The Ecommerce Influence Podcast · Austin Brawner

382: Reinventing Social Commerce: Putting Personal Connection Back In The Shopping Experience with Live Shopping

November 15, 2022·56 min·4 clips

In-store conversion rates hit 20-50% while online sits at 1-2% — Max Drutt built a company to close that gap with video.

Live commerce is the center of gravity. Lily frames Max Drutt as someone deep in video, conversion rate, product education, and customer engagement for ecommerce brands. The hook stays practical. Brands are already making strong video for social platforms, but the host presses on the catch: they do not own the attendee data there. Max keeps returning to immersive shopping experiences, especially video landing pages. An ad can lead into another video with one clear call to action, which changes the path to purchase. Instead of sending someone to images and product descriptions, the brand can answer product questions inside the video itself. The numbers land quickly. Max says some shoppable video experiences are seeing 20 to 30 percent click-through rates, which he calls absolutely crazy. Lily catches the smaller-team problem right away. A lean team may want those results without having much time or production capacity to build the whole strategy. That keeps the conversation useful, because it stays close to resources, effort, and what the approach actually takes. The stronger idea is not live shopping as a buzzword. It is video as a quicker way to teach people before they skim, bounce, or forget why they clicked. Attention span is the constraint. Max argues that most content people consume now is video, using an 80 percent-plus estimate to make the behavior shift feel concrete. The social-commerce point gets clearer near the end. The guest and host keep circling customer connection, especially when the brand owns the relationship instead of leaning fully on Instagram. NFTs come up briefly, but they treat that space as early, uncertain, and weighed down by fear and bad actors. The cleaner takeaway is simpler: own the interaction, then live shopping and shoppable video start to look like commerce infrastructure, not a gimmick.

As heard by us

A practical look at bringing live shopping and shoppable video onto a brand's own site for more control, better product education, and potentially stronger conversion.

Live shopping comes across here as a concrete ecommerce tactic, not a shiny channel experiment. Lily Ackerley sets up the main tension: brands are already making video content for social platforms, but that work leaves them with less control over the customer experience and less…

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Why you'd press play

If you want live commerce that brings video onto your own site and makes product info easier to absorb.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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