Tech
Facebook invents QVC with new ‘Live Shopping’ feature
With live demos and the ability to buy products without ever leaving the Facebook app.
Beginning this week, Facebook is opening up a live shopping channel every Friday through July 16, featuring beauty and fashion brands available in real-time to answer your most pressing pre-purchase questions. Facebook is promising an experience that will be useful for customers and brands alike.
“What if you could see this season’s latest trends modeled in real time, ask questions about how they fit, select your size, and buy, all from the comfort of your home?” Facebook asks in its announcement.
Each Friday from now through mid-July, various brands will be featured in these Live Shopping streams, which will be available for viewing through the main Facebook app. The streams’ theme will rotate each week between three categories: Glow Up, New Fashion Finds, and Self Care Spotlight. They’ll stream twice each Friday, first at noon PT and then again at 3:00 p.m.
Facebook seems to believe it just invented an entirely new type of shopping experience. The product execs over there are either very tongue-in-cheek or they’ve never heard of QVC.
Like a store in your phone — This first set of Live Shopping streams are shaping up to be a little of everything. Facebook seems to be giving brands some creative license with how they’d like to handle them — that could mean simply displaying a line of products in real-time or doing more lengthy product demos.
The full list of brands participating in these streams are:
- Abercrombie & Fitch
- Alleyoop
- Bobbi Brown Cosmetics
- Clinique
- Dermalogica
- Dolce Vita
- Sephora
- ZOX
No matter what the brand chooses to use their stream for, their products will be easily accessible for purchase with just a few clicks. Customers won’t even need to leave the Facebook app to complete the purchase.
Facebook is everything now — Starting this Friday, Facebook will attempt to become the Millennial QVC — and there are just enough people still using Facebook that it just might work.
Add it to the company’s ever-growing list of features. Facebook is at this point a short-form audio network, a dating service, and, of course, a militia gathering place. There’s no feature Facebook won’t add in its pursuit of complete internet domination — though the coolest of those additions are usually the first to get the boot.
It’s been just about a year since Facebook first announced its Shops feature; in the time since, shopping has taken over the Instagram experience, too. So sure, add a QVC feature. Why not. At this point packing in these features is just business as usual.
