Arena Online, the UK’s leading ethical flower business today announces the launch of the first Livestream Shopping event to be hosted on its website.
In the lead-up to Mother’s Day, Arena will be broadcasting daily shows in which a florist will walk customers through arranging and creating a different Mother’s Day bouquet each day. Alongside the online demonstration, customers can ask Arena’s florist anything about their bouquet, allowing customers to make an informed decision prior to purchasing.
Customers can also drop into Arena Live Shopping sessions if they’re struggling to select the perfect bouquet. They can watch as the florist creates one of their hand-tied bouquets, asking them questions about the bouquet or what bouquet might be best suited to them. Soon, customers will even be able to create bespoke bouquets with a florist, offering their input in real-time from wherever they may be in the world. There will also be time-limited deals on products for participants attending livestream shows.
With the ever-increasing popularity of live video shopping amongst Gen Z consumers, Arena wants to bring the technology to the UK’s flower industry and introduce it to other generations of shoppers.
47% of 19-25-year-olds and 30% of those aged 26-35 have purchased through live shopping events, whereas just 9% of those over the age of 56 made a live purchase in 20221.
Arena is hoping that it can entice other generations to tune in, learn a little bit more about the product, make a more informed decision and hopefully fall in love with a new way to shop.
This state-of-the-art technology has been built in partnership with LiveSell who in turn run events on a video-dedicated network provided by Agora allowing for best-in-class audio and video quality, reliability and scalability. Allowing two-way voice, video and text interaction with hosts, plus features such as live polling, private messaging and the simultaneous streaming of shows to other social networks, Live Shopping provides a highly customisable shopping
1 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346166/buyers-livestream-shopping-event-age-group-uk/
experience that can be integrated with existing websites and is available on any device with a web browser.
This initiative builds on Arena’s best-in-class fulfilment and technology platform, Hyperion, which launched in January 2023. Arena’s Hyperion platform enables household brands to deliver an integrated and frictionless retail experience, providing highly personalised fulfilment of bouquets, plants and other gifts to customers at significant scale and speed. Arena handles the end-to-end fulfilment and technology demands behind the scenes, leaving brands to take care of their customers and keep ahead of customer demand and consumer trends.
The Live Shopping feature will be available on the Hyperion platform to all of Arena’s fulfilment partners.
Today’s announcement also follows Arena’s acquisition of Patch, the UK’s leading plant delivery business, in January 2023 and the appointment of its interactive digital customer experience agent “Daisy” in February 2023.
Customers can tune into Arena Flowers’ Live Shopping flower shows here: www.arenaflowers.com/pages/live-shopping/
John Hackett, CEO of Arena Online, said: “We are delighted to announce yet another first for the floral industry, as the UK’s most ethical florist we are always looking for ways to innovate and improve customer experience. With the addition of Daisy, our digital customer experience agent and now Live Shopping, we have made our shopping experience more accessible and transparent to all users.”
Marek Zwiefka-Sibley, Founder of LiveSell, said: “Whilst Asia leads the way in live video shopping, momentum is building in the US and we’re now starting to see the concept take off in Europe and beyond. LiveSell has been built to scale from private one-to-one sessions up to group events accommodating audiences of over a million participants. Our live selling spaces can be fully self-branded by customers and embedded within existing online stores or run on customer-owned domains. Uniquely, due to our near zero latency, our events allow for full two-way interaction in voice, video and text for hosts wishing to include co-hosts or granting audience members cam and mic permissions. Whilst we have APIs for customers wishing to integrate our solution more tightly, those wishing to avoid code completely can be up and running within minutes. Our Shopify app means that Shopify merchants can import their products into their LiveSell account for livestream selling with just a few clicks. We look forward to working with Arena into 2023 as we continue to roll out our feature-rich roadmap.”
Tony Zhao, founder & CEO of Agora, said: “Live video shopping is pushing the envelope for e-commerce engagement, allowing customers to make informed decisions and experience products in real-time from the comfort of home. We are proud to power this collaboration between Arena Flowers and
LiveSell and enable both to innovate the UK’s floral industry by offering a highly customizable shopping experience on any device with a web browser.”
