually
work.
Moritz Schröder (43:19.67)
It’s interesting that in the past, Facebook and Instagram both had live shopping functionality and then Mark Zuckerberg actually pulled the plug on it a couple of years back. Do you think that that was a setback to live shopping in the West and its development? And do you think he’s gonna change his mind again and come back into it as well as maybe YouTube shopping? I mean, there are platforms that would be
RedRhino (43:29.283)
Right.
RedRhino (43:40.526)
Ha ha.
RedRhino (43:44.313)
Right.
Moritz Schröder (43:46.647)
very well positioned to get a huge audience for live shopping if they choose so. But so far it seems like they pretty much leave it to TikTok.
RedRhino (43:51.97)
Right.
RedRhino (43:56.89)
Yeah, I think a lot of the Western platforms, whether it’s Facebook, you know, Instagram, YouTube on this space as well, too. I think they’ve not really jumped into this. And I have my own theory around it. And I’ll just share with you. Number one, I don’t think they want to be the merchant of record for all the sales. Right. Because now you have to deal with everything from customer service. You got chargebacks. You got shipping and logistics. That’s not their bread and butter. Their bread and butter is selling air, which is advertisement. Right. Doesn’t cost them anything. They don’t have to
ship anything, there’s no returns, there’s no charge backs, all these different things. to me, it’s like they don’t want to be that merchant record where their name is on there, where they’re shopping. And again, all logistical and customer service issues that potentially could rise, which they’re not set up, their companies aren’t set up for that right now. So they’d have to build a huge investment for this as well too. TikTok Shop has been able to do that because they, know, again, doing on the US or the China side was not an e-commerce platform at all initially either, right?
They built those capabilities up over several years and then they can transfer that knowledge and know-how into the US market. So it’s still part of an ecosystem. Neither one of these big US social media companies have even done this yet. They’ve maybe tried at different aspects but again their ecosystem and their infrastructure is not set up for it. Not that they can’t do it and won’t do it. I say they will at some point. It’s just when is the timing right for them to actually turn the switch on to do this.
Moritz Schröder (45:23.35)
Yeah, and it seems like also those big companies right now in the US are pretty much occupied with AI and winning the race there. That’s where all the money and all the resources go.
RedRhino (45:30.711)
AI.
and
Yeah, and if you look at even what TikTok shop does on US market versus their global, you know, revenue, it’s still really small, right? Even though like, yes, it’s social commerce and life and shopping. That’s why Amazon, even Amazon, even though they’ve they’ve put some effort into it, it’s still such a small part of their business. They’re like, they, you know, they’d rather focus and extract as much revenue they can out of the other other other areas that they don’t have to put any more CapEx investment into. And I think, you know, everything from, you know, from Meta to YouTube is in that space as well, too.
They’re like, hey, we’re making money through AI, we’re making it through advertising, yada, yada, yada. Why do we want to go put a whole other infrastructure in place right now? I think at some point they will to some degree or partner with somebody already has it. More likely acquire somebody already has that set they can just dump into. But again, it’s going to take time to do the acquisition, but also integrate that into the whole aspect.
Moritz Schröder (46:32.566)
Yeah, it seems like a lot of those large tech companies go the Shopify route where they partner up with Shopify that obviously has more experience and more focus on e-commerce. Do you think though that that’s a viable strategy long-term? Because I think one of the benefits that TikTok Shop has is that it’s such a closed ecosystem, right? Everything is…
RedRhino (46:39.358)
Mm-hmm. Right.
RedRhino (46:52.024)
Yeah.
Moritz Schröder (46:54.934)
It’s a lot of work to do fulfillment, to do customer service, to do payments, all of that. But once you have it all in place, it’s a beautiful thing, right? That you don’t have to leave the app, you don’t do the redirect, you don’t lose any traffic. Conversion is through the roof compared to what Facebook is able to do. Exactly. So do you think that it makes sense to partner with a partner like Shopify for those large platforms? Or should they eventually build out their own capabilities to not
RedRhino (47:04.929)
Right.
RedRhino (47:09.72)
That’s why their conversion is so good there, right?
Moritz Schröder (47:24.399)
lose against a TikTok.
RedRhino (47:26.796)
Yeah, so even TikTok allows Shopify stores to integrate their own shop in there as well, too, right? So they can do both either fulfilled by TikTok shops or they can fill themselves because they their own dot com. So I think there will probably be an option for like that as well, too, because again, I to my point of view is a lot of brands haven’t migrated to those other third party platforms because number one, they still want the first party data. They want to control what happens, especially with shipping, logistics, customer service. They want to be able to service their customers.
even though they can acquire new customers from different channels. They still want to do that. And, you know, working with a platform, just shipping stuff to people. You know, I buy stuff off Amazon. You know, I deal with Amazon. I don’t have to go back to the brand. But if I go back to the brand, they’re like, where’d you get it from? I’m like, I got it from Amazon. They’re like, well, you know, talk to them, right? It’s like, what are you going to do? Same type of thing. So again, I think eventually that some of the larger platforms will eventually jump in. I don’t know if it’s a Shopify, you know, they’ll definitely have a Shopify integrations because so many people
are on that where there’s Salesforce integration to allow people to have to still their own aspect there, but they also have a YouTube shop potentially that could do that same thing.
Moritz Schröder (48:36.949)
Generally speaking, if we look a little bit into the future, how do you see social commerce evolve in the West in the next three to five years?
RedRhino (48:46.741)
That’s a great crystal ball to have.
Moritz Schröder (48:49.322)
Hahaha!
RedRhino (48:50.101)
Right. If we could actually do that. Yeah, I think, you know, basically very similar to what we’ve just talked about. I think at some point some of these other larger platforms are going to integrate more of the actual full ecosystem, seamless checkout within that. Also allowing them to have a third party, whether it’s a Salesforce or a Shopify or a big commerce type of, you know, integration as well, too. I think you’re going to see that at some point. I know YouTube is experimenting and they talk about social commerce in Asia. They’re actually working with shop.
Right, which is the third party marketplace as well too. It’s like a you know, shop is I would say like an eBay or an Amazon type stuff in Southeast Asia, right? So they’re doing basically hot links into shoppy and let people do that. That’s what they call social commerce right now to allow that I know that on the US side they’re allowing different links and products you can place on there. But again, it redirects you to whatever XYZ website or landing page that needs to go to for a checkout. So it’s still not seamless.
And again, I’m not 100 % sure, but some of these big public companies, they don’t wanna be the merchant of record. TikTok is still private, right? So they’re probably like, it’s okay, we can do this XYZ. But with YouTube, Meta stuff, again, I don’t know if they would just wanna be that merchant of record and take care of all the aspects of that.
Moritz Schröder (50:13.396)
Do you think that ByteDance is going to capitalize on that and just completely dominate when it comes to social selling in the West?
RedRhino (50:22.707)
So far that they have been right there just killing it compared to everybody else. No one’s even close to them. All right, and there’s there’s nothing really stopping them other than the fact that you know, they kind of get in their own way to some degree when I say that it means, you know, their confidence level for brands to come on the platform and brand protection, IP protection, stuff like that, especially, you know, they still want to get some, you know, strikes against their some of their brands, which happens because some of the affiliates will say XYZ against one brand, you know,
especially cosmetics, health products, there’s a lot of claims people make and that gets strikes against your brand on the platform as well too. So I think a lot of these brands are like, we’ll kind of wait and see. We’re happy to experiment. We’re happy to march it. We get, know, and I know everyone talks about, hey, you get this nice halo effect, sends you over to Amazon. But again, you go from one 30 third party over to another third party. If you’re the brand, yes, I’m getting sales, but who are my people buying? I have no idea. Right. And I can never build that community the way that properly it should be done through social commerce. So I think there’s
there’s going to be, there’s a nice hybrid method that needs to happen here for any of the brands to think about selling on the platforms.
Moritz Schröder (51:30.755)
If you were the CEO or CMO of a Western company right now and you had all your experience in live shopping and social commerce and what has happened in China in the last decade in the space, what would your strategy be like for the next five years here in the West to really capitalize on this building wave of social commerce?
RedRhino (51:53.29)
Yeah, I would even break that down even to like the next two years what I’d be doing, right? Versus five. Fives is a lot of stuff’s gonna be changed and we have a lot of moving parts. I say next two years, number one, get on the major platforms and go live as much as you can. You can open a shop on that. If you’re using an e-commerce partner right now, then go ahead and use them and make sure you’re adapting that. But also that could be a small portion. And a lot of the brands get something I think is completely wrong is the platforms like TikTok Shop doesn’t reward you for putting your whole SKU and whole portfolio
on the TikTok shop. It’s basically the China model, right? You have two different segments to go on to your shop. One is a hero product that’s going to drive all your sales and live streams, everything like that. Another one’s going to be your bundle, right? That’s going to be your value add and that could be two or three more products, whatever that is. Those are the two things you sell. You don’t sell anything else. Those are only things you sell there, right? And you build that up and it’ll help create that halo effect. You’ll get some customer, you know, obviously, sales and people figure out, this is really great.
Where can I get this again? Let me come trying to find you and start building that up from there. the second, second of the three things I would do is actually go live on my own website. I would have a set schedule, whether it’s once a week, twice a week, whatever it is, publish that and do that every single week and engage the community. It’s not going to be a salesy thing every time, maybe one out of four times that we’re going to advertise it. For example, if it’s a skincare or fashion company, I go in there and say that our designers come in here, we have five pieces we’re going to go through and why, what kind of fabric?
we use, right? Why we do this? What is this good for? How do you wear this? What this pairs with? Yada yada yada on your live stream, right? If you have a retail location, I would set up a retail live stream in my retail location that again, that would go live at a certain amount of certain set time every day, or every time period, it’s once a week or whatever it is, but make sure that’s published everywhere and you actually do it, right? You may not have very many followers or viewers at the time, it doesn’t matter because when you finish that you’re going
break it down and you’re gonna send all that stuff back out from the cut down right and do the thing so if you go once a week that’s what you do it’s just part of your playbook and you’ll eventually over three six nine months you’re gonna build a huge following and a huge community from this as well too.
Moritz Schröder (54:07.683)
Right. So you basically use live shopping, not only as a sales tool in the moment, but also as a way to create brand awareness, but then also to create content that you can distribute across your following.
RedRhino (54:19.861)
Right. And I think number one thing is to build community out of it. Right. Because you need to build that engagement. You need to build that trust and authenticity that you’re going to showcase with whoever’s coming to view your stuff. Right. So and you invite different guests in from your company. Right. Or other other consumers that have customers have bought your stuff. Get them in because a lot of the live stream software now you can actually invite multi-host type stuff. Get two or three of the customers come on and talk about why they buy from you and what they liked about the show. And it’s like let them be a part time host as well too. Right. So
Moritz Schröder (54:23.28)
Hmm.
RedRhino (54:49.814)
you can do that as well to let them co-host with you. So I think there’s a lot of ways to do this, but it has to be part of the playbook. And it’s not just like, okay, we’re gonna do this for, you again, 30 days and see how it works. If you don’t try it for a full year, then, you know, it’s probably not gonna work for you. it’s like anything, right? Anything new that’s coming out. Consumers are not quite adapted to doing this yet. It’s still kind of novel approach. But if you do this, you’re gonna get the novelty aspect of things, especially going live in your store. And if you have a set schedule,
That goes live once a week or twice a week. You’re gonna have great great sales. I can give you one example There’s a customer or a brand in Japan. It’s a small designer boutiquey type of fashion brand They go live every night seven nights a week seven days a week 8 p.m About 20 30 minutes
Moritz Schröder (55:37.659)
Mm-hmm.
RedRhino (55:40.328)
They come on, it’s basically the same show every night. They have their staff come on there and they have different hosts, which is their own staff come on there. They say, hey, welcome to our show. And they hold up a physical card. And this is the reveal of the coupon code for the night, right? They have it.
Moritz Schröder (55:57.905)
right.
RedRhino (55:59.349)
Okay, we have our, you know, they don’t wait for like, you know, however many people they come on there. The first minute they’re like, Hey, welcome. This is my, this is my name. If you guys don’t know who are, this is our show. We have here’s five pieces we’re gonna show tonight. And they hold the physical card up. Okay, here’s our big reveal. What three, you know, five, four, three, two, one, they flip it around, they have it on there. So it’s not pinned to the screens like digital stuff. It’s physical people look at it like, okay, got it. And then they put that down on the side, you can always see it in the background for that. Then the second thing they do, they have an iPad.
Moritz Schröder (56:13.221)
Mark.
RedRhino (56:29.618)
and they show people this is how you check out. This is how you add products to here. This is how you do it. And they do about 30 second to 45 second intro of how to use their website and how to add stuff to cart and how to check out.
From that, then the other staff and stuff will come up and they’ll introduce themselves. If they don’t know who they are, this is what I do. This is my position. You do this every night and they go through maybe two or three different pieces that they’re going to showcase that night. And whoever the model comes out doing this, they come out and they tell them what their size is, how tall they are. They actually say how much they weigh as well to what size they’re wearing, stuff like that. If it’s shoe size, what they’re wearing and they model that stuff. But they let people know of their sizing and dimensions as well, So
I think it’s very, and it’s very, and they have about 10 stores, and they told me about 30 % of all their revenue comes from the livestream, from their 10 stores.
Moritz Schröder (57:22.988)
Wow. That’s huge.
RedRhino (57:24.116)
because it’s a night, it’s huge, right? For 10 retail locations and they change the live stream locations between the stores as well too. So from different times, right? They have their main one they do like their flagship store, but they have other ones and they go around and do that as well too, right? Hey, we’re in XYZ location tonight, blah, blah, blah. And they have people actually show up to their live streams watching at their store. Yeah, so they have tea and stuff, so.
Moritz Schröder (57:33.488)
I like that. Nice.
Moritz Schröder (57:47.436)
Nice. Yeah, I think that’s actually a very underutilized aspect of social shopping and live shopping where in the West we still think about it pretty much only transactional. We’re thinking about, okay, what’s the ROI on that? How long does it take until I break even with this investment, et cetera? Whereas I think, as you just pointed out, it should be considered a very long-term strategy.
RedRhino (57:55.315)
Yeah.
Moritz Schröder (58:12.624)
And then also you can get so many more things out of it than just purely transactional, right? Like you can increase the engagement, you can increase the community building, you can increase the engagement of your own employees by letting them host it. You can involve storytelling, all of that.
RedRhino (58:18.608)
Right, absolutely.
RedRhino (58:28.178)
host as well too, right? They build their skill set. Exactly, yeah, 100%, yeah. So I thought that was for a smaller brand, and I’ve seen them grow. They had five stores when I first started talking with them and working with them a little bit. And again, they’re up to 10 stores now over the last couple of years. And it seems to be working very, very well with them. I think it’s a great, every time, I don’t speak Japanese myself, but working with them on different aspects of their strategy, I think they’re doing a fantastic job.
Moritz Schröder (58:58.349)
What do you think brands from the West that want to enter the Chinese market should be doing? Do they need to have an agency that helps them navigate this quite complex ecosystem or is there a way they can pull this off themselves?
RedRhino (59:13.907)
Unless they have some capability that knows the China market very in depth, they’re going to need to engage an agency or some type of company to help them navigate and actually connect with Chinese consumers. One of the key things that enter in the Chinese market is you need to start doing your pre-marketing ahead of time, build your brand equity long before you even enter the market. A lot of brands think, okay, I’m going to go to China, let me open up all these things, and then I’ll start talking to consumers.
By the time you do that, you’re six, nine, 12 months into this and they still don’t know who you are. There’s no brand demand, right? And they’re still trying to figure out if you’re a trustworthy brand or not, right? Especially being a foreigner, you guys could leave in a heartbeat, right? So the way to do it properly is actually start doing the seeding and brand building and brand equity acquisition for that during probably six to nine, 12 months period before you even launch in there. But definitely you’re going to have to have some local players or an agency that really knows the market.
very well, that’s going to help navigate this for you. Otherwise, it’s very, very too complicated. There’s no Facebook and YouTube and all the stuff there, right? Again, I mentioned those different platforms and you have to be really intense and very in-depth and knowledgeable of those platforms. Otherwise, it’s really hard to work.
Moritz Schröder (01:00:33.783)
Right, so this is a necessary skill set to have and it makes sense to hire someone who knows this platform world in depth and then probably also has connections to the right live streamers, to the right key opinion influencers. being able to utilize that network that certain people provide makes a lot of sense if you’re a brand that tries to push into the Chinese market.
RedRhino (01:00:48.464)
Right.
key opinion leaders and stuff like that as well too.
RedRhino (01:01:02.674)
Yeah, there’s basically two different things you need. You’re going to need an e-commerce operator, which they refer to as a Taobao partner or a TP, a trade partner that will manage every aspect on the platform itself. But then you’re also probably going to need, if they don’t offer that, you’re still going to need an influencer or a KOL company to help drive these sales and engagement outside the platform because they are wall platforms. You need to be to navigate those different areas. A lot of the companies offer both services as well too, or all under
one roof, they can do that as well too. I typically like to do all under one roof. And the reason for that is because now everyone all their KPIs are aligned. And sometimes we work with brands that come in, they had their own PR or social agency, their KPIs are not aligned with our sales goals. And when everything is connected through social commerce, 55 % of all e-commerce transactions through social commerce and 33 % through live,
external social agencies need to be well connected to the ecosystem as well too. Not just trying to get me a bunch of vanity likes and retweets and stuff like that. It doesn’t drive enough sales for us.
Moritz Schröder (01:02:15.533)
Yeah, yeah, I could see that. Ron, I really appreciate you taking the time. It was a really good conversation and great to speak with someone that is as knowledgeable and exposed to what is happening in China because the rest of the world is looking at it, sometimes not really understanding everything that is going on in China. But we all realize that this is
RedRhino (01:02:21.774)
Absolutely.
RedRhino (01:02:33.563)
Right.
Moritz Schröder (01:02:40.494)
at least in terms of social commerce and live shopping where the future is being developed right now. So it’s really exciting to speak to someone like you. Where should people go and check out what you have published, what you’re posting? Where do you want to direct people?
RedRhino (01:02:46.64)
Right.
RedRhino (01:02:55.887)
Yeah, I think probably.
Yeah, I think the easiest way just go to LinkedIn, right? Just my name Ron Wardle. Pretty easy to find in there. I just put everything from social commerce, live shopping, you know, leader. That’s kind of what I’ve set myself apart with right now, even though I have a ton of experience on lot of different areas. Social commerce is not only the now, but it is the future. And so trying to educate a lot more people, not only because people talk about what happens in China, how do we translate in the West? And there’s ways to do that. So the last, you know, probably four or five years, I’ve been working mostly on the U.S. market, really helping
you know, identify how to do properly, set up the proper playbooks, testing, you know, vigorously of how to do this properly. Again, with all the different aspects that are different from China, there’s a lot that are exactly the same, but how do you go about putting that into the right strategy? So that’s kind of what I’ve been working on for the last little while. But yeah, good LinkedIn, you can find me there. I’m happy to engage, so.
Moritz Schröder (01:03:47.488)
Awesome. Ron, thanks so much for the time.
RedRhino (01:03:50.092)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.