In addition to selling directly to consumers, SharkNinja sells on a variety of marketplaces, but one — the TikTok Shop — has a special benefit: livestreaming.
The home appliance retailer’s approach varies by marketplace. It sells on Amazon and eBay, where it has had “relative success,” according to Calvin Anderson, senior vice president of global digital experience at SharkNinja. It benefits from exposure on Amazon, North America’s largest online marketplace, and from resale on eBay. Anderson referred to the TikTok Shop as “the more playful one” because of its livestreaming.
TikTok Shop “is one of my favorite touch points with a consumer because we’ll have a livestream for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes we’ll get a few thousand people listening at any given point, and they are chatting with you real time,” Anderson told Digital Commerce 360. “My team and I always joke that we’ve learned more about the customer and what’s happening in the moment whenever we do a big, long livestream.”
SharkNinja connects with consumers through livestreaming
During each livestream, Anderson and his team try to focus on the underlying message that SharkNinja consumers are sharing.
“At first, we used to build these very long programs of exactly what we’re gonna talk about for the next six or seven hours,” Anderson said. “And now, if we really have a consumer starting to hit on a topic, we dynamically shift our program to really meet their needs.”
He said he believes livestreaming is “anchored in 1:1 moments.”
That “doesn’t mean that we have a single conversation with a million customers,” Anderson said. “It means that we have good conversations with the people that are talking to us, and 10,000 people see that conversation and have a little brand crush on you because they love what they just observed. That’s the power of the livestreaming that we’ve got to find a way to get into — and to have that conversation and entertain them and be playful and sweet and fun.”
Livestreaming also varies by region, he said. Anderson referred to China as the kingpin in the livestreaming space.
Retailers can learn more about which livestream hosts’ personalities resonate best with their consumers, which jokes they respond to and what promotions and games interest them.
“The population is used to shopping live as entertainment, and the West is not quite used to that,” he explained. “Even the West that’s in Asia outside of China is not quite used to that yet. I think it’s that we’re not really as entertaining yet. We’ve not found a way to find the conversation, laugh and play with the consumer and really entertain.”
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